nettime: New Media/An Interview

["Robert Simon" <robertms@euronet.nl>]

The following text just came out in The Berlage Papers 20, published 
by the Berlage Institute of Architecture in Amsterdam-- 


New Media in Rotterdam, and an Interview

The aesthetic significance of contemporary digital media remains an
open, perhaps premature question. What counts as Art is determined
within a discursive field and a community of participants, while the
privileged object is not, in some mechanical or magical fashion, a
necessary corollary of  new technologies.

Most interesting about the "new media" events that took place in
Rotterdam this past September, ISEA96 (International Symposium on
Electronic Arts) and DEAF96 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival), was
precisely the tension between the ragged, uneven development of
communities and discourses, terms and languages of discussion--very
much a "work-in-progress"--and the belief that the new media
technologies have somehow definitively rearticulated the paradigms of
contemporary artistic production, distribution, and reception. 

This is not to say that the installations, performances, on-line
initiatives and design experiments displayed in Rotterdam were not
often quite compelling in their own right.* And to be sure,
throughout ISEA and DEAF a critical consciousness was much in
evidence in many of the sessions. But the sense I have is that new
media art and aesthetics is a field that has not yet come into
being: perhaps wild heterogeneity, incoherence, dispersal, perpetual
lack of finish and open-endedness will be its fate and its virtue,
but this remains to be seen and developed, and this is not
necessarily a bad thing.

*********************************  

Victoria Vesna is a multimedia artist and teacher at the University of
California at Santa Barbara, and was a participant in ISEA96.** The
following interview took place via e-mail in late October.

Robert Simon: It seems a commonplace claim of new media art theory
that current digital and networked art is essentially process rather
than--as in "old" media--object based. To my mind such a distinction
makes little sense in light of traditional performance arts such as
music or theater, or when one thinks of the ephemeral
site-specificity of an exhibition, or considers literature and
painting in terms of  processes of production and reception. So is
this claim to be understood as yet another instance of  polemical,
avant-gardist ground-clearing? Or is new media art truly and
fundamentally distinct from what has come before? And is it useful to
make such a distinction? For the sake of whom or what?

Victoria Vesna: Consider the phenomenal rise of Netscape's stock,
which to date still has shown no profit. Our collective imaginations
are driving this economy--technology allows for "process" and ideas
to become commodity. Conceptual art has moved into a corporate world!
New products replace old ones, good guys fight the bad ones--these
binary distinctions are necessary in a market economy with competition
claiming to have the newest, best, greatest!!! In my mind the same is
true of the art market.  What we are witnessing is not necessarily a
strictly philosophical discourse of defining work which has no
tangible existence or value but attracts large audiences and carries
with it a significant amount of hype. This hype is already the driving
force of the new economy centered around technology. The art market is
seeing, on the one hand, grants disappearing, and on the other, large
amounts of money being generated by information technology. So, the
real question the art world is grappling with is how to market this
work as art and whether the places to do it in are museums and
galleries?

R.S.: Electronically networked art allows for enormous, nearly
instantaneous accessibility, as well as possibilities of spontaneity
and interactivity that seem to reconfigure traditional positionings
between artist and audience, between producer and recipient. Given the
fact of the Internet, what is the future (or the present) of the new
media museum or gallery exhibition? And what are the actual or
potential relationships between these venues (i.e. the Internet and
the gallery/museum)?

V.V.: Museums and galleries have historically functioned as spaces
which sanction and decide what is considered as high art. The same
still holds true even with networked art. Even if it is accessible
from any computer at any time, there is a very different aura attached
if it is also being privileged to be projected in a museum or
established gallery. The important difference is however, that work
may be recognized by the audience first (a popular site for instance)
which then brings it to the museum. This shifts tremendous power over
to the audience and artist in the selection process which to date has
been incredibly insular if not downright incestuous. Museums could
potentially be revitalized by this media not only by attracting larger
and more varied audience but also to act as community centers offering
access to high end technology. Finally, it is important that the
museum itself has a presence outside its limited geography which helps
decentralize the art world still dependent on major cities in the
West.

--Robert Simon (robertms@euronet.nl)

*An overview of the projects and events is available at
http://www.eur.nl/ISEA96 and http://www.v2.nl/DEAF.

** One of Victoria Vesna's recent projects is Bodies c INCorporated,
which can be accessed at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc. 

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