Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. He is a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University in Krems, Austria. He was formerly Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies program at Duke University, and Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah College of Art and Design. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and technology in the 1960s, information aesthetics, interactivity and agency, and the cultural implications of cybernetics, robotics, and biotechnology. He edited Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003). His second book, Art and Electronic Media was published by Phaidon Press in 2009. Full CV available on my website.
BIO
PHD FELLOWSHIPS 2011 - Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
Deadline:
Wed Dec 01, 2010 21:08
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) PHD FELLOWSHIPS 2011
Applications are invited for up to 6 PhD fellowships at ASCA, tenable from September 1, 2011, for a period of up to 4 years. These are fully funded staff positions. ASCA is a research school associated with the faculty of the humanities at the University of Amsterdam, with particular strengths in Media Studies.
Previous contact with ASCA or its members is not necessary, and international researchers are encouraged to apply. Application guidelines, as well as details of ASCA’s research concerns and projects, can be found on the institute’s website: www.hum.uva.nl/asca. Completed applications should be submitted as PDF files via email before January 15th, 2011, 1 p.m. (CET) to: Dr. Eloe Kingma, ASCA, asca‐fgw@uva.nl. Members of the selection committee are: Murat Aydemir, Josef Früchtl, Bart Garssen, Patricia Pisters, Kati Röttger. Other faculty and staff affiliated with ASCA include Mieke Bal, Richard Rogers, Geert Lovinck, Edward Shanken, and Marc Tuters.
For more details, see http://www.fgw.uva.nl/asca/object.cfm/objectid=CD7FD057-92D3-44A7-92BAF34A64310A09
Applications are invited for up to 6 PhD fellowships at ASCA, tenable from September 1, 2011, for a period of up to 4 years. These are fully funded staff positions. ASCA is a research school associated with the faculty of the humanities at the University of Amsterdam, with particular strengths in Media Studies.
Previous contact with ASCA or its members is not necessary, and international researchers are encouraged to apply. Application guidelines, as well as details of ASCA’s research concerns and projects, can be found on the institute’s website: www.hum.uva.nl/asca. Completed applications should be submitted as PDF files via email before January 15th, 2011, 1 p.m. (CET) to: Dr. Eloe Kingma, ASCA, asca‐fgw@uva.nl. Members of the selection committee are: Murat Aydemir, Josef Früchtl, Bart Garssen, Patricia Pisters, Kati Röttger. Other faculty and staff affiliated with ASCA include Mieke Bal, Richard Rogers, Geert Lovinck, Edward Shanken, and Marc Tuters.
For more details, see http://www.fgw.uva.nl/asca/object.cfm/objectid=CD7FD057-92D3-44A7-92BAF34A64310A09
The Postmedia Perspective
Part 6 of 6
From the above considerations, it should be becoming clear that new
media theory straddles medium-specificity (the “new properties” of
meta-media first proposed by Kay) and medium-generality (the “universal
machine” proposed by Turing.) In my book, I argue that the history of
ideas and practices pertaining to computing and new media as a
technological and cultural field cannot be limited to modernist
conceptions of medium-specificity propounded by Krauss in her dismissal
of the post-medium condition. It appears that neither specific nor
universal theories of media are sufficient for the task, just as
Domenico rightly suggests that neither new media theory nor contemporary
art theory are sufficient for the task of making sense of either NMA or
MCA. To their benefit, new media discourses have a remarkable ability
to equally embrace universality and specificity, to say nothing of
remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999), convergence (Jenkins 2006),
software studies, and a variety of other theoretical models, eroding the
binary opposition between specificity and universality. The richly
textured conceptual and applied hybridity of NMA practices and
theoretical discourses offers great potential for reconfiguring the
terms of debate concerning experimental and avant-garde artistic
practices in the 21st century.
