[spectre] media center of the 21 c

[Timothy Druckrey]

greetings.

Some comments on the on-going Š

First two references:

Joke Brouwer & Arjen Moulder (eds) : aRt&D: 
Research and Development in Art (V2_NAI)

Georgina Born: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, 
Boulez and the Institutionalization of the 
Musical Avant-Garde (University of California 
Press)


Beyond these two important sources there are 
numerous reports, exhortations, proposals, and 
other documents scattered around the net that are 
related to the broad issues of 'new media' and 
ways to approach appropriate 'institutions' that 
could/can sustain, support, and/or exhibit it.

There have been so many thoughtful entries to the 
discussion, and they revolve around the 
predictable issues about the pitfalls and 
benefits we are all enveloped in. In the 
after-word to the aRt&D anthology I contributed a 
text "(Ad)Venture Aesthetics." Since it is so new 
I refer to it rather than pasting it here. In 
that text I made, among other remarks, some 
critical comments on a report written by Michael 
Naimark for Leonardo (funded by the Rockefeller 
Foundation): Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Money: 
Technology-Based Art and the Dynamics of 
Sustainability (available at www.artslab.net). 
This report resolutely muddles the issues (just 
consider the title itself!) and can serve as a 
kind of case study in much of what is emerging in 
this discussion. "Indeed," I wrote in the 
after-word, "the fatal flaw of Truth, Beauty, 
Freedom, and Money: Technology-Based Art and the 
Dynamics of Sustainability is that it can only be 
sustainable if it works either as a beta-site for 
the staging of marketable ideas or as a 
"demo"-site Š one that fulfills R & D's goals of 
usability and marketability, a neo-liberal media 
institute compromised-integrated-at the outset 
(despite its good intentions)." Born's 
'Rationalizing Culture' is an important critical 
assessment of the cultural politics, political 
economy and internal conflicts in the 
organization of a large media institute.

We are all familiar of the shifting media terrain 
of the 90s where the reverberating interest in 
'new media' emerged in numerous venues (from the 
Soros initiatives to the proliferation of the 
festivals, from the opening of the ZKM and ICC, 
to the incorporation of media into the mainstream 
biennale circuit. In this frenzied decade, a 
significant international network collected 
itself in the mailing lists and improvised 
meetings on the festival circuit. And while this 
exceptional community evolved and found a kind of 
'punctuated equilibrium,' the fledgling 
institutes like ICC and ZKM were formulating a 
way to 'stabilize' and construct a more settled 
framework for a media even still shirked by the 
mainstream art world. Of course there are many 
cross-overs and attempts (Documenta, the 
Guggenheim., the Whitney, the Walker, ICA 
(London), etc.) to insert 'new media' into their 
programs. Many of these initiative have 
floundered or collapsed Š as they only clumsily 
conceptualized media forms that defied agendas 
that are too often market driven and that were 
unprepared for the technical demands, funding 
imperatives, and shattered borders that could no 
longer 'contain' media inside their white or 
black boxes. Yet we see how this has been adapted 
by, for example, the interesting but extremely 
problematic discourse around "Relational 
Aesthetics" (Nicolas Borriaud's hybridization of 
'new media') and its defiantly oblivious link to 
a generation (or more) of media theory and 
practice...

Rather than settled, our burgeoning field has 
sustained itself in a kind of dual resistance, at 
once against assimilation and against 
incorporation. This is not a new debate, but one 
that has trailed modernity's uneasy relationship 
with the 'new' as much as it is a threat to an 
institutional, critical and (art)historical 
discourse whose authority has been under siege 
for the entire 20th century. For us perhaps, the 
urgency emerged with the rise of portable 
electronics and the need to be accountable to 
more than the predictable aesthetics of an 
insulated art world, but to a communicative 
sphere that demanded a shift into the speculative 
system that emerged in the first stages of the 
experimental sound and video scene in the 60s 
(admittedly a bit over-simplified). The numerous 
sites that promoted this activity both freed and, 
paradoxically, marginalized the field. Yet their 
powerful impact obviously reverberates in our 
media scene, joined by a network that continues 
to provide the kind of forum in which this debate 
is evolving. In the dispersed system, the media 
arts built a parallel system, self-reflexive, and 
simultaneously rapidly transforming artistic 
practices in ways that Jeremy Welsh outlined:

