ben . craggs on Mon, 18 May 2009 10:50:50 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis |
> what i am always wondering about is why the media arts field is so > concerned with its media. is dealing with "new media" or "old media" > an excuse for making good or bad art? IMO defining art by its media > is on the same level as defining art by its subject. not getting > over these definitions will result in a ghetto-situation sooner or > later. the problem -IMHO- is not that media art is not recognized > by the fine art world but that the fine art world is dealing with > other subjects. when was the last big exhibition dealing solely > with "painting" or "sculpture" you've seen? ars electronica and the > others are doing that every year: "new media art" with changing > subtitles. <...> An interesting addition to this would be the emergence of 'New, new media arts'. I am thinking here, of practices in the field currently defining itself as bioart. Here the medium that is being manipulated is a form of living or sem-living matter, or tissue. Bioartist, Eduardo Kac and curator Jens Hauser have sought to specifically identify this new art practice, expressly on the basis of the medium itself. Bioarts, they argue, are most definitely are not those works that take bios or a form of life, as a subject, but manipulate it as a medium. That said, the manipulation of living tissue can be executed through a number of divergent practices, specific technologies, and it is these that seem to be defined by some as the media, not the living tissue they manipulate. I guess a somewhat simplistic comparison would be between with identification of various 'digital media' in abstraction from the advances in computer technology on which they are based. My current work in the field of bioart is increasingly pushing me towards a frustration at the distinction between art/science/media/technology/old/new that recurs in the majority of literature, and if I am not wrong seems to predicate this current discussion. In the light of these new practices I have been working towards re-imagining what art and media are in themselves, as technologies and processes not as distinct practices - the specific media or declared purpose seem less relevant from this perspective. So I wonder whether 'meaning is present in all works, to varying degrees, regardless of how they might be appropriated by culture' could be extended beyond a simple valorisation of art. It also seems that those new media theorists, such as Manovich and Baudrillard are somewhat restricted in their approach in that new media is perceived in a somewhat teleological sense, newness for the sake of newness, with new theories to match new media - without asking what is actually recurring in new media. IMO it seems that most new media, are really just old media anyway, particularly so in bioart. Is the creative growth of tissue not what we do continually as part of our natural bodily processes? Would it be facetious then to ask whether all media be considered from this originary perspective, negating the discussions about relative newness or cultural categorization (ie i's art, it's science, it's technology, it's media). Ben -- --------- Ben Craggs 07868 273 360 --------------- http://www.digitalscribblings.org/forums A place for academic discussion, networking and general postgraduate procrastination! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org