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Book Review – Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization
Posted on December 28th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization: Reflect No. 8, edited by Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (available on amazon USA
NAI Publishers says: Should artists be activists? Is activist art one of an artist’s primary responsibilities or a pointless sideshow on the fringes of serious politics? The philosopher, writer and art historian Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck explore this theme in collaboration with other thinkers and doers in his new book Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization.
In a time of globalization, populism, hypercapitalism, migration, War on Terror, and global warming, artistic engagement is vital. Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization takes the measure of contemporary activist art. What is the role of art and activism in the polarized, populist society of the spectacle? Art & Activism examines both the criticism of engagement as a mere pose and the need for cultural activism in today’s society. Urban activism and activism by anonymous networks are also investigated. Special attention is devoted to the effects of the War on Terror on activism in practice. The book concludes with a theoretical framework for contemporary activism and an impassioned plea for genuinely political art.
Errorist International, Operation BANG!, 2005
It is traditional in the blogosphere (is anyone still using this word?) to close the year with a ‘best of’ post listing the 10 most popular stories, the best exhibitions seen, the gadgets that have changed our life. I wish i could do it, it’s excellent for traffic. Alas! i have the memory of a mongoose and i’m too lazy to go through the archives of the blog. But i can safely declare that the best book i’ve read in 2011 was Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization.
A number of books about art and activism have landed on my doorstep over the past few years but this is the first one that takes as its premise the fact that activism, protest, subversion, disruption, criticism, community, resistance, etc. have become little more than buzzwords. Punk has lost its bite and essence and is now little more than a fashion trend. Che Guevara is more famous for the t-shirts his face sells than for the role he played in the Cuban Revolution. Subversion has been the cornerstone of Madonna’s rise to pop power for decades. The discursive fringe has reached the mainstream. Resistance is hip! Subversion is cool!
The popularity of these terms have depleted them from any meaning or strength. Well almost… Today you can land a commission or assignment from public institutions and private sponsors by writing application that claims that your ‘subversive’ artwork will raise ‘a healthy debate in the community’.
The editors of the book have therefore found it necessary to come up with a new word to define a powerful strategy that connects art and political engagement: subversivity. Subversivity is a disruptive attitude that tries to create openings, possibilities in the ‘closedness’ of a system.
The quality of the book extends way beyond its premise. Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization is composed of 30 essays by artists, art historians, philosophers, cultural critics, social scientists, curators, theatre directors, etc. I expected at least one or two of these texts to be bland, too scholarly, or cliché. But all i read was solid and relevant. There were a few repetitions but i never grew tired of the thoughts, experiments and ideas shared in the book.
The texts jumped from one discipline to another: visual art, theatre, architecture, hacktivism, urbanism, performances. They discussed artistic and activist practice in Europe and North America of course but also in Syria (exploring the form activism can take in a country where public activity is closely monitored by the State), South Africa, Argentina and other countries which ought to appear more often on the contemporary art map.
Unlike many books i review on the blog, this one contains very few images. Two to be precise and that includes the one on the cover. I didn’t really miss the images and discovered a few artistic/activist projects that would have deserved an individual post:
Renzo Martens, still from Episode 3, 2008
Renzo Martens, still from Episode 3, 2008
Ruben De Roo takes Renzo Martens’ film Enjoy Poverty as a platform to explore how artists can stimulate the political consciousness of the consumers of tragedies that we (‘Western’ audiences) are. A few years ago, Martens went to the Democratic Republic of Congo to launch a two-year project that examined the exploitation of one of Africa’s major exports: images of poverty and suffering. The artist traveled with a blue neon billboard that read ENJOY POVERTY and worked with Congolese photographers, teaching them how to sell images of suffering to Western media and aid agencies.
Christoph Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich / Please Love Austria, 2000 (Image: Baltzer)
Christoph Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich / Please Love Austria, 2000 (Photo © Paul Poet)
In their remarkably powerful and compelling essay, members of the collective BAVO call for socially committed artists to abandon “NGO art” (mostly art devoid of any political stand for fear of loosing subsidies) and urged them to be ‘really political’ by developing strategies and practices of resistances that stretch the limits of their discipline in the direction of radical politics. They gave Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria as a meaningful example of art engaging with politics:
In 2000, shortly after Jörg Haider’s far right party became part of the Austrian government, Christoph Schlingensief set up a camp for asylum seekers in a shipping container outside the Vienna Opera House. Twelve asylum seekers lived in the container for 6 days, their lives streamed over the web in a kind of Big Brother show, and the audience were invited to vote their least favourite players to exit the container and be deported to their native country. Decorated with a banner saying Ausländer Raus! (‘Foreigners out!’), the container became a flashpoint in Austria’s national and racial debate. One of the outcome of the work is that, at the end of the show, antifascist action groups stormed the container and freed the immigrants (who were actually actors.)
