Forward from Christiane Paul: RE: [-empyre-] reply to Ben Bogart

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

rom: <Christiane_Paul@whitney.org>
Date: March 7, 2006 1:04:37 PM PST
To: <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] reply to Ben Bogart


One of the threads of this exchange seems to have returned to the  
good old topic of medium vs. content, which has already been much  
discussed on lists and within conferences and festivals over the  
years. (And I don't mean to say that it doesn't warrant further  
exploration). At least part of this discussion is related to  
modernism and its reflection on formal aspects of artwork.

Millie Niss wrote:
"But I don't think that given a good concept, one can ever devote too  
much effort to getting the technology right."

Absolutely, but you're already assuming that there is "a good  
concept" somewhere in the work.
What Ben and GH seem to refer to is the much heard criticism that  
"New media art is all about technology." At first glance, this  
criticism seems ambiguous at best. Obviously, new media art, at least  
to some extent, is "about technology." As you and ben have pointed  
out, no object or art form (be it painting, sculpture, or  
photography) can be separated from its own materiality, and one could  
argue that every painting also is "about" painting and comments on  
its own medium -- although the degree of self-reflexivity  
substantially varies from one work to another. (see modernism)

In most cases, the above complaint is meant to express frustration  
with a gratuitous use of technology -- a showcasing of technology for  
technology's sake.

Millie Niss wrote:
"I think maybe some curators do not know enough about computers to be  
able to
properly judge new media...  Until we have a generation of arts
administrators who are trained in new media and computer technology,  
there
will be some very silly curatorial and funding decisions made."

I would agree again. In the case of new media art, the criticism  
conerning "technology focus" is fundamentally linked to a person's  
familiarity with the medium. Obviously, a completely gratuitous use  
of technology can only produce bad art. For most new media artists,  
who often have worked with their medium for at least one if not  
several decades, technology is "just" a medium as paint or or clay;  
they take it for granted. This is not meant to say that these artists  
are not interested in or closely follow the "latest" technologies.  
The state of the medium often lags behind the concepts that artists  
try to communicate, and they continuously find themselves pushing the  
boundaries or developing technologies in order to express their ideas.

If an art recipient / museum visitor is unfamiliar with a specific  
technology or interface, it will automatically move to the foreground  
and become the focus of attention -- which very often is completely  
unintended by the artist. For the expert audience, on the other hand,  
the technology tends to be transparent, it moves to the background  
and becomes mostly a vehicle for content. Unfortunately, this problem  
of focus and perception cannot easily be solved.

An additional factor that needs to be taken under consideration here  
is that every medium in its emerging phase tends to explore its own  
characteristics, which is a necessity and an important step in  
shaping an artistic practice. Many of Nam June Paik's works -- such  
as Magnet TV and TV Crown -- precisely fulfilled that function and  
investigated the "materiality" of television and video.

Moreover, new media art often critically investigates its underlying  
technologies and their encoded cultural and commercial agenda, which  
automatically results in a shift of focus to the medium itself. Not  
until new media art will make regular appearances in the art world  
will its technologies be taken for granted rather than understood as  
an obsessive fixation.

Software / algorithmic / generative art tends to be a particularly  
tricky medium in this respect. Again, the topic has been much  
discussed (e.g. at the 2003 Ars Electronica Festival, Code -- The  
Language of Our Time). In the following, a few excerpts from an essay  
I wrote for Ars -- full text at:
http://www.aec.at/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/ 
festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=12501

In “Concepts, Notations, Software, Art,” Florian Cramer outlines that  
much of contemporary software art takes two opposite approaches to  
software art and software criticism: either “software as first of all  
a cultural, politically coded construct” or a focus on “the formal  
poetics and aesthetics of software code and individual subjectivity  
expressed in algorithms.”

The latter is exemplified in the criteria for evaluation established  
by computer scientist Donald Knuth, who has been talking about  
“computer programming as an art” since the 1970s (9): among these are  
correctness, maintainability, lucidity, grace of interaction with  
users, and readability (which would make the Obfuscated C Code  
Contest (10) a failure in the art of programming).

The study and criticism of software art has to be equally literate in  
the aesthetics of the back end’s construction and the front end’s  
(multi-sensory) perception. The crucial dilemma of software art may  
very well be that the study of its “backend” will always remain a  
fringe culture that won't be integrated into the mainstream of  
(perception-oriented) art criticism. The interconnectedness of  
written code and the actions it produces also begs the question how  
transparent the relationship between these two forms can or should  
be, and whether this might be a criterion for evaluating the art.  
Meaning, is software art more successful if one can “see” the  
algorithms at work in the unfolding of visuals / sound and can  
establish direct connections between the front end and the code  
driving it? Art that allows this connection to be made will certainly  
be accessible to a wider audience but it remains questionable whether  
the transparency of cause-and-effect relationships is a criterion for  
the quality of art. The issue here seems to be one of reference and  
is embedded in a larger discussion surrounding the status of  
representation in digital art.