[spectre] TAKE-OVER!

[Jeremy Welsh]

ok

it's a good idea to get back to the thread that Lorenzo started and Eric
followed up. We did meander off the path a bit in the last few posts and it's
unfortunate if that annoys somebody. But we can't pretend that everything that
gets posted on a mail list will be of equal interest to everyone.

A core point here, with regard to Take Over, seems to be a question of how we
as educators/artists provide our students with the appropiate sources of
information and the critical tools they need to engage in the elaboration of a
cultural practise that can exceed the boundaries of the existing art world.
This may seem trite and obvious, but it should also be remembered that many of
us are working in a non-English speaking environment where our students will
not inevitably stumble upon the numerous worthwhile sources of information and
discussion - online or offline - that we ourselves are aware of. In
Scandinavia, for example, there are hardly any print publications and precious
few online resources in a Scandinavian language. So far Norway has produced
only one Norwegian language book on digital culture, published in the early
nineties, most of it translated from existing anthologies like Michael
Benedikt's  Cyberspace: First Steps. The problem, therefore, is to devise a
filtering system that allows the most useful resources to get through to a
particular target audience. I can't expect my students to plough through the
enormous amounts of information that I receive myself on a regular basis - I
have to try to pick out the parts that will be useful to them, and this
process of picking out is something that colleagues can share. So it's
unfortunate if it ends up being a bit like trading football cards online, but
in a way it's really necessary.

>One solution is to disseminate more information on the history of computer
>art/ tech art/ net art so that curators and artists can research the area
>more effectively.

I agree, and as Chris observed, a lot of the material that has been accessible
online is not necessarily there any longer, or has been moved, so exchanging
information just as a way of keeping reources up to date would be valuable.

>This kind of integration seems to be leading to shapeless integration (
videoart is under the same spell) and >the password of the art scene about the
new Media is " Oh, it's just like any other medium...The Artist must >be free
to experience anything....".

Precisely. Which gets us back to the issue of providing information and
critical tools. For years we have seen the mainstream art world lapping up
"electronic art" that is somewhat less sophisticated than the average
first-timer's home movie. Video art managed to move a long way beyond the
"turn on the camera and jump around" school a long time ago, but the art world
just loves to keep rerunning that particular script. There is still a strong
market for the artist clown. So a problem, and a very real one at that is, how
to get students to believe that it is worthwhile to delve deeply into both
technical and theoretical aspects of the electronic media when it is blatantly
obvious to them that it pays much better to act the fool ?  One unfortunate
legacy of the neo-conceptualism that flooded both art schools and the art
market in the nineties is precisely this assumption that any medium is just
like any other medium, that it's only the message that counts (though sadly
there is too often no message either) and that artists somehow operate in an
open field in which all acts are self validating. One consequence of this is a
conservative demand for a return to traditional values, a reskilling of the
artist within the confines of historically validated practices (painting,
sculpture). Such reactions tend to force a situation of binary opposites,
where the electronic arts are posited as "the opposite" of traditional media,
a situation which is both ridiculous and counter productive. We need to be
able to discuss digital media in relation to a history of the (tradirtional)
plastic arts AND as an extension of the processes that conceptualism
initiated, at the same time insisting that the "deskilling" of recent years be
reversed, at least insofar as we want digital artists who are skilled in the
uses of their media and who understand in what context they are operating.
Maybe this is not a problem for everyone, but here in liberal Scandinavia it
is definitely so.

jeremy