Alfredo Jaar, Lights in the City, in 1999
Gie Goris mentions Alfredo Jaar‘s Lights in the City as an example of art work that fuels a debate in society and unsettles without resorting to easy provocation.
The artist installed red light on the Copula of the Marche Bonsecours, a landmark monument in the centre of Montreal. The lights were connected to homeless shelters located 500 yards from the building. When a homeless person entered one of the shelters, they could press the button that would make the top of the building glow red.
Eventually all the shelters for homeless people in Montreal could be wired and connected to the Cupola. This way, a major landmark and historical monument in the city would be acting as a non-stop lighthouse, producing endless, painful distress signals to society. With enough media coverage and public outrage and support triggered by these ongoing distress signals, homelessness could be completely eradicated from Montreal, Jaar explained.
The strategy worked so well that the commissioning authority ended the intervention.
The book ends with the most honest plea: to burn the book (or burn your brain) because subversion (or subversivity) can be undermined by essays, books, intellectual jargon and ‘radical’ theories.
Image on the homepage: Errorist International, Operation Bang!, 2005. Action in Mar de Plata, Argentina. Courtesy of the Etcétera Archive.
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Review of the Frieze Art Fair
Posted on December 22nd, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Paul Simon Richards for Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Photo by Polly Braden. Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze
As many of you probably know, i love contemporary art fairs. Yes, it’s pure porn art and there’s too much to see, most of which is quite frankly bad. But there are good surprises as well and i don’t mind spending hours in front of painted horrors if at some point i stumble upon a piece that will move me. I’m that easy. Besides, art fairs expose me to works and artists i would otherwise never have accepted to look at.
That’s how in mid-October i found myself in Regent’s Park, London, clutching my hard earned press pass (did they make bloggers sweat to get an accreditation!), expecting to be blown away. Year after year, i had read about the Frieze art fair in mags and newspapers. It looked extravagant and fearless. It looked like an art fair i would enjoy.
Alas! What the 173 galleries exhibited inside the gigantic pavilion was a bit uneventful.
Maybe the euro crisis had compelled gallery owners to be cautious and somewhat conservative in their selection of art works. Maybe my expectations were too high. I walked from corridor desperate for some excitement to photograph.
I was keen to see Pierre Huyghe’s crab living inside a Brancusi head but i never managed to locate it. I didn’t manage to miss Christian Jankowski’s 65-metre yacht though. Made by a specialist boat builder, the luxury ship could be purchased at the merchant’s prize for €500,000. Or for €625,000 if you fancied having the artist sign it. The references were obvious (Duchamp, financial crisis, bling culture, etc.), the whole point not so much.
Of course it wasn’t all pain and gloom. The PM3 of the talks are online, there was Nathalie Djurberg! there was Nathalie Djurberg!, i ended up in The Guardian (albeit in a photo gallery showing people who confuse art fairs with fashion shows) and i did find works that make this post worthy of a quick scroll down:
Michael Landy, Credit Card Destroying Machine, 2010 (Thomas Dane gallery). Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Frieze/ Linda Nylind
Michael Landy was showing a Tinguely-inspired eccentricity that shred your credit card in exchange of a drawing by the artist. You might remember that 10 years ago Landy spent 2 weeks destroying all of his worldly possession in an empty store on Oxford Street.
Over some 20 years, street photographer Igor Moukhin chronicled rallies and protest marches across Russia.
Igor Moukhin, Resistance (XL gallery)
Seb Patane, Untitled, 2011 (China Art Objects Galleries)
Brian Griffiths, Bear Work Wear (black), 2011 (Vilma Gold gallery)
As i screamed earlier, there was Nathalie Djurberg! there was Nathalie Djurberg!
Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
In Encounter(s), Tejal Shah collaborated with artist Varsha Nair. Wearing a straightjacket, outstretching their bodies, they wrapped themselves around pilars, across stairs, through gates and against other pieces of architecture. The work amplifies the paradox of our highly networked reality wherein technology variously connects, only to ironically distance us.
