[spectre] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

[Norman]

Hi Andreas and friends
 
“A pattern that reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and media art?”
Possibly, and if so, to whose benefit? What were institutions hoping to gain from this expansion in the first place, and did they?  Might they have become unwilfully blinkered, self-perpetuating autarkies?  Would it be blasphemous to imagine that institutions run by and for humans are endowed with life-spans, and that one generation of institutions/ organisations for e.g. media art might quite inevitably and fortunately be succeeded by another? And if that were so, what kernels of art and culture and the critical reflection that is an integral part of art and culture might one hope to see passed on from one generation of institutions to the next?
 
At the risk of sounding like a Philistine (not a good idea given today's politics! – is humour still allowed on this list??), my questions are what, where, why, for whom is art?  How and why do pilgrimages to media art institutions differ from those to “traditional” art institutions (the Louvre still tops the charts)?  Are there links and should there be? 
 
Is there any connection between these currently decried down-scalings and restructurings and closures of media culture and media art institutions, and massive interests being mobilised around a powerful new breed of cultural archives to store and access the cadavers of ephemeral art commissioned and/ or show-cased by the places being threatened? (this question bounces back to the previous one…).  When does an art archive, a cultural memory engine, become a morgue, a DNA repository for bygone human expression?
 
Why is it that lists like these buzz with permanent noise of cultural and artistic activity, more frequently stemming from ad hoc groups than larger institutions which don’t (have to) employ the same advertising circuits? I’m not saying it isn’t sometimes annoying. But it occasionally grates with something unexpected, with a lurch into unforeseen ways of thinking that is perhaps not so obvious in closed discussions where everybody knows everybody. Like those who make the same annual pilgrimages.
 
Gibson in Count Zero: “How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook?”
I’m lucky enough to encounter work that fishhooks my snaggable soul. Yet I take the bait in increasingly non-territorial waters. Weird eddies on the net or in strange physical spaces – like Lascaux. That’s an eye-opener. Or Florian Kramer’s recent text on this list. Or other such indices of energy levels that hint at new patterns of cultural and artistic territorialisation.
 
With all due respect and solidarity for those whose livelihoods and commitment to others are at stake in these “restructurings” – something most of us can sympathise with all the more strongly in that we’ve been through it in one form or another – I’m interested in looking at where we go from here. What we need to carry over from past institutions and why. Because that question determines what it is we’re trying to preserve and foster. Rightly or wrongly (and that question is one we don’t have the answer to – but one that probably doesn’t have an answer so I shouldn’t have asked it in the first place). 
 
Blind faith. The need to act. To ex-press. To risk the hook.
 
Kia ora
>From squirming fish on line
 
 






> Message du 16/08/05 15:12
> De : "Andreas Broeckmann" 
> A : nettime-l at bbs.thing.net
> Copie à : 
> Objet : [Ecb-list] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?
> 
> [on 13 june 05, Rob van Kranenburg asked on this list: 'what's 
> next?', quoting the 'restructuring' of IVREA and the closure of the 
> MIT Media Lab in Dublin; we have also recently seen the termination 
> of the Radiator Festival, Kopenhagen/DK, of CICV, Montbeliard/FR, of 
> the World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam/NL, as well as the scaling 
> down of Electrohype, Malmoe/SE, Public Netbase, Vienna/AT, and of 
> HTBA Hull Time Based Arts, Hull/UK; while each of these cases has its 
> particular local, national or even personal reasons, it is difficult 
> not to think that there is some sort of a pattern which, at least in 
> part, reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and 
> media art; and what do we make of these rumours from Tokyo? abroeck]
> 
> posted by permission of the author, Mr. OZAKI Tetsuya, of ART iT and 
> REALTOKYO - http://www.artit.jp/ - http://www.realtokyo.co.jp/ )
> 
> a PDF version in Japanese and English is at
> http://www.realtokyo.co.jp/japanese/column/102-103_Behind_the_Scenes.pdf
> 
> 
>