Dear All,
Thanks for this Roger. Of course I fully support your
statement. And I would like to add to it.
- Isn't it the other way around ? We don't think we have
masterpieces in new media art because the (old) works are
not shown and barely preserved ? When was a Rembrandt
considered a masterpiece ? He may have been a successful
artist of his time but that is different from producing
masterpieces, right ?
- I may be terribly old fashioned and not enough post modern
but I do believe that some of the new media art works have
an aesthetic quality beyond any tech turn point or social
breakthrough or whaterver. Moreover, I believe some works
are also key when they still have an aesthetic interest even
when the technology they were built/created with has become
trivial. The question then is what am I looking at when I
interact with them : my memory of my first emotion or the
possibility of a renewed emotion (or intellectual pleasure
to make it wider) ?
- I do agree with Roger, we need to combine art
history/science history/technology history/social history
and probably much more.... which is precisely what is done
by big museums like Le Louvre about the artifacts they
collect, right ?
By the way, Roger, I think we started using the terminology
"key works" and listing some art works we thought belongued
to the category during the week seminar we did at Les Treilles.
http://olats.org/projetpart/treilles/mono_index.php
Annick
P.S. I apologize, I haven't read the book yet, still waiting
it crosses the Atlantic to reach my mailbox !
Le 10/07/14 22:04, roger malina a écrit :
> Rick
>
> on page 26 of the book ( http://re-collection.net/ ) in chapter 2 that
> you authored
> you make the flat statement:
>
> " A somewhat smaller problem confronting preservation is that new
> media art has no universally recognised
> "masters' "masterworks' or 'movements'. There are artists who have
> been exhibited more than others
> but there is no Rembrandt of New Media art'- as you point out this has
> significant impact on conservation
> and archiving strategies that are elaborated in chapter 5, 9 and 13
> and feeds into your social memory theme
>
> in a meeting in holland in 1996 i think we had a meeting of a number
> of people including jurgen claus,otto piene
> annick bureaud and others and we hashed this 'are there masterpieces
> of new media art' topic and
> agreed that there were however key works that somehow in our memory
> were turning points- annick
> already to her watching charlotte morman levitating during art
> transitions at mit , but as someone
> who has served on numerous ars electronica and other juries i can
> remember the delight we had when
> works like rokeby's "very nervous sytem', sommerer.mignoneau
> interactive plants, char davies ephemere,
> kac's genesis, jeffrey shaw's legible city just to name a few emerged
> in the exhibition landscape
>
> one of the interesting aspects of new media art it seems to me is that
> the works cross link in
> the history of art, the history of technology and the history of
> science so that a key work can
> be remembered because it broke a technical impediment and led to
> artists mastery over medium=
> certainly in shaw's legible city, the aha was the break from the
> keyboard interface and the idea of bicycling
> around a virtual space-if you think of much of the key work by the
> vasulkas= the achievement is a combination
> of key work in art and key work in interactive technologies- similarly
> oron catts and iona zurr's semi living
> worry dolls - are interesting both because of their place in art
> history but also in the cultural appropriation of science
>
> in some cases the key work that innovative technologically at the time
> gets overtaken because the
> technology is superceded - the kinect and wii make irrelevant to some
> extent some of the key techological
> aspects of early key works= as annick noted she is working on the
> history of art and the french minitel
> which the internet made obsolete as a technical solution but that
> doesnt mean that that key minitel art work isnt
> still significant in the history ofart/science/tech and certainly in
> our social memory of the times those works are still important to
> archive
>
> i think the concept of key works rather than masterpieces is
> consistent with out post-modern non canon building sensibilities
> and can provide guidance to conservator and curators on which work to
> archive first- and that this needs to be in
> the framework of the history of art+science+technology not just the
> history of art - this is problematical of course- in
> san francisco the computer history museum, the SF museum of modern art
> and the academy of sciences have
> curators formed in very different ways, and art historians or curators almost
> never talk to science historians or technology historians and curators
>
> roger malina
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