"look at the videos that run in bienales, 
museums, galleries and exhibitions. visit the 
venice bienale, for instance (i did last month). 
half of the art of art works there is video but 
none of them are experimental or self-reflective. 
they are nice and some shocking pictures. it's 
art that uses a documentary style in order to 
present itself as uncompromised (not edited, no 
special effects etc.). that is what I call 
conservative. new media art, at its best, is 
aware of the materiality of the technologies it 
is utilizing, and explores its underlying 
architecture. The 'contemporary arts' version of 
video is techno-naive, and sometimes worse: it's 
just badly filmed and edited, and then tries to 
sell this clumsy work as sublime superiority over 
new media art."


Perhaps a bit exaggerated, the point is clear - 
that there is a distinction to be made between 
the art world and the media scene, between the 
institution and the platform. Whether we in the 
media scene can, or want, to sustain this is one 
of the subjects of this debate, whether we can 
build, or want, a legitimate system for the 
'movable-feast' we have created is also a subject 
of this debate, and whether we can, or should 
battle for the sustenance of institutes like ICC 
is an urgent aspect of what will characterize how 
we create or compromise.

There's no doubt that the big scale institutes 
like ICC, ZKM, even AEC hardly serve the specific 
and still conflicted demands of an unsettled 
field. And nor should they. But they do serve a 
large purpose in bridging and publicizing some of 
what is being done (with all the attendant 
problems). Alongside this, of course, are the 
numerous festivals (DEAF, Transmediale, Š) that 
serve as barometers, temporary discourse centers, 
and gathering points. Indeed these 'nomadic 
summits' serve to define practices (historical, 
theoretical and artistic) in forms that 
demonstrate a breadth of concerns generally 
absent from what Andreas Broeckmann calls the 
"'old style' cultural logic" of narrow 
institutional discourse -- and that are not, as 
Eric Kluitenberg writes, "susceptible to 
simplifying trends and slogans" and that do not 
attempt to build the very kind of hierarchies 
that the work we have done has fought to shatter. 
In this it is not a 'ghetto' that we inhabit, but 
rather a zone without many of the imperatives 
that sustain the 'cultural logic ' of the  market 
economy with its deadly centralizations.

Surely this will continue to be a precarious 
territory, one that is sadly exposed in the ICC 
situation, but no less in the drastic shifts in 
institutions (like ZKM or AEC) that attempt to 
sanction their activities AS IF they are the 
leadership rather than exemplifying the very 
conflicts (in the best sense) between 
institutionalization and autonomy. ZKM has, for 
example, largely abandoned support for production 
(and for a decade it was a powerful producer) in 
favor of bombastic exhibitions. The highly 
visible exhibition touts itself as encyclopedic 
rather than exploratory and itself undermines its 
insulated community in favor of a broader public 
(no less broader funding). This is the fate - and 
crisis - of the mega-institution. Rather than 
lament it, we must continually remind ourselves 
of the transience of our own practices as much as 
we need to support the necessity of the bridging 
institutes that have served so well to claim 
media as a central territory of the work done in 
the past decades.

In this the ICC situation is difficult. Not state 
supported, and hence not specifically subject to 
popular will, NTT will assess it in an obvious 
bottom-line valuation. But as is plain from many 
postings here in the past month, the skepticism 
and criticism of what Tom Holley called "building 
based orgs" is pervasive. And let's face it, we 
can't have it both ways. I agree with Eric 
Kluitenberg's "wider social context" at the same 
time realizing that this is a danger zone in 
which artistic practice is usually marginalized 
in the often vague sociologies of the 'new media' 
industrial complex. In this the dual resistance 
(against assimilation, against incorporation) 
returns. Here our defense of ICC is not easy 
since it seems narcissistic and self-serving. The 
'wider context' - meaning the public itself -- is 
indeed what would serve to defend such an 
important institution. Yet as much as we are the 
bearers of the imaginative possibilities of 'new 
media,' an enormous gulf persists between the 
charlatans of corporate aesthetics and pervasive 
access, the philistines of an art world hyping a 
new market, and a huge public whose interests are 
the crucial component in the legitimation of 
important media practices that seem to break 
every convention of 'traditional art.'