Tejal Shah, Encounter(s), 2006
Marina Abramovic, The Levitation of Saint Teresa, 2010 (Lisson Gallery)
Probably my favourite painting at the fair:
Miriam Cahn, Herumstehen, 2005 (Elizabeth Dee gallery)
In case you were wondering ‘how much does the work below cost?’, i found some figures online: In Frame, the section in the fair for young galleries showing solo artist presentations supported for a second year by Cos, sales were also substantial. François Ghebaly sold out their Patrick Jackson booth, selling Dirt Pile on Table (roots&glass) (2011) priced at $9,000; two versions of Heads, hands and feet (2011) for $15,000 and 3 dirt pile sculpture for $20,000 all to significant international collectors.
Patrick Jackson, Head, Hands and Feet (black) + Head, Hands and Feet (red), 2011 (François Ghebaly Gallery)
Wolfgang Tillmans. Faltenwurf (Grey), 2011 (Galerie Chantal Crousel)
Dawn Mellor, South African Gallerist Kristen Scott Thomas is showing neo-institutional critique works by Zurich based artist Chaz Bono, 2011 (Team Gallery)
Ken Okiishi, Manhattan Transfer (Alex Zachary gallery)
Tobias Zielony, Yet Untitled (#14), 2009 (KOW Berlin)
Tobias Zielony, Powwow, 2009 (KOW Berlin)
Alex Hartley (of the Nowherisland fame) was showing what looked like a photo of the Unabomber cabin. Close (very close) inspection revealed that it was a sculpture with the architectural model carved and built into the photography of the landscape itself. The series is on show at Victoria Miro this Winter.
Alex Hartley, Waiting for Daylight to End (Kaczynski Cabin), 2011
Cinthia Marcelle, O Cosmopolita, 2011
This is the billy-goat costume that Paweł Althamer wore to travel the world on the footsteps of a Polish children’s-book character.
Pawel Althamer, The Billy-Goat, 2011
Glenn Ligon, Negro Sunshine, 2006
No art fair is conceivable without at least one work from Elmgreen and Dragset (i spotted 3 at Frieze):
Elmgreen and Dragset, The Fruit of Knowlege, 2011
Taryn Simon, The Wailing Wall, Mini Israel, Latrun, 2007
Cornelia Parker, 30 Pieces of Silver (with reflection), Frith Street Gallery
Matthew Brannon (Casey Kaplan Gallery)
Oleg Kulik, Kulik vs. Koraz, 1997 (XL gallery)
Sorry i have no title nor author for the following works:
More images.
Photo on the homepage: Paul Simon Richards for Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Photo by Polly Braden. Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.
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Cloud Music Showdown: Amazon vs. Apple vs. Google [REVIEW]
Posted on November 17th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments
It’s been a huge week for digital music lockers. First Apple made iTunes Match available to U.S. customers, then Google Music launched. These two services are competing with with Amazon’s Cloud Player (which is integrated with the new Kindle Fire) in a new realm of cloud music storage.
The three major contenders offer similar products with a similar mission: Allow users to buy new music and access existing libraries from multiple devices, via the cloud.
Here’s how the services compare to one another in terms of ease of use, pricing, mobile accessibility, and track selection.
A disclaimer: I am a Mac owner. As a result, my desktop experiences are based around Mac OS X Lion. Windows integration may differ. For this test I used the new HTC Rezound, the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Pricing
Google Music is free to all users. This includes access on the web, desktop and mobile devices. Google does impose a library limit of 20,000 songs. Purchased tunes don’t count.
iTunes Match is $24.99 a year. For that $24.99, users get the ability to upload 25,000 songs, excluding any iTunes purchases. Macworld offers a fix for users who have more than 25,000 tracks in their iTunes library but still want to use the service.
Amazon’s Cloud Player is free for for up to 5GB of uploads (not counting Amazon.com MP3 purchases). Plans with 20GB of storage (for any type of data) start at $20 a year; the space for music is unlimited.
Winner: Google Music, because it’s free. Still, $20 for unlimited song storage is worth a gold star for Amazon.
Buying Music
The iTunes Music Store first went live in 2003. Within five years, became the biggest music retailer in the United States. What has kept iTunes in the number one spot — despite competition from Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy (now defunct), eMusic, 7Digital, Sony, Microsoft and dozens of others — is that finding and buying music is very, very easy.
iTunes is bloated, especially on Windows. But it boasts one of the easiest search and purchase processes on the Internet.
