[spectre] "the encounter that needs to be staged" (banff report) [u]

[Geert Lovink [c]]

> From: Judith Rodenbeck <jrodenbe at slc.edu>
> Date: 5 October 2005 12:22:18 BST
> To: idc at bbs.thing.net
> Subject: [iDC] REFRESH! conference, some impressions
>
> To the idc list:
>
>      I’ve just come back from “REFRESH! The First International 
> Conference
>      on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology” in Banff.
>      Herewith some brief impressions of the conference.
>
>      I am an art historian (and ex-performance/video artist, from the
>      Studio for Interrelated Media at Mass Art) with a longstanding but
>      hitherto relatively untapped interest in new media. My own field 
> of
>      expertise is performance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, 
> including
>      Fluxus projects, but I also teach on the early part of the 20th
>      century and am currently leading an advanced seminar on what I 
> call
>      “mechanical transcriptions of the real”­that is, following 
> Kittler,
>      those analog copying technologies that have so defined 20th 
> century
>      experience and inflected much of its art. I attended the 
> conference
>      as an observer, trying to learn more about the subject. What 
> follows
>      is merely a report, but it comes filtered through that complex of
>      interests & preoccupations.
>
>      The first thing to be said is that this was an enormously 
> ambitious
>      conference: its four days were packed from morning to evening with
>      panels and events the overall distribution of which, in terms of
>      topics and time, I thought was pretty good, given the mission.
>      Sessions ranged from “media histories” to a session on 
> “collaborative
>      practice/networking” to “history of institutions”; there were 3
>      keynote addresses­Edmond Couchot, Sarat Maharaj, and Lucia 
> Santaella;
>      a poster session; an optional hike (Banff is in the stunning 
> Canadian
>      Rockies); a walk-through of the media labs; und so weiter. Meals 
> were
>      had communally in the Banff Centre’s dining room, and at least for
>      me, since I knew not a soul at the conference AND felt like what 
> one
>      snooty panelist called a “clueless newbie,” these became 
> interesting
>      moments of social anxiety and unexpected social pleasure. While
>      things did tend to split out into the old pros and the young
>      nothings, they did get a bit more productively mixed up on 
> occasion.
>      Before I launch into the problems with the conference, the 
> feeling I
>      got from those I spoke with was that it was a mixed success but a
>      success overall. I do think the conference provided a very good
>      starting point for something, and this seemed especially true 
> after
>      the final session.
>
>      High points of the conference, in no particular order:
>          * Mario Carpo’s paper on architecture in the age of digital
>            reproducibility, which dealt with the shift from a simply
>            additive to an algorithmic modularity in architecture. This 
> was
>            probably the most professionally delivered paper at the
>            conference, as well as the most intelligently amusing, and 
> what
>            Carpo presented as a paradigmatic slide was fascinating,
>            provocative. I learned something.
> Philip Thurtle and Claudia Valdes showing footage of Alvin Lucier 
> doing solo
> for brainwaves. I’ve forgotten what the paper was about, but was 
> thrilled to
> see the footage and to have the piece presented.
> Chris Salter on a history of performance with media, beginning with a
> fantastically forceful evocation of Russian Constructivis plays. I 
> teach this
> material, but Salter’s presentation was vigorous and made a very 
> strong case
> for its inclusion in a “new media” history.
> Christiane Paul on curatorial issues with new media. This was also a 
> very
> professional (by which I mean good, clear, to the point) presentation 
> and very
> usefully laid out the difficulties involved, from curators having to 
> rebuild
> settings to house work to problems of bitrot to audience development.
> Impressive and useful.
> Machiko Kusahara on “device art” discussed Japanese aesthetics. This 
> was an art
> historically thin paper­no discussion of Fluxus, very loose mention of 
> Gutai
> and then Tanaka’s electric dress but not the “painting machines” of her
> husband­but the presentation of a different value-system for Japanese 
> “device
> art” (gizmos whose “art coefficient” is activated by their use) was 
> pretty
> convincing as well as very thought-provoking.
