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Guest Column: When "New Media Art" Loses Its Prefix

Renown curator Domenico Quaranta explains why “new media art” is simply art now.

Merce Cunningham in collaboration with John Cage, Stan VanDerBeek, Nam June Paik, Variations V, 1966. Courtesy of the Cunningham Dance Foundation.

Once upon a time there was the sixties. Extraordinary years, which laid the foundations for most of the art around today. Years in which artists, freed from the restrictions of formalism, began working with everything they could get their hands on: archived documents, organic materials, photographs, video devices, and the first computers. They defined new forms of art, and often bound themselves to a new brand of formalism—Video Art, Computer Art…—artists worked on the specific characteristics of their medium, addressing that medium.

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Video Art went on to follow the destiny we all know: after a brief spell of incubation, during which video was deemed "the vacation of art," it became a fully-fledged art medium, and started being used by artists who did not view themselves as “video artists.” Even those who first donned the title of Video Art Curator began questioning whether the term "Video Art" had any meaning beyond a mere classification of materials. Now the term is only used nostalgically, but video is ubiquitous.

Digital media were a different story. Computer Art, after a promising debut with exhibitions like “Computer-Generated Pictures,” staged in 1965 by the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, and “Cybernetic Serendipity,” opened in 1968 at the ICA in London—retired to the labs it had come out of. The medium was still too complex and inaccessible for artists without particular technical skills to manipulate it, and digital artists carved out a comfortable niche for themselves, working in close contact with technicians, scientists, and engineers. The decision to engage in art "with a prefix" became a survival strategy, with artists holed up in "peer" communities to continue experimenting without running the risk of over-simplifying things. Companies and institutions started to offer lab facilities and awarded prizes, and the first international festivals and conferences came into being: Siggraph, Ars Electronica, etc. Even when digital media managed to put in an appearance at traditional art venues (like Documenta 6, or the 1986 Venice Biennale), those involved found it hard to view this as anything but an exceptional, one-off thing, and to envisage a confident encounter with contemporary art.

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The world of New Media Art thus grew and firmed up, and when in the mid 90s, thanks to the advent of the web and the explosion of so-called consumer IT, the medium finally became accessible to all, this parallel art world was stronger and more solid than ever before. In this context the phenomenon of net.art emerged to play a formidable role, historically speaking, despite the fact that it perhaps never came to full fruition. What it brought to the world of "New Media"—up till that time dominated by buzzwords like "interactive," "multimedia," and "virtual"—was critical culture, the ironic eye of an avant-garde movement, political activism, conceptual play and a healthy disregard for pixel poisoning (the New Media version of Duchamp's "turpentine poisoning"). Net.art managed to bring digital media into the ring with contemporary art, and lay the basis for a dialogue. I have never viewed New Media Art as an avant-garde movement, but I have no doubt that net.art was. Not incidentally, the big museums—from Guggenheim to SFMoMA—began courting net.art like never before.

In other words, net.art managed to bridge that great cultural divide between what Lev Manovich in a 1996 essay called "Duchamp Land" and "Turing Land" 1. At the same time, however, all the emphasis on the internet as the new forum for art, and the anti-establishment (and anti-market) stance of the first net.art led it to view the advances of the art world somewhat ironically, if not with open disdain. Which was surely, in part, responsible for its eventual demise.

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As for the world of New Media Art, there is no doubt that it is now doing better than ever before. And this is a good thing. Digital media have not lost their potential for risk-taking, and there is still ground-breaking work being done that can only exist "at the edge of art," to quote the title of a great book by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito 2. For this reason, it is a good thing that there continues to be a kind of "no-man's land" for experimentation, inhabited by specialists, alien to market and product logic, stimulating production of and debate on a form of art that cannot or does not want to conform to these rules: an ecosystem in which digital media research can develop free of any kind of restriction.

What I protest against, and what many artists, critics, and curators have protested against before me, is that transfers from one world to the other are still so rare, and so difficult to achieve; that the audiences of the two spheres are still so different, even though the art itself is often culturally very similar; that those who write about contemporary art know nothing about New Media Art, while those who write about New Media Art hardly ever do so in a contemporary art journal, and that an artist with five Transmediale and four Ars Electronica appearances under his or her belt, as well as years of experience, but without at least one solo show in a private gallery, is viewed as a new arrival.

And that we talk about New Media Art, when we could simply talk about art. Because when all is said and done, this is the point: in the last fifteen years, New Media Art has lost its prefix. Even when it is highly self-referential and technical, the popularity of the medium makes its technical feats appreciable to even a lay public. Unfortunately—or fortunately—the computer has become almost a household appliance. We might not be able to identify the heating element, but we all know how to navigate the web. What's more, the pervasive nature of the medium goes hand in hand with its ability to influence our present and condition our future; a present and future that few artists know how to decode as lucidly as new media artists.

A longer version of this text has been published in: D. Quaranta, Y. Bernard (eds.), “Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age”, exhibition catalogue. FPEditions, Brescia 2008. Translated from Italian by Anna Rosemary Carruthers.

1 Lev Manovich, "The Death of Computer Art", 1996 [revised 2001].
2 Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art, Thames & Hudson, London – New York 2006.

Domenico Quaranta is an art critic and curator. His previous publications include Gamescenes: Art in the Age of Videogames (2006, co-edited with Matteo Bittanti) and Media, New Media, Postmedia (2010). He curated various shows, including “Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age” (2008, with Yves Bernard) and “Playlist: Playing Games, Music, Art” (2009 – 2010). He is the founding Director of the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts and a co-founder of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age.