Ed Shanken, 17 January 2011
PS. I
am chairing a panel on this topic at CAA in NYC on Fri, 11 Feb and
welcome Rhizomers to attend and participate in the discussion. See
http://conference.collegeart.org/2011/sessions/sessions.php?period=2011-02-11
Links:
Art Basel Conversation with Bourriaud, Weibel, Grey (19 June 2010):
View: http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/mhv/
Download: http://www.artbaselvod.ch/videos/salon201006192.m4v
Contemporary
Art and New Media: Towards a Hybrid Discourse (draft overview essay of
current monograph)
http://artexetra.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/shanken-hybrid-discourse-draft-0-2.pdf
www.artexetra.com
From the above considerations, it should be becoming clear that new
media theory straddles medium-specificity (the “new properties” of
meta-media first proposed by Kay) and medium-generality (the “universal
machine” proposed by Turing.) In my book, I argue that the history of
ideas and practices pertaining to computing and new media as a
technological and cultural field cannot be limited to modernist
conceptions of medium-specificity propounded by Krauss in her dismissal
of the post-medium condition. It appears that neither specific nor
universal theories of media are sufficient for the task, just as
Domenico rightly suggests that neither new media theory nor contemporary
art theory are sufficient for the task of making sense of either NMA or
MCA. To their benefit, new media discourses have a remarkable ability
to equally embrace universality and specificity, to say nothing of
remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999), convergence (Jenkins 2006),
software studies, and a variety of other theoretical models, eroding the
binary opposition between specificity and universality. The richly
textured conceptual and applied hybridity of NMA practices and
theoretical discourses offers great potential for reconfiguring the
terms of debate concerning experimental and avant-garde artistic
practices in the 21st century.
Ed Shanken, 17 January 2011
PS. I
am chairing a panel on this topic at CAA in NYC on Fri, 11 Feb and
welcome Rhizomers to attend and participate in the discussion. See
http://conference.collegeart.org/2011/sessions/sessions.php?period=2011-02-11
Links:
Art Basel Conversation with Bourriaud, Weibel, Grey (19 June 2010):
View: http://www.artbasel.com/go/id/mhv/
Download: http://www.artbaselvod.ch/videos/salon201006192.m4v
Contemporary
Art and New Media: Towards a Hybrid Discourse (draft overview essay of
current monograph)
http://artexetra.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/shanken-hybrid-discourse-draft-0-2.pdf
www.artexetra.com
The Postmedia Perspective
Part 5
Early in the excerpt, Domenico summons Manovich’s 1996 distinction between “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land,” a distinction that he claims remain “valid to a point” despite considerable changes in both artworlds over 15 years. As a matter of principle, I abhor such simplistic, binary oppositions, which do violence to the subtle layering of ideas and practices by flattening reality into sound-byte categories. Moreover, Manovich’s characterization of Turing Land, as oriented “’towards new, state-of-the-art computer technology” misses what is conceptually most interesting about Turing’s (and Manovich’s!) theories of digital computing: the idea of the universal machine. Writing about the Dynabook (an early multimedia computing system) in their 1977 essay, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg claimed that “the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media.” This “new ‘metamedium,’” as they called it, has “new properties” including “dynamic search” (i.e., random access), simulation, the ability to combine images, animations, and sound, and programmability. Its content, they propose, “would be a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.” Manovich credits these ideas in his later, more nuanced theories, which emphasize the unique properties of meta-media.
Early in the excerpt, Domenico summons Manovich’s 1996 distinction between “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land,” a distinction that he claims remain “valid to a point” despite considerable changes in both artworlds over 15 years. As a matter of principle, I abhor such simplistic, binary oppositions, which do violence to the subtle layering of ideas and practices by flattening reality into sound-byte categories. Moreover, Manovich’s characterization of Turing Land, as oriented “’towards new, state-of-the-art computer technology” misses what is conceptually most interesting about Turing’s (and Manovich’s!) theories of digital computing: the idea of the universal machine. Writing about the Dynabook (an early multimedia computing system) in their 1977 essay, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg claimed that “the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media.” This “new ‘metamedium,’” as they called it, has “new properties” including “dynamic search” (i.e., random access), simulation, the ability to combine images, animations, and sound, and programmability. Its content, they propose, “would be a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.” Manovich credits these ideas in his later, more nuanced theories, which emphasize the unique properties of meta-media.