> tour of the labs AND, surprisingly, the poster session, which was 
> cluttered and
> weird but also the one moment in the conference when people really 
> talked to
> each other’s ideas
> Tim Druckrey’s screening of apocalyptic Virilio. He gave a very lazy 
> but
> passionate paper, basically asking why on earth new media would want 
> to be
> included in an old canon, and noting that a far bigger problem is 
> present in
> Nicholas Bourriaud’s blythe “relational aesthetics” than in the 
> October cabal’s
> control of high theory.
> Michael Naimark’s corporatist but useful analysis of the 
> sustainability of new
> media institutions.
> Johannes Goebel’s passionate and pragmatic overview of two such 
> institutions.
> the final, quasi-impromptu “crit, self-crit” session led by Sara 
> Diamond. This
> was where most of the lingering meta-issues were put on the table, and 
> it was
> done in such a way that those in the room I think felt it was really a 
> high
> point and a great note on which to finish. Left the feeling that while 
> there is
> work to be done it will be done.
>
> I didn’t go to everything, needless to say, and doubtless there were 
> good
> things on other panels. I heard that Claus Pias’s paper on cybernetics 
> was
> excellent, for instance.
>
> That said, the conference overall suffered greatly from what Trebor 
> Scholz and
> Geert Lovink have dubbed “panelism”: a territorial structure in which
> moderators also delivered papers within the format of a way over-tight 
> schedule
> and with virtually no time for questions; a few speakers went beyond 
> their
> alotted minutes in the first sessions and then panels were policed to 
> an almost
> draconian degree, making the entire assembly tense. Discussions were 
> notably
> truncated. In fact, to this art historian it seemed weird that people 
> would
> gather for a conference on something as shifting and relatively openly 
> defined
> as “new media” (how many papers in fact began with loose attempts to 
> list the
> salient features of new media) and then sit and hear something they 
> could have
> read already
>  for though the organizers had posted quite a number of papers on
> their official website beforehand, it was clear that most attendees 
> hadn’t read
> those papers
>  and then not discuss what they had heard.
>
> What surfaced in the tension around (non) discussion was a big mess of
> anxieties. Topped by the anxiety over having “new media art” 
> categorized as
> “art” or as “new media,” these inflected many of the panel 
> presentations and
> discussions, and not in a productive way. Part of the problem, as 
> Andreas
> Broeckman pointed out in the final crit session, was that the mission 
> of the
> conference was probably too broadly and vaguely defined. But what I 
> heard over
> and over again was “traditional art history” can’t deal with new 
> media. The
> first thing I’d want to know is, what precisely is “traditional art 
> history”?
> From Simon Penny’s castigation of art history as racist, imperialist, 
> classist,
> etc., it sounded to me like what was meant was Berensonian 
> connoisseurship;
> this seemed overwrought, but his excursus was only the most vigorous 
> and
> politically thought-through of a frequent plaint. Yet while he was 
> quite right
> to note that cultural studies wasn’t mentioned once at the conference 
> his
> characterization of art history is way behind the times. Art history 
> and new
> media share Walter Benjamin and, for better or worse, Rudolf Arnheim; 
> new media
> people would do well to read Panofsky and Warburg, just as I and at 
> least some
> of my colleagues read Weiner and Kittler. Art history may not yet be 
> able to
> deal with new media, but perhaps it is also the case that new media 
> doesn’t
> know how to deal with art history.