Amazon has a section of its website dedicated to purchasing MP3s, but the search and purchase process can be hindered by accessibility issues. Depending on where you search, your artist selection could come back as a physical CD or as an MP3.
Google’s new music store has a clean layout like iTunes. The problem with Google Music: it lacks a shopping cart. You must purchase a track or album on the spot, and can’t group a bunch of purchases together for later.
Likewise, there is no “wishlist”, which Amazon and Apple offer. Google also makes navigating sections more difficult than it should be.
All three services make purchased tracks accessible across devices immediately. iTunes Match also makes all past purchases available. Amazon will store purchases made after March 2011, but previous purchases need to be manually uploaded. Since Google Music is so new, it’s a given that all of its purchase history is available.
Winner: iTunes. It’s still the fastest way to search for and find songs with minimal hassle.
Cloud Listening
A big promise of all three services is the ability to listen to your songs and playlists without having to download them.
All three make good on this promise. Apple uses iTunes as its central music hub. You can authorize up to ten devices for use with iTunes Match — five can be computers with iTunes — to stream or download songs.
Streaming songs within iTunes, as we described in our iTunes Match review, is almost indistinguishable from listening to a local file. Songs and albums show up in iTunes regardless of whether they have been downloaded locally or not.
Amazon and Google both use web-based playback systems. Amazon’s is the clunkiest of the bunch. Yes, you can browse by album, artist, song title or playlist, but navigating through the interface can be a chore.
Google has clearly spent a lot of time on its web-based music interface. But I found that songs or playlists would occasionally take a long time to switch from one to the next. Like Amazon, Google Music doesn’t work well with compilation albums — an annoying problem for someone like myself who has hundreds of them in her collection.
Where Google gets major props is that its cloud player is optimized for mobile devices as well. Amazon has an iPad interface for its Cloud Player, but no iPhone or mobile phone interaction.
Winner: Google Music. It’s the only service that lets you access your library from mobile and desktop browsers across platforms.
Uploading and Downloading Songs
Listening to music in the cloud is great. But first you have to get it there.
All three services support uploading purchases or songs obtained in other ways (ripped from CD, downloaded off the web, and yes, even pirated). Depending on the size of your library, this process can take quite some time.
This is where iTunes Match becomes worth its $24.99 yearly fee. The service can match tracks already in your library with songs in its database. If it finds a match, you don’t need to upload those tunes. Where it can’t find a match, those files are uploaded to the cloud.
This process works quite well. In my tests, iTunes Match has not once confused one file with a different version of the same song (which is useful when dealing with live tracks, alternative takes or remixes).
Amazon and Google both provide file uploading utilities. Google’s Music Manager can integrate directly with iTunes and monitor your iTunes folder to upload new tracks and match existing playlists. The program runs in the background, continuously uploading new iTunes tracks to your Google Music library.
Amazon also links with iTunes playlists and uploads albums and songs to Amazon Cloud Drive. This application needs to be launched to work; there isn’t an auto-sync option.
When it comes to downloading files, Google Music in its current state is painful. Users can only download tracks from the web interface twice. Using the Music Manager, however, users can download all of their files.
The problem with the Music Manager: there isn’t a way to select what files you want to download, or to auto-download new purchases.
Amazon makes downloading new purchases a snap, and also makes it easy to download existing songs for albums from the Cloud Drive interface. Amazon can also automatically add downloaded tracks to an iTunes or Windows Media Player library. If you also have iTunes Match, those Amazon files are usually just moments away from being synced and matched to the cloud there too.
Winner: iTunes. It’s the only system that is truly hassle-free. Amazon’s option is better than Google Music, which is a real pain.
Mobile Access
It isn’t enough to listen to music from your computer. We also want access on the go.
Apple’s mobile solution is the most limited in terms of device access. Playlist syncing and file access is only available on an iOS device. For iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Apple TV owners, this is great. But users of other mobile systems are out of luck.
Amazon makes things a bit easier by providing a mobile app for Android and an iPad-friendly web view of its library. Though not currently in the App Store, the app aMusic is a good way for iOS users to access their Amazon Cloud Player files. With any luck, it will be back in the App Store soon.
Google should be commended for making its music store compatible not just with Android, but with other browsers too. Visit music.google.com on an iOS device, and users are treated to a well-designed HTML5 app player.
