Hello again Yasminers,
The image that Jon has called up with 'Variable Media' seems like it resonates with Nake's definition of a collection of artworks that are fluid, ephemeral, and, at a more nuanced level, somewhat critical and political in their resistance to being managed (and classified) as fixed objects. Perhaps these works are artifacts of "wild media" as much as "variable media."
I think it is helpful to define and assert some essential characteristics of ...I'll just say new media... (such as ephemerality, variability, etc.) by way of informing the preservation of artworks made in those media because every seemingly objective preservation approach reflects some political world-view anyway. But - when it comes to practical preservation as much as theory - perhaps we would do well to avoid an overly-essentialist assertion that every artwork made in the same media shares the same social agenda. Every artwork within a shared medium inherits something from that medium, it's true, but within that, there is a lot of room for, well, variety and for intentionality.
Jon and I argue in our book for a variable media approach to preserving new media artworks, but we allow for the fact that - at the level of the individual artwork - some artists will make works that resist or ignore those principles. For instance, we advocated recording and (generally) following the artist's intent for a work, even if that artist asserts that their variable media work may *not* be changed or re-made in any way; that it be fixed like an object. Of course the trade-off to that choice is that their work will live a short life (again, this is also what I read in Nake's post) and will have to live on through documentation alone. That should be made explicit, but it's still a valid artistic choice.
So too I wonder, Jon, about characterizing only wild media as variable media. Television was quickly subsumed under corporate domination, but not at the very start. Farnsworth's experiments in San Franscisco in the '20's held as much promise for subverting social norms as the Internet - for a short while. Farnsworth was even, like an artist, self-conscious about it. When asked when he would "see some money come from this invention", Farnsworth transmitted an image of a dollar bill (!) And some media go back and forth in their mainstream/wild roles - the Internet was the tightly controlled tool of the military and academia (1969-1990ish) for as long as it's been the new wild west of media (1990ish-2014.)
Lastly (since I'm having too much fun here), terms are important because they define communities and and frame what constitutes a subject worthy of study (see related discussion currently on the CRUMB list.) "New media" still has it's role as a widely-understood and broad category (Jon and I use it throughout our book including the cover :) and, in addition to debating whether "new media" should be replaced by computational- or variable media, let me add my concern that all of those will be replaced by "contemporary art" and the whole fascinating history of new media art will be discursively swept under the museum rug.
Richard Rinehart
---------------------
Director
Samek Art Museum
Bucknell University
---------------------
Lewisburg, PA, 17837
570-577-3213
http://galleries.blogs.bucknell.edu
---------------------
Re-Collection: Art, New Media, & Social Media
http://re-collection.net
On Jun 30, 2014, at 1:23 PM, roger malina wrote:
> Yasminers
>
> Just want to pick up Jon Ippplitos email ( hi Jon) and just re
> announce that the context for this discussion
> is the new book Jon and Rick Rinehart have just published
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Re-collection-Social-Memory-Leonardo-Series/dp/0262027003
>
> it is available in ebook for those of you who want to read it during
> this discussion.
>
> Also I want to thank the people who send self introduction emails- let
> me encourage all new subscribers
> to YASMIN to do this, at least if you do plan to send a post. Social
> media can be remarkably inpersonal.
>
> Also want to thank A Michael Noll and Frieder Nake for their posts on
> how they as pioneer artists in
> the new media field they view the issues of conservation and
> restoration of their own art work.
> Let me encourage other pioneers on the list to do the same ( hi ernest).
>
> Jon takes strong issue with my suggestion that the term "computational
> media' might be a better way to discuss
> the new media art that we are talking about- the term computational
> media is advocated by Noah Wladrup
> Fruin in his NEH/NEA/NSF funded report ( https://mediasystems.soe.ucsc.edu/ )
>
> Jon goes on:
>
> For me, the "new" in "new media" refers not to the latest gizmos
> available now but to expressive technologies of any period that
> outpace their culture's ability to control them. The aesthetic
> application of optics in the fifteenth century destabilized the
> church's stranglehold on orthodox representation, just as the creative
> use of packet switching in the twentieth subverted a network
> originally intended for command and control. By contrast, television
> was never "new media" because its rollout was carefully controlled by
> the reigning media monopolies.
>
> and hammers it in with:
>
> This is where I think the term "computational media" doesn't help
> matters, as to me it implies a mechanistic essence that ignores the
> de-centered social networks that are the most important product of
> contemporary media from Snapchat to Second Life. Conserving
> "computational media" sounds like a matter of getting a bunch of
> computer science PhDs in a room to create the ultimate emulator. Yet
> maintaining software and hardware alone would do nothing to preserve
> Access Grid performances, World of Warcraft guilds, or user
> contributions to websites like net.flag or PostSecret.
>
> Ok i will beat a retreat on substituting the term computational media
> for new media, but I do think like Jon does that terminologies are
> important
> and that the term 'new media' has become unhelpful ( just as the prior
> terms of electronic art, computer art, interactive art, net art have
> become superceded)
> ( we even have a program on Emerging Media whatever that is here at
> the University of Texas, Dalls -- well social media and cell phones I
> guess which
> is robust theoretical concept)
>
> certainly in our community of practice we now see digital media co
> existing with wetware, bio art, eco art- but not all of them are
> computational-
> hence i am not convince the term computational art is not helpful as
> it identifies a key conservation and restoration issue that relates to
> computation technologies- which are not shared with wet ware and bio
> art, or maybe overal.
