[-empyre-] signing off: Participatory Art: New Media and the Archival Trace

[rtf9 at cornell.edu]

>As we draw our June discussion to a close we would like to thank our 
>guest discussants to whom we are most appreciative:  Hana Iverson 
>(US), Sarah Drury (US), Nicholas Knouf (US),
Claudia Pederson (US) and Miyawaki Atsuko (UK/Japan).

Thank you to our curated guests as well: Sean Cubitt, Simon Biggs, 
Linda Dement Annette Barbier, Richard Rinehart, Patrick Lichty, 
Yiannis Colakides and Helene Black, Horit Herman Peled,Deborah 
Tolchinsky, David Tolchinsky, and Shadi Nazaria and the rest of our 
online participants who sent us posts this month.
>
Just yesterday I found myself in a heated debate with a group of 
humanities summer school students who had just read Balzac's "The 
Untitled Masterpiece." I was invited by their professor to spend an 
hour sharing my own work with them as well as other artist's work who 
had influenced me:  digital, participatory, networked, affective, 
ephemeral.  These students just could not fathom how this work could 
possibly be categorized as "art."

Their questions illuminated their tightly held notions about the 
nature of what art is.  Those notions nurtured during their primary 
and secondary school educations.  How is artwork that exists in 
Second Life valued in the art market? What beauty is recognized in 
work that does not exist materially?  How can the skill of a video 
maker be compared with an artist who can render the figure 
realistically? How do art historians record work where there is no 
tangible evidence of the work? I fleetingly answered their anxious 
questions in the time we had and then pointed them to our archive 
from this month's discussion:
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre


Perhaps Simon Biggs is correct when he writes "I gave up calling what 
I do art a while ago. Generally I refer to what I do as creative 
practices (note plural). In interdisciplinary and collaborative 
working contexts this allows you to divest yourself of a lot of 
baggage whilst ensuring that the most valuable aspects of the 
"practice formerly known as art" are retained."

Many thanks to all of you for sharing your views.  Welcome to 
Christina McPhee who will be introducing our topic for July.

Renate and Tim


-- 
Renate Ferro
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
,
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall
Ithaca, NY  14853

Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/