>
> On this score a truly low moment was struck on the first day by Mark 
> Hansen,
> whose hatchet job on Rosalind Krauss was so lame that even the new 
> media
> theorists were bugged. Instead of new media bemoaning its lack of 
> recognition
> by art history and then its savaging of same (“we want to be with you; 
> we hate
> you” or “I love you; go away”) it might be more productive to stage a 
> genuine
> encounter. Leaving aside Andreas Broeckman, who gave a very nice but 
> grossly
> amputated (ran out of time) presentation on aesthetics and new media, 
> and the
> truly awful presentation comparing the websites of the Louvre and the
> Hermitage, the art historians who were at the conference were either 
> working
> with medieval Islamic art or with the visual culture of science. That 
> is, there
> were no art historians dealing with contemporary art who were not 
> already part
> of the inner circle of new media people; yet this is precisely the 
> encounter
> that needs to be staged. Meanwhile Mark Tribe, not an art historian, 
> gave an
> extremely art historically lame presentation on appropriation, and 
> while the
> broader point was, well, okay, his presentation of the historical 
> material was
> painful and for at least this listener undermined his credibility. (On 
> the
> other hand, Cornelius Borck, a historian of medicine, gave a terrific
> presentation­historically nuanced, intelligently read, and carefully
> researched­on the optophone of Raoul Hausman and Hausman’s complicated
> relationship to prosthesis.) From my perspective this suggests a 
> serious
> problem of disciplinarity: surely just as new media artists/theorists 
> expect a
> sophisticated treatment from art historians (Simon Penny again: art 
> historians
> should learn engineering, cognitive science, neuroscience before they 
> discuss
> new media) so new media artists and theorists should treat the work 
> that comes
> before­both art and media­with the historical complexity (without 
> going to
> Pennyian excess) art history at its best demonstrates.
>
> Other issues that came up:
>     * Problems of storage & retrieval of new media work. From an 
> historical
>       point of view this demonstrates a remarkable degree of 
> self-consciousness
>       on the part of new new media­something new, incidentally, in the 
> longer
>       history of media, and interesting as a phenomenon.
> Huge anxiety about the “art” status of new media, alongside a 
> subthematic of
> the relation to science and to scientific models of research.
> Adulatory fetishizing of cognitive science, engineering, and 
> neuroscience (in
> marked contrast to the dissing of art history).
> Lack of a fixed definition of new media, with repeated nods to 
> hybridization,
> bodily engagement, non-hierarchical structure, networking, and so on.
> Disconnect of the keynote speakers. Couchot had difficulty with 
> English and
> seemed, while emphasizing hybridity, to be speaking from another time. 
> Sarat
> Maharaj rambled for nearly 2 hours about Rudolf Arnheim and the Other; 
> I found
> this talk excruciating, though I later spoke with someone (media 
> artist, go
> figure) for whom it had been a high point. And Lucia Santaella’s 
> beautifully
> delivered, rigorously near-hallucinatory and religious but to me quasi-
> apocalyptic vision of the “semiotic” and “post-human” present/future 
> of the
> “exo-brain” was a chilling picture of species-death.
> Ongoing problem of gender and geographic distribution. While 
> non-Western topics
> cropped up here and there at the conference, the one panel that dealt 
> in any
> extended way with non-Western paradigms was also the one panel that 
> was almost
> all female­and also the panel that got the most flak in its few 
> minutes of
> discussion, in part because most of those dealing with non-Western 
> paradigms
> were Western. This relegation of dealing with the Other to the women is
> typical. There was also some grumbling that many of the non-Western 
> projects
> had been tucked into the poster session rather than elevated to panel 
> status.
> It would have been good to have some representation from Africa, or 
> even a
> panel on doing new media in less media-rich environments than 
> Euro-Ameri-
> Nippon.
> Comical reliance on and then debate about Powerpoint
> . And then, as one member
> of the audience pointed out, nearly all of the people at the 
> conference in
> their ppt-critical right-thinking wisdom had little glowing apples at 
> their
> desks. No sign of Linux.
>
> That’s a sketch, replete with opinion. I’d encourage anyone interested 
> in more
> specific information about the conference to check the website at
> www.mediaarthistory.org, which has some papers up as well as abstracts.