Articoli con tag ‘new media’
Media, New Media, Postmedia now available in English!
Link Editions is proud to announce the release of “Beyond New Media Art”, by Domenico Quaranta.“Beyond New Media Art” is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title “Media, New Media, Postmedia” (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation.
“Beyond New Media Art” is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age.
From the book’s preface: “So what is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? And what has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what accounts for the limited presence in critical debate of an artistic practice that appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organization of the world we live in?”
Domenico Quaranta is an art critic and curator. His work focuses on the impact of the current techno-social developments on the arts. He regularly writes for Flash Art and Artpulse. In 2006 he edited (with M. Bittanti) the book “GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames”; in 2010, he published the book “Media, New Media, Postmedia”. As a curator, he organized various shows, including “Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age” (Bruxelles 2008, with Y. Bernard), “Playlist” (Gijon 2009 and Bruxelles 2010) and “Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age” (Brescia 2011; Basel and New York, 2012).
Link Editions is a publishing initiative of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age. Link Editions uses print on demand and digital formats to create an accessible, dynamic series of essays and pamphlets, but also artist books, catalogues and conference proceedings. A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, Link Editions releases its contents free of charge in .pdf format, and on paper at a price accessible to all. Link Editions is a not-for-profit initiative and all its contents are circulated under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.
Until June 15, all Link Editions books will be available on Lulu.com with a 20% discount.
http://editions.linkartcenter.eu/
Firing a new canon?
I worked on this a couple of years ago, but it’s finally out in printed and digital form. Edited by Valerio Terraroli and published by Bompiani / Skira, It’s an art history book meant for the high schools and universities, from cave paintings to… net art. I made research for the second half of the Vol. 5, on contemporary art from the Fifties to the XXI century, and I was able to add some issues that are not usually featured in high school art history manuals.
It would be great to know if this is happening also elsewhere, and get documentation of it.
Sorry for the bad mobile phone pics…
Michelle Kuo
Letter from Philip Leider to Matthew Baigell, October 30, 1967.
A quote from Michelle Kuo‘s introduction to the September issue of Artforum, “Art’s New Media“:
“Today we still cringe at manufactured genres like “computer art,” even if art as we know it could barely exist without computers. Technophilia and technophobia alike pervade museums, galleries, and art-fair booths; the language of new media and social media—platform, network, algorithm, sharing—abounds in press releases and exhibition titles, slaking our thirst for 1960s-cum-1990s cyber-euphoria. At the same time, Leider’s doubt echoes in the distance, a critical reminder that art’s affair with media is always prone to historical amnesia, to lazy conflations of vastly different positions and practices, to abrupt shifts from the faddish embrace of progress to a pining for the obsolete. We are nostalgic; we want to move on.”
My response to Claire Bishop’s article “Digital Divide”
This is my response to Claire Bishop‘s essay “Digital Divide“, published in Artforum in September 2012 (also posted in the comments section of the article):
Reading this article was a pleasure, and a pain. Some of the points made here are really good, and I also felt a lot of empathy for many of the examples raised, such as the use of obsolete or dead media, or the “archival impulse”, which have been the polar stars of my curatorial and critical work so far.
The problem is that Bishop fails in formulating the main question, that is: contemporary art should respond to the digital age – why it doesn’t? In my opinion, this question should be reformulated this way: “why the mainstream art world, the small niche I belong to and I’m talking to hereby, doesn’t respond to the digital age?”
To put it simple: there is the new media art world, which is a niche- true; there is the mainstream art world, which is a niche as well (a couple of magazines, and a few dozens of galleries, collectors, institutions, curators and artists); and there is the real art world, which is comprised of all the people who recognize themselves as artists, of some who don’t (but do something that can be understood as art as well) and of all the people working around them. In the real art world, there are not five, but legions of artists responding to the digital age. Some of them are really bad, some are really good, but just a few became successful in the mainstream art world: the ones Bishop named, and some of the ones named in this discussion. These artists are neither new media artists nor mainstream contemporary artists: they are artists that sometimes use digital media, sometimes don’t; sometimes do unique objects for galleries, sometimes spread their work on the internet; they work with second level galleries, and with curators that aren’t art stars yet; they don’t sell out at art fairs, but they have a market and collectors; they are rarely featured in mainstream art events such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta, but they have an increasing presence in a big network of institutions, despite the fact that Claire Bishop doesn’t know them. This is the background where mainstream artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Thomas Ruff go fishing to find ideas like the ones displayed in Touching Reality, or in the Zycles series. The true innovation takes place there, and not in the mainstream.
And – I think – it couldn’t be otherwise. To ask with mainstream contemporary art is not reacting to the digital age would be like to ask why William-Adolphe Bouguereau and the French Academia weren’t reacting to the industrial revolution and to photography. At the time, to see true innovation you should make a visit to a photographer’s studio in Paris; now, dear Claire, I’d warmly recommend you a trip to Rhizome.org.
Bishop puts it in terms of fear:
“Is there a sense of fear underlying visual art’s disavowal of new media? Faced with the infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the art object needs to be reasserted in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.”
Of course, the establishment fears and rejects what may force it to change; that’s why a century of apparently “innovative” art didn’t change the way art is circulated, discussed and collected at all, but rather enforced it. Innovation was accepted as an ideology, but rejected as a means of true chance. But again: if the establishment (that is, the mainstream art world) is pretty coward, contemporary art isn’t. You just have to look for the brave ones.
Domenico Quaranta
Artistic Director, Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age
http://linkartcenter.eu/
The Future of Art
The Future of Art. An immediated autodocumentary
What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way artists produce and distribute artwork? The Future of Art begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.
This video was shot, edited and screened at the Transmediale festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany. More infos here.
David
I have frequently been asked about my relationship to the New Media. My answer has always been: New technologies are nothing other than new means to an end. Alone they are of significance; it always depends upon how they are applied. I am against naive faith in progress, glorification of the possibilities of technological developments. Much of what today´s artists produce with New Media is very boring. But I am just as opposed to the deuncination of technology. For me technology in itself is not a category according to which I judge works. This type of categorization is just as outmoded as division into classical art genres (painting, sculpture…). I am interested in the idea of a project; ideally the means of realizing the project should arise from the idea itself.
Catherine David, “dx and new media“, June 20, 1997
Allen
In the last issue of Mousse Magazine (Issue 26, December 2010, pp. 196 – 200), German art critic Jennifer Allen published an interesting article titled “From Media to New Media”. Addressing some recent events and publications, from Free to CRUMB’s latest outputs, she argues that the most revolutionary features of digital media – both in terms of distribution and production – are having little or no impact on the contemporary art world. Definitely a worth reading. Here a couple of quotes:
While describing the gradual acceptance of new media art and artists, the retrospective view of A Brief History points to a basic conflict: to remain true to techy origins or to become part of the museum and the art market.
If there’s a new democracy to celebrate in the new media, the most democratic dimension is hard to see. While anyone can be an artist, a photographer and a filmaker [...] everyone will not make it into the museum and the art market. We all increasingly use the same tools to do different tasks, even the same tactile gestures of clicking, saving, copying, pasting, sending. But that radical equality has not quite movedbeyond the screen.
Manovich
As digital and network media are rapidly became an omni-presence in our society, and as most artists came to routinely use it, new media field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or aesthetic issues – a kind of local club for photo enthusiasts.
Lev Manovich, “From Borges to HTML”, 2003