The app player doesn’t offer offline playback, but the interface is similar to the Google Music Player for Android. The unofficial gMusic app is also a great option for iOS users. It doesn’t offer playback editing, but all other files are accessible and can be downloaded for offline listening.
Winner: Google. It’s the only service that is truly cross-platform friendly.
Overall
All three cloud music and storage platforms have their share of pros and cons. For iOS users, iTunes Match is going to offer the best user experience. For Android users, Google Music is a great option with a lot of flexibility for mobile — despite some limitations on the desktop side. Amazon is more of a mixed bag. The service is great as a way to buy and download MP3s, but it doesn’t really take advantage of the cloud as well as it could. Still, it’s a worthy option.
More About: amazon, Amazon Cloud Player, apple, Cloud Music, features, Google, google music, itunes-match
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Book review – Media, New Media, Postmedia
Posted on August 30th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Media, New Media, Postmedia, by Domenico Quaranta, published by Postmediabooks (available on amazon UK
The english abstract is available online, here’s just an abstract of it: Neither the label “New Media Art” nor the artistic practices it refers to were able to conquer the official art criticism or, more generally, the contemporary art world. Just a few works of New Media Art were able to enter the permanent collection of a museum, and even less were able to escape the limbo of the museum’s warehouses. New Media Art is more or less absent in the contemporary art market, as well as in mainstream art magazines; and recent accounts on contemporary art history completely forgot it.
How can we explain this segregation? Why “official” art criticism and history have still so many difficulties in integrating the artistic research on new media technologies into their interpretation of the art history of the Twentieth century, even now that this research can be considered in all its historic relevance? Why the art market, that was able to greet video, installation and performance, is still unable to accept and distribute artworks based in software, hardware or computer networks? Why many artists are so intolerant of the very term “New Media Art”, and of any attempt to stress its diversity? Why, on the other side, other artists are so proud of this diversity? Why New Media Art pretends to be “different” from contemporary art, and yet proudly reclaims its relationship with contemporary art’s very same roots, the Avant-gardes?
(…) Medium, New Media, Postmedia is the first attempt to give these questions a common, holistic answer. In order to reach the goal, this book starts discussing the current definition of New Media Art, making its weakness clear and suggesting a new definition that makes it possible to reconsider New Media Art’s historical development on a new basis and to better understand its recent developments and its positioning in contemporary culture.
But Medium, New Media, Postmedia is not just an attempt to explain the current status of the artistic research with new technologies, but also a militant endeavor to help it get the critical consideration it deserves; it’s not just a description of the present, but also an attempt to change the future, suggesting new critical and curatorial strategies.
Paul Chan, 5th Light 2007 (detail.) Photograph © Sylvain Deleu
It’s not every day that i feel like recommending a publication to anyone interested in new media art. No matter the depth of their involvement with new media art, no matter their degree of expertise. Whether you’re a student, an academic and someone who curates or collects contemporary art and is ‘just curious about new media art’, Media, New Media, Postmedia is one book you ought to read. The catch is that, so far, the book is available in italian only. The abstract i butchered above as well as the list of contents are available in english online. It’s not much but it should give you an idea of the breadth and tone of the publication. Media, New Media, Postmedia is a brave book, one that might ruffle a few feathers sometimes (but oh so elegantly!) The publication gives a carefully researched overview of the state of the ‘new media art vs contemporary art world’ debate, navigating deftly between opinions and ideas. As far as i know Media, New Media, Postmedia has no equal in english and i do hope Quaranta looks for and finds a publisher who will be willing to translate it.
Hopefully my review will be of interest not only to the 3 readers i have in Italy but also to other readers who might like to know what happens beyond the abstract and the list of contents. This is not going to be a thorough review nor a summary of the book but more of a way for me to digest it and highlight a series of ideas that help me keep the love/hate relationship i have with new media art on the healthy side.
The first three chapters lay the basis for the whole discussion. The first one looks into the definition of medium, of new media (art), but also delineates their identity and analyzes how pertinent these terms are. The second chapter traces the history of new media art from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The third chapter brings side by side the world of contemporary art and new media art. it is a rather painful confrontation as new media art seems to emerge as the eternal loser in terms of critical recognition and economic perspective.
