Notes toward an “Open” Conversation on New Media Art and Ending the Politics of Exile

Abstract

As a curator who works at the intersection of film and or New Media, and like anyone who works in a specific area for a period of time, I regularly come to question what lured me to the field. Medium has always been of interest to me, but I also believe that I came to this generic turf (oft considered a subfield of the visual arts) because of a certain sense of exile I felt when operating within the broader schema. By exile I refer to the sense of being an outsider. Coming from a film and visual arts background, I was not schooled within the conventional mold of an historical discourse (although this has changed through self-education). Indeed, influential media curators from Steve Dietz to Sarah Cook, a colleague who co-runs the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB) email list-have observed that new media is like visual art, but with noted differences. The emphasis on processes and networks has been considered divergent or separate from the museological objecthood often theorized in historical discourse. As culture continues to subsume dividends, there evolves a narrative that equally encompasses the travails of a Paris Hilton sex tape and the work of famous YouTube artists such as Marisa Olson and Ryan Trecartin (who directly critique that narrative). Bearing this in mind, I find myself scratching my head at the continued historical subdivisions of so-called Art. My experience at international symposia suggests that the construct of media history in academic discourse has been arced around an obsession with reconciling the relationship between and technology for an audience with so-called high art concerns. To the younger generation of curators: media seems to speak from a position of lack. I refer to lack in the postcolonial sense of the word-a discourse I believe I am well versed in. It is a lack that is built on an Orientalist politics of outright exclusion, based on a very didactic and diametric fear of the Other. For so-called contemporary new media artists and curators, this apparent lack seems all but imagined. We are in control of our fate. Our destiny. What was once our exile is now our source of empowerment. Not tied to binding contracts with private gallery owners, the world as manifest through virtual and cross-embedded screens is our platform, our all-embracing oyster. Why do we need an inherent predisposition that continues to define a narrative of struggle for artists with media-led practices? A narrative that continues to propagate the notion that medium-led practices are held in a separate light from the broader canon of the visual arts and culture? Isn't it anachronistic? The past three decades have materialized in significant ways. We have witnessed the birth of electronic and media departments within universities, as well as international conference series on the subject. They have proliferated in tandem with global capital. But, when culture becomes remixed and hyperlinked, labels become contestable. The capitalization of the words Arts and Electronic Art, for instance, are by their very nature framing devices initiated and applied by an outdated historical movement, whose vernacular has since become especially directed toward a select group of self-subscribing individuals. I would like to take this opportunity to be as polemical as possible. I would like to provoke the thought that these terms and constructs (for example, Art Histories, Electronic Art, New Media) are self-constricting and exiled formations or spaces. These strictures must be shifted to encompass and enable a more fluid formation for the creation of a broader schema. This may be a written or unwritten history, but whatever the case, it must enable a more malleable and open frame for the appropriation of media-based technology and its relationship to visual culture. I know that I, and the many artists I work with, would like to stop living in self-fulfilling exile and self-marginalization. …