We know that the mainstream art-world has failed 
in accounting for other than the most banal media 
spectacles. We also know that, as John Hopkins 
writes, "many the practitioners from media art in 
the 90's -- Š have been adsorbed by academic (or 
the short-term media art) institutions.  It's 
easier and takes less energy to survive (and as 
one gets older that survival/energy issue gets 
more important)" and that the academic route is 
itself a troubling - if necessary - detour where 
'media art' is easily subsumed into aestheticized 
job-training since it's difficult to demonstrate 
that there are 'real' opportunities for serious 
art practice (particularly in the US) other than 
the dizzy circuit of biennales and festivalsŠ

We have dealt with these 'failings' in a most 
persuasive way, building a mutable sphere (with 
numerous initiatives) that expands and contracts 
by necessity and that has 'established' an 
enormous network of colleagues, collaborators, 
and creators. These "unstable" (as V2 describes 
itself and as many other initiatives model 
themselves) institutes are both signifiers and 
harbingers of a field that is less concerned with 
closure (the role of the 'stable' institutes) and 
more with transition. And while I don't 
completely agree with Valery Grancher, who wrote: 
"In art world there is no hierarchy, no value 
order, just streams, I came from net art and now 
I am in this stream  and I didn't choose it, 
that's darwinism....," he does identify a 
pertinent problem - that many of the works we 
would defend stand in sharp contrast to 
institutional valuation.

And in this we are in a quandary that oscillates 
between the very real need to support the few 
institutions that sustain and signify the 
substantial accomplishments of the past decades 
and the equally practical realization that they 
don't seem flexible enough, that they establish 
dense internal economies that seem, in words 
appearing in the postings,  "old," "archaic," 
"classic,"  or as 'morgues,' that squander 
resources and are insufficient to the concerns of 
"the stream." It doesn't take much attention to 
see this shattering of stability in the prismatic 
corporate cultures of globalization. Tradition 
dies easily in the 'darwinist' frenzy that 
disregards its history. The behemoths are 
consumed (sometimes lamented), but adaptability 
survives. In the arts, we are not so callous and 
fight the social amnesia of what John Hopkins 
calls the "declining empire," an 'empire' in 
which we cannot retreat into a defense of the 
obscure or stand cynically at the margins. Rather 
WE are responsible for evolving a more 
integrative model, one that is neither didactic 
or condescending, one that invites, engages, the 
'mainstream' instead of waiting for them to see 
the error of their 'ignorance,' one that embraces 
history or the 'archive' without denigrating its 
achievements, one that can convince the 
'inhabitants' of the "massive expansion of the 
field of digital culture" (in Andreas' words) 
that their 'quasi-natural environment' is sorely 
in need of reflection and that its creative 
possibilities are not limited to their gadget 
mania.

At the end of the text for aRt&D, I included this 
short remark from Pierre Bourdieu:

"If I say that culture is in danger today, if I 
say that it is threatened by the rule of money 
and commerce and by a mercenary sprit that takes 
many forms Š it will be said that I am 
exaggerating.

If I say that politicians, who sign international 
agreements consigning cultural works to the 
common fate of interchangeable commodities 
subject to the same laws that apply to corn Š are 
contributing (without always knowing it) to the 
abasement of culture and minds, it will be said 
that I am exaggerating.

If I say that publishers, film producers, 
critics, distributors, and heads of TV and radio 
stations who rush to submit to that laws of 
commercial circulation Š If I say that all of 
them are collaborating with the imbecile forces 
of marketing and participating in their triumph, 
it will be said that I am exaggerating.

And yet Š

If I recall that the possibility of stopping this 
infernal machine in its tracks lies with those 
who, having some power over cultural, artistic, 
and literary matters, can, each in their own 
place and their own fashion, and to however small 
an extent, throw their grain of sand into the 
well-oiled machinery of resigned complicities Š 
it will be said perhaps, for once, that I am 
being desperately optimistic.

And yet Š"