Golan Levin with Greg Baltus / Standard Robot Company, Opto-Isolator, 2007
The last two chapters The boho dance: New Media Art and contemporary art and The postmedia perspective are where the action is at. The title of chapter 4 refers to the Art Mating Ritual (the Boho Dance then the Consummation) ironically described by Tom Wolfe in The Painted World. In this case, however, the attempts of new media art at seducing the contemporary art world have failed repeatedly and miserably. Quaranta analyzes the reason of this fiasco by going through a series of exhibitions in major art museums that celebrated the ‘newness’, ‘brightness’ and ‘avant-garde’ of new media but never quite met with the respect of contemporary art critics and curators, due too often to the excessive focus on the technological perspective rather than on the art perspective of the works exhibited. Apart from a few exceptions, new media art has not yet found a comfortable place in art institutions and public or private collections. According to Quaranta, the usual excuses brought forward do not stand a close observation. Is reproducibility the culprit? No, think of the limited editions of photos, and of the price that a print by Cindy Sherman or Andreas Gursky reaches at auctions. Is it because of the ephemeral nature of many of the works? That didn’t prevent Damien Hirst’s shark to get the icon (read ‘bankable’) status it has nowadays. Is it the rapid obsolescence of the material used in new media art works? Quaranta replies with the example of VHS video works that have been transferred onto digital support and of neon installations by Dan Flavin that cannot use the original red neon anymore because in the meantime it was discovered that that particular shade is toxic. The real problem of new media art is that many in the contemporary art world have doubts about its value as art and as an investment.
The final chapter, The postmedia perspective, opens by laying the blame of the foul reputation of new media art on art critics and curators. On the one hand, the new media art world has tried to impose on the rest of the art world the criteria used internally to appreciate a work. Moreover, they have failed to do justice to new media art by presenting it as a uniform phenomenon instead of the heterogeneous reality that it is. On the other hand, many contemporary art critics have failed to go beyond the technological aspect of the works of new media art. Or they have also seen it a ‘uniform phenomenon’ and condemned it as a whole.
What unifies new media art is not the use of ‘the media’, it is its familiarity with the cultural impact that these media have had on society.
Dirk Eijsbouts , Interface #4 TFT, Tennis V180, 2004
For Quaranta, the New Media art world should turn its frustrating complex of inferiority into a virtue: that is, to act as an incubator for art forms that wouldn’t be accepted at a first stage by the mainstream art world. He gives as an example Tft Tennis v180°, an installation typical of ars electronica ‘gadgetry’. It might not stand raise up to the standards of a contemporary art critic, but it has value as a prototype ahead of game research, as a precursor that paved the way for the Wii. Without new media art, works like this one would struggle to find a suitable context to be produced, exhibited and discussed.
As i mentioned above, Media, New Media, Postmedia is a book that required audacity. And it took someone like Domenico Quaranta, a critic and curator whose involvement and respect for new media art doesn’t need to be proved any more and who has rubbed shoulders with the contemporary art world, to dissect and appraise in a way that was at time harsh the world of new media art. I suspect it was sometimes a distressing process but one that was necessary if new media art wants to get rid of the stereotypes, weaknesses and misunderstandings that weights it down.
Unsurprisingly, i’m going to end with the conclusion, not mine, but the one Quaranta has written in the abstracts:
At the end of this long debate, conclusions can’t but be provisional. The advent, after the last World War, of the digital media introduced the premises for a consistent change of paradigm in the contemporary cultural production. These premises, patiently nurtured in the New Media Art world, have now reached the complexity needed to cause the cultural revolution we are expecting from them. What we still have to understand is if this change should be pursued through the radical opposition to the idea of art that has been winning until now, or rather through border crossing, mediation, cross-breeding. This book is a bet on this second way.
Check out the blog Media, New Media, Postmedia.
Domenico Quaranta is a contemporary art critic and curator whose research focuses on the impact of the current techno-social developments on the arts. He’s a prolific writer, his articles and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and he has written and contributed to many books and catalogues. I was particularly enthusiastic about GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames which he authored together with Matteo Bittanti. You can either download for free or get as a print on demand his recent In Your Computer, a collection of texts he wrote between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews.
He curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions all over Europe (right now you can see ITALIANS DO IT BETTER!! at the Venice Biennale.) Domenico Quaranta is the Director of the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts and a founding member and Artistic Director of the very promising and much needed on the Italian territory LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age. If all of the above were not enough, he also lectures internationally and teaches “Net Art” at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan.
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