[-empyre-] Wired sustainability and Ambient Media

[Timothy Murray]

>

While I find this discussion on ambient media on plasma to be 
interesting, I find myself wondering about a certain slide toward 
this format in the museum and curatorial world which well could 
distract artists and curators from the quirky grit of much work 
concerned with "wired sustainability."

Given my interest in Tom and Patty's emphasis on ambient media and 
micromedia that might extend conceptual interventions on 
sustainability beyond the dominant media world, I've also been 
concerned about the increasing embrace by galleries and museums of 
the sort of aesthetic that prefers the slickness of large, flat 
screen video over the complexity of interactive experimentation 
and/or abrasive political critique that may be made more 
appropriately via amateur/self-made machineries and aesthetics.

I can think of two major North American exhibitions recently that 
transformed media intervention into "video painting" whether through 
primary emphasis on the flat screen or flat, perspective projections. 
The result, to my mind, was the luring of the visitors into a more 
conventional museum experience (one that conceivably could be 
exported via handhelds, etc.).   I don't know whether this was simply 
by coincidence, but both major shows I saw, one in California, one in 
New York, featured rather non-political, non-abrasive beautiful 
videos.  That is, even though some of the work featured landscape or 
"ecological" themes, none of it engaged the viewer with questions 
about sustainability or about the relation of sustainability to the 
aesthetic environment  or to the new media environment (precisely 
what Britt and Rebecca seek to provoke in their funky, clunky, and 
still tekno sophisticated and critical installations).

So I find myself resisting developments in ambient media that might 
function as anything like "a  visual form of Zen meditation, a pause 
from the press of daily life."

I do not think that ambient media need go only in this direction. 
But I've also noted a curatorial habit of organizing exibitions and 
festivals that program or hang the contrasting work of Zen ambiency 
and wired sustainability in different spaces or time schedules.   I 
guess it's the grit of cohabitation that I'm thinking will continue 
to provoke further critical reflection on the choices and dilemmas 
facing us in the environments of wired sustainability.

I'm looking forward to pursing this discussion.

Best,

Tim
-- 
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853