>
> of course Johannes Goebel, founding director of EMPAC, in his CRUMB
> post reposted on YASMIN
>
> http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/2014/06/yasmindiscussions-fwd-crumb-post.html
>
> attacks more virulently the idea of situation new media in the domain
> of fine arts and its institutions ( as the Liverpool Declaration
> tends to do http://www.mediaarthistory.org/declaration ) arguing that
> the right frame of reference is time based arts and performing arts
> whose institutions archive and restore in very different ways than do
> fine arts institutions
>
>
> Jon's conclusion is:
>
> . So in Re-collection Rick and I have chosen a different term that
> suggests a proactive approach to ephemerality: variable media. Here
> the idea is to work with those involved in a work's creation to
> identify possible ways it can successfully transform to accommodate
> future changes in technology and social context. We use the term
> "variable media" to apply to more than computational media, because we
> think the same general preservation strategies that work for net art
> and iPad apps can apply to performance, wetware, and installation art
> as well.
>
> with the proposal that the term "variable media" bridges not only
> computational media, but wet ware, performance and installation
>
> and in particular a goal of working with the artist to identify what
> is to be conserved and how ( let me encourage again the pioneers on
> this
> list to chime in)
>
> i would think that from the point of view of a conservator or restorer
> of work there needs to be some kind of clear terminology
> that both frames the conceptual approach of conservation ( eg what is
> it that we are trying to conserve the documentation about the work as
> Nake talks about, or the documentation produced by the work as Noll
> says, or the time based experience as Johannes argues ) and that the
> current terminological confusion in our community is unhelpful
>
> death to "new media art" welcome to computational art, variable media.....
>
> roger
> --
>
> Re: [Yasmin_discussions] ART, NEW MEDIA, AND SOCIAL MEMORY
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm really looking forward to hearing the perspectives of folks on
> this list about the risk of obsolescence that endangers so many forms
> of contemporary creativity. But first I have to offer a special thanks
> to Roger Malina for inviting Rick and me to this discussion. Roger has
> worked hard to keep this issue on the frontburner of our field for the
> past decade, and the continued pressure he has exerted has made the
> doom of our collective enterprise a bit less inevitable.
>
> And now I'll repay my debt to Roger by taking issue with him (or more
> properly with the report he cites):
>
> Roger wrote:
>> a recent report chaired by Noah Wardrip-Fruin [uses] the term 'computational media' which i think is
>> a much better term than 'new media" !!
> I like "computational media" better than "digital media." As Rick
> Rinehart points out in a chapter of Re-collection called "Variability
> Machines," Babbage's original computer wasn't digital--in fact it
> wasn't even electrical. Yet while they are meant to be more
> future-proof than the apparently relative term "new media," I believe
> these phrases throw the baby out with the bathwater by focusing on the
> gadgets instead of their revolutionary implications.
>
> For me, the "new" in "new media" refers not to the latest gizmos
> available now but to expressive technologies of any period that
> outpace their culture's ability to control them. The aesthetic
> application of optics in the fifteenth century destabilized the
> church's stranglehold on orthodox representation, just as the creative
> use of packet switching in the twentieth subverted a network
> originally intended for command and control. By contrast, television
> was never "new media" because its rollout was carefully controlled by
> the reigning media monopolies.
>
> It makes no more sense to reduce new media to "computational media" or
> that hideous term "information and communication technologies" than it
> does to reduce the Renaissance to "optical and painterly technologies"
> or Impressionism to "brush art."
>
> Why does this matter? I think the answer is implicit in the
> "Envisioning the Future of Computational Media" report Roger cites.
> Noah and his co-authors identify the proliferation of these media
> across "video games, smartphone apps, ebooks, social media, and more,"
> and rightly tell us we have to interview creators if we want to
> understand the birth and therefore the continuing survival of each
> work:
>
>> Developing industry best practices around archiving current "closing kit" materials with third parties, expanding to include records of the development process....
>
> Importantly, the authors also point to the social context that is so
> critical for the development and sustenance of these works:
>
>> important work has been done by amateur archivists....The field must find ways to address often-ephemeral, but historically key, elements that exist "outside" computational media works, such as the work of fan and modification communities as well as marketing materials and critical reviews and responses....
>
> This is where I think the term "computational media" doesn't help
> matters, as to me it implies a mechanistic essence that ignores the
> de-centered social networks that are the most important product of
> contemporary media from Snapchat to Second Life. Conserving
> "computational media" sounds like a matter of getting a bunch of
> computer science PhDs in a room to create the ultimate emulator. Yet
> maintaining software and hardware alone would do nothing to preserve
> Access Grid performances, World of Warcraft guilds, or user
> contributions to websites like net.flag or PostSecret.
>
> Of course, the same ephemeral de-centering that makes new media
> revolutionary also makes them prone to obsolescence, as they slip
> through the traditional cultural institutions like water through a
> sieve. So in Re-collection Rick and I have chosen a different term
> that suggests a proactive approach to ephemerality: variable media.
> Here the idea is to work with those involved in a work's creation to
> identify possible ways it can successfully transform to accommodate
> future changes in technology and social context. We use the term
> "variable media" to apply to more than computational media, because we
> think the same general preservation strategies that work for net art
> and iPad apps can apply to performance, wetware, and installation art
> as well.
>
>> We can imagine a future in which authors can make citations to specific states of computational media works and readers can "follow" those citations to versions of the work, in the same state, running in emulation.
>
> Just as an aside, I recommend a protocol for this in the essay "Death
> by Wall Label" in Christiane Paul's book New Media in the White Cube
> and Beyond, mirrored here:
>
> http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/11.php#variabledates
>
> So do others on the list agree that we need to look beyond software
> and hardware to preserve contemporary creativity, or am I just making
> a fuss over semantics?
>
> jon
>
> ______________________________
> Jon Ippolito
>
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