The Postmedia Perspective
Part 4
Citing Inke Arnes, Domenico asks, How can we “underline New Media Art’s ‘specific form of contemporaneity’” in a way that does not “violate th[e] taboos” of MCA? I’m compelled to take issue with the tone of this query. Violating taboos has played an important role in the history of art. One of the key contributions NMA can make to art in general is in drawing attention to and contesting the status quo. This has a lot to do not just with the explicit use of technological media but with challenging the museum and gallery – or any specific locale – as the privileged site of exhibition and reception. If NMA lies down and accepts assimilation on the terms of MCA, then much of its critical value will have been usurped.
At the same time, I’m compelled to agree with Catherine David’s assertion (quoted) that “Much of what today’s artists produce with New Media is very boring,” but I must add that much of what today’s artists produce without New Media is equally boring. While MCA curators and theorists like Krauss, Bourriaud, David make all the usual criticisms of NMA’s “vacuous celebration of technology,” I agree with Domenico’s assertions that some of this work, even if it fails as art, may have “heralded a new development in knowledge” and that “The New Media Art world can potentially generate the energy that powers the other art worlds, giving their respective ‘ideas of art’ a radical evolution.” Moreover, I argue that there may be specific strategic and conceptual advantages to using emerging media in a metacritical way. In other words, if used cleverly, technological media may offer precisely the tools needed to reflect on the profound ways in which that very technology is deeply embedded in modes of knowledge production, perception, and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding epistemological and ontological transformations. I believe that such a metacritical approach is operating in the best NMA (and the best digital humanities scholarship.) Rather than shunning technological media, this method may offer artists the most advantageous opportunities to comment on and participate in the social transformations taking place in digital culture, in order to, as Bourriaud implores, “inhabit the world in a better way.”
Citing Inke Arnes, Domenico asks, How can we “underline New Media Art’s ‘specific form of contemporaneity’” in a way that does not “violate th[e] taboos” of MCA? I’m compelled to take issue with the tone of this query. Violating taboos has played an important role in the history of art. One of the key contributions NMA can make to art in general is in drawing attention to and contesting the status quo. This has a lot to do not just with the explicit use of technological media but with challenging the museum and gallery – or any specific locale – as the privileged site of exhibition and reception. If NMA lies down and accepts assimilation on the terms of MCA, then much of its critical value will have been usurped.
At the same time, I’m compelled to agree with Catherine David’s assertion (quoted) that “Much of what today’s artists produce with New Media is very boring,” but I must add that much of what today’s artists produce without New Media is equally boring. While MCA curators and theorists like Krauss, Bourriaud, David make all the usual criticisms of NMA’s “vacuous celebration of technology,” I agree with Domenico’s assertions that some of this work, even if it fails as art, may have “heralded a new development in knowledge” and that “The New Media Art world can potentially generate the energy that powers the other art worlds, giving their respective ‘ideas of art’ a radical evolution.” Moreover, I argue that there may be specific strategic and conceptual advantages to using emerging media in a metacritical way. In other words, if used cleverly, technological media may offer precisely the tools needed to reflect on the profound ways in which that very technology is deeply embedded in modes of knowledge production, perception, and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding epistemological and ontological transformations. I believe that such a metacritical approach is operating in the best NMA (and the best digital humanities scholarship.) Rather than shunning technological media, this method may offer artists the most advantageous opportunities to comment on and participate in the social transformations taking place in digital culture, in order to, as Bourriaud implores, “inhabit the world in a better way.”
