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

[Norman]

Hi Armin and All
 
I hope you don’t mind my sending this through to the list – it seems to have been addressed to me alone but is marked “and All” and I think it’s important for All…
 
Sorry if I put across the wrong impression, I’m not being simplistically anti-institutional- I currently work in/ for an institution and in the past have worked in a stolid new media institution, namely the ZKM – but the thing that interests me at a more general level is institutional life-spans, profiles, positioning, and capacity to evolve/ adapt – something precisely that Yukiko Shikata’s recent curatorial work apparently exemplifies within the ICC. When Toshiharu Ito came to the “New Images and Museology” conference at the Louvre in 93, that kind of institutional link seemed obvious – i.e. ICC / Louvre (just as it was then obvious to invite Jeffrey Shaw for the ZKM – the story behind the speaker list for that event is a saga in French and international cultural politics). Without knocking either Ito or the Louvre, it was then a matter of institutional heavyweights engaging in the public arena. The France Telecom sponsors of French museum developments were delighted to (indirectly) shake hands with NTT counterparts. It would be (unfortunately) barely conceivable to imagine that kind of situation today – e.g. Shikata/ KOP at the Louvre, though it would probably make for a quite unique debate. The tech-heavy work you’re referring to with respect to early ICC curating seems to relate to the “narrow focus on the physical substrate of medium” John Hopkins mentions. Indeed, a long shot from the KOP type energies you’ve been involved with.
 
It���s this habit of institutions to engage with similarly sized and similarly motivated institutions that intrigues and frustrates me – there’s little room for the disparity and dissymmetry that tend to generate new kinds of dynamics. I guess most biological systems work this way so seeking other behaviours boils down to romantic idealism. 
 
Tom, your Joe Kraus quote is a pearl – it also brings to mind something about the explosion of popular theatre venues in mid-nineteenth century Paris. They mushroomed and as Bernard Dort put it, there was a massive and steadily growing network of “salles”, of theatre houses, each of which reflected its own eclectic public, like a hall of mirrors. I don’t have the exact quote so this is shamefully loose but I wonder how it might connect with our niche events and venues. Also echoes of Douglas Trumball at an early nineties edition of Siggraph, predicting the demise of huge cinema venues in favour of networks of smaller, specialised screening facilities (of course in those days Trumball was preaching for full VR)… Yes, of course the buzz is inaudible at a different level.  At what level though can it make a critical difference – beginning with yet getting beyond those who are witness/ party to it? Some reflection I find really valuable on these questions is contained in Ned Rossiter’s writing on organised networks – including on issues of institutional scale – at info.interactivist.net and at fibreculture. 
 
I’m curious about cross-over publics. For me fringe activities are not necessarily those borne by self-branded fringe events, but might be better identified with “mongrel” publics, with the promiscuity that characterises people who wander between events and venues of different kinds, different geometries. The Tate Modern’s ground floor is a fascinating cultural watering hole, with its millions of tourists and strollers pushing prams up the Thames and incidentally discovering Nauman thanks to Unilever (Eliasson - Sunlight soap?)  Then there’s also the quirky and less visible patronage of an upper floor Tate exhibition by industrial progressive lens developers – works by Fiona Tan and others dealing with optical perception. Who notices the Varilux plug, and what could/ should/ might we make of it? 
 
Which brings back the funding models question, the real crunch I suppose.  Like all the examples mentioned, and as you say Tom, the Celtic Tiger / MIT ML is a case study in itself – including complex relations with European regional funding. Pre-“European enlargement” of course. It's useful to get the ICA story. And the MIT Boston model is obviously not without its own dangers – like so many institutional models spawned by/ following on from the Bayh-Dole Act, authorising American universities to patent publicly-financed findings. The CICV and CRAC and IVREA have their own complex histories, along with the other institutions we've heard about on and around this list. Indeed global generalisations about locally entrenched institutions are always risky. Yet the very fact that we as a niche group of spectres are exposed and sensitive to these kinds of structures and their upheavals is meaningful, and justifies our trying to get an overview of them.
 
So how do we reinforce the value of this field to wider society? i.e.increase access and understanding of the work?
 
Having these discussions is hopefully an important step.  I’m grateful for them in any case.
 
Best to all from a squirming fish trying to catch a worm with a hopelessly uncooperative telecom line
 
sjn
 

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> Message du 18/08/05 16:31
> > De : "Armin Medosch" 
> > A : norman at wanadoo.fr
> > Copie à : 
> > Objet : Re: [spectre] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?
> > 
> > Hi Norman and All
> > 
> > I think your concerns are legitimate but in the particular case of the 
> > ICC the situation was just starting to get interesting. What has 
> > happened there is a generation change. A few years ago a scaling 
> > down has happened already and with that younger curators came in. 
> > Now Yukiko Shikata also works that with whom I have collaborated 
> > in the context of KOP. Yukiko has just curated the excellent Open 
> > Nature exhibition and I am sure she has many other ideas. For me 
> > the ICC was once one of those mega-institutions which promoted 
> > tech-heavy work of Jeffrey Shaw and the like - thus, not very 
> > interesting. Now, a slimmed down and conceptualle modernized ICC, 
> > I would really hate to see that go away. I have critizided institutions 
> > heavily in the past, but in the end, if there are no institutions at all, 
> > what happens to the field? 
> > 
> > regards
> > Armin
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 18 Aug 05, at 14:59, Norman wrote:
> > 
> > > 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
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
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> > > 
> > > 
> > > > 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
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > >
> > > 
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