Death of Net Art & formnalism

Hello, all,

Sorry to be so silent - have been working on a very large Intelligent Agent (132 pp.) among other things.

This thread is very interesting, and also brings up a number of concerns.

The idea of New Media forms (or even broader techno-art forms), their relevance, and adnerence to same by (even small) insitiutions brings up a lot of issues. This is a conversation that I have at times when collecting material for Intelligent Agent.

We have a mission to address New Media Art, have had (more or less) since we started in the mid-90's. Rhizome has a mission for Net Art (insert definition here) as well.

I'll get into the problem with definitions, then get into relevance and and legitimacy.

I think it's agreed that we are in a genre/medium/movement that is very, very fluid; one that changes slightly many times a year. This is due to the exploration of rapid changes in culture, technologies, etc. that are intrinsic to what we do.

My thought on the matter is that taxonomy tries to drive a stake and create a larger set of meaning in the definition of art. For all my issues with it, the name "New Media" is probably useful in that it is so nebulous and vague.

From this, my practice at IA has been to include things like influences on New Media, techno-arts that are sister forms, and so on.

In my practice, I do not think I have made a piece of net art per se since 2000, with my Sprawl project for the Smithsonian. No, wait - there were a number of live pieces I did in the last 2 years, but that's byod the point.

The point is that while I am not as concerned with 'net art' specifically, I certainly do New Media on a regular basis, much of it offline, and I am looking at things like RFID, Bluetooth, remote observation droids, and my ongoing work in mini video devices, mobility, and VR.

Relevance
This conversation really perked up my ears. The thing that was of great interest was that the word 'relevance' was used in the same paragraph with 'curators, gallerists, and collectors'.

This brings up the difference between artistic relevance, cultural relevance and cultural capital.

First, one has to think about the issue of relevance as a priori statement. When one wants to engage with relevance per se, one engages with the desire to be placed within the communities and traditions in society and culture at hand. Can we say that relevance is "required" or "necessary"? Not really, but I think that Recognition is core to that argument. The two are tightly linked, and is the subject for anoter large conversation.

In the case of artistic relevance, assuming we are talking about artists with a good acumen for art, the 'relevant' is defined by the artist in context with their practice. Does this form comment on the issues desired in a way that serves the artist and the issues best, critical or formal?

That gets close to cultural relevance, as successful work usually has a strong link between cultural and artistic relevance. Does the work engage with historical memes, current events, execute their ideas in a powerful and concise way, and so on?

But then, the recognition of culturally relevant work gets into the realization of cultural capital. This is where the link between "relevance" and the "curators and collectors" comes in. It's interesting to note the phenomenon of collection of software pieces like Napier's and the objectification of Simon's and Campbell's work.

What then, is the relationship between "relevance" and "recognition", or even the legitimization of forms by institutions? Also, why are we concerned with formal defintiions like Net Art and their continuation in such a mutable field of inquiry? Is it to let the scholars, curators, and audiences catch up? This is a bit of a problem, as Christiane has said that the more experimental types like myself are often doomed to be "pre-moded" unless we ease back a little at times and let the institutions catch up a little.

The questions then are fairly straightforward, and probably in the area of practice and intent. What are you looking to accomplish with the work, is it more personal, public, institutional, capitalistic? Likewise, how do artists working in these mercuric forms see their cultural communications channels legitimizing these forms on larger scales, and want those channels to help create a context for legitimacy?

As for me, I'm much more interested in sharing the work as a form of dialogue, but this is something I've been pretty remiss in lately. But then, it's really desirable to get support, as (like me) without indpendent support, a lot of us tend to go academic. I stayed indie for 14 years; that's not bad.

I hope this is worthy grist for the mill.
Patrick Lichty
Interactive Media Arts & Design, Columbia College Chicago
Editor-in-Chief, Intelligent Agent