The Postmedia Perspective
Part 3
While Domenico traces the roots of the post-medium discourse to Guattari and Brea, it could also be seen as rooted in Dick Higgins' 1966 "Statement on Intermedia." I propose another early touchstone, one that, like Higgins' statement, has the advantage of authorizing the historiography of art and technology/new media art: critic Burnham’s embrace of ‘post-formalist art’ in his influential Artforum essay, “Systems Esthetics” (1968) and his magnum opus, Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968). Burnham was able to see ideas beneath forms and media, as exemplified in his brilliant exhibition, Software (1970), which joined together, without differentiating between them, works of art and works of technology, technological artworks, and artworks associated with conceptual art, happenings, and performance. As I noted in my essay, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art” (2001), for Burnham, scientific and technological advances (now known as new media) were inseparable from the sweeping economic and social changes associated with the information age. Given the flood of technology and technological modes of exchange into all facets of life in the 2000s, I argue that this inseparability is as true or truer today than it was four decades ago. It is in this context that I agree with Weibel, whom Domenico quotes as stating, “This media experience has become the norm for all aesthetic experience. Hence in art there is no longer anything beyond the media…. There is no longer any [art] ouside and beyond the media experience.”
The debate surrounding medium-specificity and the post-medium condition is fraught with tension both in NMA and MCA circles. Rosalind Krauss refers to post-medium practitioners as “nothing but pretenders” in contrast to Ruscha, Kentridge, Calle, and Marclay, whom she champions as “the genuine avant-garde of our day.” (Krauss, The Guarantee of the Medium, 2009, p. 42). Bourriaud, on the other hand, seems to embrace the post-medium condition as a positive development, yet refuses to grant art that explicitly uses technological media, like NMA, entry into the high alter of MCA. Regarding medium-specificity and, more particularly, the importance of medium-specific analysis for NMA (which surely must threaten the uninitiated in MCA), Domenico rightly points out that “many works cannot be properly understood without an in-depth knowledge of the medium and its dynamics, and therefore continues to require a specialized critical approach.” Later, he hedges on this, arguing against Christiane Paul’s “prejudice” that “New media art requires media literacy,’” yet a few sentences later he returns to the Weibelian position that “all contemporary art needs to be media literate.”
While Domenico traces the roots of the post-medium discourse to Guattari and Brea, it could also be seen as rooted in Dick Higgins' 1966 "Statement on Intermedia." I propose another early touchstone, one that, like Higgins' statement, has the advantage of authorizing the historiography of art and technology/new media art: critic Burnham’s embrace of ‘post-formalist art’ in his influential Artforum essay, “Systems Esthetics” (1968) and his magnum opus, Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968). Burnham was able to see ideas beneath forms and media, as exemplified in his brilliant exhibition, Software (1970), which joined together, without differentiating between them, works of art and works of technology, technological artworks, and artworks associated with conceptual art, happenings, and performance. As I noted in my essay, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art” (2001), for Burnham, scientific and technological advances (now known as new media) were inseparable from the sweeping economic and social changes associated with the information age. Given the flood of technology and technological modes of exchange into all facets of life in the 2000s, I argue that this inseparability is as true or truer today than it was four decades ago. It is in this context that I agree with Weibel, whom Domenico quotes as stating, “This media experience has become the norm for all aesthetic experience. Hence in art there is no longer anything beyond the media…. There is no longer any [art] ouside and beyond the media experience.”
The debate surrounding medium-specificity and the post-medium condition is fraught with tension both in NMA and MCA circles. Rosalind Krauss refers to post-medium practitioners as “nothing but pretenders” in contrast to Ruscha, Kentridge, Calle, and Marclay, whom she champions as “the genuine avant-garde of our day.” (Krauss, The Guarantee of the Medium, 2009, p. 42). Bourriaud, on the other hand, seems to embrace the post-medium condition as a positive development, yet refuses to grant art that explicitly uses technological media, like NMA, entry into the high alter of MCA. Regarding medium-specificity and, more particularly, the importance of medium-specific analysis for NMA (which surely must threaten the uninitiated in MCA), Domenico rightly points out that “many works cannot be properly understood without an in-depth knowledge of the medium and its dynamics, and therefore continues to require a specialized critical approach.” Later, he hedges on this, arguing against Christiane Paul’s “prejudice” that “New media art requires media literacy,’” yet a few sentences later he returns to the Weibelian position that “all contemporary art needs to be media literate.”
