[spectre] Re: the media art center of 21C [u]

[Jeremy.J.Welsh]

On 04. sep 2005, at 07.47, Geert Lovink [c] wrote:

>
> 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.
>
I can agree with a lot of what Geert says here, but then again it's not 
as simple as that, and a closer look at  some of the work shown in 
Venice will explain why. A work that did apparently bear the 
characteristics of "new media art" was to be found in the Belgian 
pavilion. It was a work that examined and attempted to deconstruct some 
of the underlying architectures of the media it deployed and it could 
be described as experimental in nature. Unfortunately, none of this 
helped. The analysis of media was confused and confusing and the signal 
level of the work's content was drowned in a sea of noise. The result 
was neither stimulating nor challenging, merely annoying. But a work 
that seemed to me very successful was the projection installation by 
the Chinese artist Kimsooja in the Arsenale - a simple and perfectly 
exceuted work that used the medium of video exceedingly sparingly. 
Rather than being in any sense an investigation of the medium the piece 
could be seen as a direct descent of performance/body art video-based 
works by, for example Ulay & Abramovic. The point is that the formal 
means of execution and the content of the work were in perfect balance 
and the result was therefore deeply satisfying for the spectator.

Last night I attended a performance by Walid Raad/The Atlas Group at a 
theatre venue in Bergen. It was a performance in which several 
discourses overlapped and interreacted with one another within a 
framework that was at once an investigation of the structure of a 
performance and an investigation of the architectures of different 
media (for example Powerpoint presentation and "documentary" video). As 
a whole it is a work that demonstrates many of the aspects of Lev 
Manovich's "database cinema", though it is theatre rather than film. It 
deployed a range of "new" or not-so-new electronic media and to a large 
extent was concerned with the ways in which documentary media from 
photography to today's digital media shape and influence our 
understanding of the spatial and temporal structures of our culture. 
Whether such a performance belongs to a field called New Media Art, 
Contemporary Art or Free Theatre does not seem to be so interesting, 
but what it does demonstrate is the way in which much of the thinking 
that developed in the media art scene has filtered over into other 
fields and has made a positive impact, in much the same way as the 
experimental film aesthetics of an earlier era have been absorbed into 
the mainstream of visual culture.

best, Jeremy