DANUBE TELELECTURES - Archive entry No 3Mai 27, 2007 |
"Myths of Immateriality: Curating, Collecting and Archiving Media Art” Lectures by and debate with Christiane Paul and Paul Sermon |
During the last decades media art has grown to be the art of our time, though it has hardly arrived in our cultural institutions. The mainstream of art history has neglected developing adequate research tools for these contemporary art works, they are exhibited infrequently in museums and there are few collectors. Media art is hardly being archived and systematically preserved like ancient and traditional forms of art. This loss of data our society is facing because of the change in storage media and operational systems threatens to result in a total loss of our contemporary digital art. Which practices and strategies in the curating and documenting of media art do experts in the field suggest?
Interactive telematic art that defies a means of mechanical reproduction | |
 | Through descriptive accounts of my own arts practice, and that of other telematic artists, I will present the ephemeral dilemma interactive media arts often resides within. This work is frequently reliant on protocols and hardware that quickly become obsolete, leaving the art works built on these platforms in a redundant form; as a cultural memory, or a word-of-mouth recollection. Moreover, there is a public interactive element to this work that occurs in the technological and social context of the time. As audiences become more familiar with the ubiquity of technology the public perceptions and reactions to these artworks constantly change and are frequently understood by technological scrutiny rather than the theoretical and conceptual ideas implicit in the artwork. My own telematic art work attempts to transcend these problematic issues and exist as conceptual ideas or pieces that outlive the ‘shelf-life’ of the technology my installations rely on. Telematic Dreaming was produced 15 years ago, but is still being presented to this day, currently on show in Feedback at Laboral in Gijon, Spain. This is made possible because the installation itself is really no more than a conceptual system that relies on video projectors, cameras and mixers. Whilst projector and camera improvements will come and go, my concept will continue to utilise the basic of these technologies that essentially never change. The significance of Telematic Dreaming is its concept, which can be explained in a few sentences. This is ultimately the art work or story that gets passed on, making it possible to continually recreate the original installation. |
Paul SERMON is Media Artist and scientist at the University of Salford, UK. He studied BA Hon´s Fine Art degree under Professor Roy Ascott at The University of Wales, from September 1985 to June 1988. Post-graduate MFA degree at The University of Reading, England, from October 1989 to June 1991. Awarded the Prix Ars Electronica “Golden Nica” in the category of interactive art, for the hyper media installation “Think about the People now”, in Linz, Austria, September 1991. Worked as an Artist in Residence and produced the ISDN video conference installation “Telematic Vision” at the Center for Arts and Mediatechnology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, from February to November 1993. Received the “Sparkey Award” from the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles, for the telepresent video installation “Telematic Dreaming”, in June 1994. Reader in Creative Technology at the University of Salford, Research Centre for Arts & Design, Manchester, England, since June 2000. | |
The Myth of Immateriality -- Presenting & Preserving New Media | |
 | The process-oriented nature of the digital medium poses numerous challenges to the traditional art world, ranging from presentation to collection and preservation. The standards for presenting, collecting and preserving art have been tailored to objects for the longest time and few of them are applicable to new media works, which constitute a shift from object to process and substantially differ from previous process-oriented or dematerialized art forms. New media art seems to call for a distributed, "living" information space that is open to artistic interference -- a space for exchange, collaborative creation, and presentation that is transparent and flexible. In order to make a commitment to new media art, institutions need to develop alternative approaches to presentation, collection, documentation and preservation. Among the issues that will be discussed in the presentation are the inherent challenges that the digital medium poses to the existing art system; the ways in which the roles of artists, audiences, and curators are changed through digital culture and practice; as well as different models for presenting and preserving new media art. |
Christiane PAUL is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization and information resource dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts. She teaches as an adjunct in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Digital Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design and has lectured internationally on art and technology. Christiane Paul has participated in numerous panels on new media and presented at conference worldwide. | |
Archive entry No 3 | |||
DTL # 3 | Myths of Immateriality: Curating, Collecting and Archiving Media Art | Paul Sermon | |
Christiane Paul | |||
Paul Sermon & Christiane Paul | |||
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