Re: [-empyre-] Galleries, publics, net.art

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

At 14:10 +1000 8/7/02, Daniel Palmer wrote:
> First, your notion of the audience. As Reiner suggests, "a net art 
> show at a museum is a good opportunity for a first introduction of 
> this art [stuff] to a completely new audience." When I recently 
> curated a program of CD-ROMs for regional galleries, among the many 
> moving entries in the comments books was one from an 83 year old man 
> who said it was his first time using a computer! ie. it's worth 
> remembering that audiences to art spaces are more diverse and plural 
> than is sometimes supposed. I know you were careful to note that you 
> were speaking only for yourself, but your post reflected the 
> privileged position of an academic net junky with fast/constant net 
> access... Even in Australia, most people use 56K modems and pay by 
> the minute/MB at home (and we know the other arguments about 
> plug-ins, speed of the computer, etc.)

hi Daniel

i agree with some of what you write :-) but i want to clarify what i 
mean, i guess. or what i think i mean.

i use a 56k modem from home all the time. and my personal (and yes as 
you note it's my own idiosyncratic approach) assumption is that 
net.art needs to acknowledge these as part of its aesthetic. if it 
doesn't, then i think of it as media art, or new media art, or 
digital art, but not net.art. and i think this only because of the 
things i listed. if it's about the net then i reckon (and yes this is 
provocation :-) ) there are various material conditions that it ought 
to engage with or find resistance in.

these include:
the screen as domestic appliance/space
bandwidth
time constraints

and no doubt others. as an example things like massive multiplayer 
rpg online work fine, but i don't think of them as net.art, they're 
computer games.

this might be academic nit picking. i'm sure it is, though for me it 
matters simply because i'm tired of all the 'click here to watch' 
stuff online that is constantly touted as interactive video. (if 
clicking to play and stop is the definition of interactivity then 
ain't a VCR a wonderful interactive thingie.) so with net.art that 
doesn't want to be on the net (that secretely wishes to be DVD and 
projected) then i want to call it something else. but of course this 
could just be rather naive.


> Seems the problem for you is the idea of the 'audience' for net art, 
> with its passive-spectacle connotations? ("cos its about using, not 
> consuming for
> goodness sake"). OK, I take your point about the ideal of *using* 
> the medium, but 'consumption' is not always so simple/bad. eg. I 
> like cooking, and appreciate the fact that the ingredients are 
> available for me to create with, but sometimes I like going out to 
> dinner - where the choices are more limited, but hopefully what's on 
> offer has been carefully prepared and I can engage enjoyably with 
> the experience without myself making anything new (although I might 
> take ideas home for the kitchen). Not quite a perfect analogy, but 
> you get my point.

yep. and i agree. but i think your analogy also supports my point: 
you cook *and* you like eating out. i think one informs the other, 
and you might agree that one without the other would make your 
experience of whichever was left less. (dunno.) but i love seeing 
work in galleries in contexts, particularly where you can meet/greet 
creators and get some context around the works. (and i really like 
the current ccp show btw.)

> Second, I agree that the monitor screen has a domestic/personal 
> history, but surely we can imagine the net differently, more 
> publicly? As Reiner reminds us, the net is a kind of public space. 
> I'm happy for people to do whatever in their private bubbles, but 
> I'd also like to see the web in public (and semi-public) places, and 
> like Marek, I'm very interested in the relationship of a physical 
> space to a networked one. This stuff is great in galleries, but 
> costs, as Helen notes (eg. John Tonkin's work, Personal Eugenics, 
> where you have your portrait taken in the gallery installation and 
> it's uploaded to the web, for all to see. Or stuff like Ken 
> Goldberg's Telegarden, where remote users  interact online with a 
> physical environment - in his case, water a real garden)

yes, though for me this is telematic art. uses the network of course.

> [snip stuff that i agree wholeheartedly with]


> Anyway, thanks for the provocation Adrian! By the way, OK, so 'art' 
> is an institutionally defined notion, caught up in a bureaucratic  
> network of definitions....  So who cares if what you are doing is 
> art or not? Embrace the ambiguity! But I think you're being a little 
> disingenuous to suggest you put some stuff up online and then it 
> gets picked up as art - isn't it already framed as such by your own 
> career trajectory as a film/digital theorist/academic, participation 
> in art festivals and the like?

sort of. but i came to the art side accidentally so am still strongly 
resistant to some of the ideologies i'm required to deal with if i 
want to think of my some of my stuff as art. i have work that i 
explicitly wrote as academic, theoretical content that has since been 
treated as net.art, i find that just odd.

so i'm finding this ambiguity personally quite disorientating and i 
think that's what i'm biting back against. and who cares? well i do 
if only because my employers see a difference because the government 
sees a difference. it makes a very material difference to where, how, 
why i'm defined and located institutionally which has significant 
implications for funding and the like. being able to embrace both is 
good, as long as you don't end up being no good at either?

thanks daniel.
cheers
adrian miles


--
   
+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies 
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+  hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]