[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