On the Feedback exhibition and the Rhizome interview

Just a few points that jumped out at me while I was reading through
the interview:

First of all, I think Feedback sounds like an excellent exhibition
and I also think the coupling of recent work and older, yet related
work is great. It puts new media art in a realistic, much needed art
historical context which is definitely a necessary step in de-
marginalizing new media art.

However, although I hope to be proven wrong, I'm not thoroughly
convinced that it's going to have that effect on people. One thing
that is not mentioned in the interview, that I think an exhibition
like this may point out, is the fact that more or less all art is
"responsive" in some sense and that instead of using responsiveness
to set itself apart from other forms of art, new media uses it to
highlight it's relation to other forms of art. This is just a
suggestion. I'm just throwing it out there and hopefully it will
generate some interesting debate. But if we accept this point, then
what is it in new media that sets it apart. For there is definitely
something.

Now I'm going to start talking about stuff I've talked about before.
I think it's the coded aspect of the work and although we can not say
that all new media artwork is coded in the sense of being programmed
in a programming or scripting language (work produced in Photoshop
isn't exactly "coded" in the sense that I'm using the term), I get
the feeling that new media art in general is becoming more and more
code-based. More and more artists are moving beyond the capabilities
of available software packages and therefore require custom code to
produce their work.

Now I want to quote Christiane Paul. In the interview she states
that, "As long as we do not understand the language of new media as
we understand the language of painting and video, this art form will
not be integrated in the traditional art world."

So what is it in the "language of new media" that we (or they) don't
understand. I get the feeling that we're constantly being shown that
new media concepts aren't really that new. Yet, there is something
new about new media and there is a language that isn't understood by
the traditional art public and that language is not the presentation
of the work and it is not the code itself, but it is, I believe, IN
the code.

In 2002, Christiane Paul curated the CODeDOC exhibition on The
Whitney's ArtPort website. What I found really fascinating about it
was that it required that you click through the source-code of the
exhibited work before you got to actually view the work. Also, the
artists' comments on each others code was really good feature. If
there were more public discussion between artists on each other's
code, this might give the more traditional art public an opportunity
to learn about this mostly hidden language of new media. I don't
understand why more artists don't open-source their work. This is
what the world needs to develop a deeper understanding of what we're
doing.

Anyway, good interview on what sounds like a really good exhibition.
I'm glad to have Christiane, Jemima and Charlie on our side.

Pall Thayer

–
Pall Thayer
[email protected]

http://www.this.is/pallit