automaticupdatediscussion

Automatic Update Discussion

I imagine some of us might have run into the discussion surrounding the planning of the Automatic Update exhibition at MoMA... In light of the conversation about the nature of new media this morning (and Sarah Cook's involvement in the online discussion) I thought I'd pass along some of the links and comments on some of the mailing lists that everyone may not have seen...

http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/automatic_update/index.html

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As an artist who started working with technology in the 1970's, then worked

with network technologies in the 1980's and started to use the web from the

early 1990's I can say that the dot com thing was not on my radar when I

started to work with the web. I was aware at the time that some people I

knew were trying to position themselves for what they thought might be

something pretty big, but most of those people were involved in ISP startups

or in institutional contexts. They were rarely artists.

I think that most of the artists at that time engaging with those media were

in a pretty similar situation to me and coming at it in a similar manner,

although their individual ethical and social outlooks obviously meant their

agendas and objectives were distinct. I was not thinking the web would

become this huge thing involving large amounts of money. Microsoft had not

yet released Explorer and the Google people were, I guess, still in school.

As for the death of net.art issue, that only concerns a particular group of

artists who conceived of networked art in a very particular way, at a

particular time, and who self-identified themselves as a group. The value of

the work of these artists, individually and collectively, has been well

documented. That many of them consider what they did then to be of only an

historic nature now is fine. That is their right and I would agree that the

work they did and the way they did it is a thing of the past. However, that

does not mean that networked art is dead. Far from it. It seems alive and

kicking to me, with exciting new artists appearing all the time. Most

recently I saw some wonderful work by a young Mexican artist, Eugenio

Tiscalli.

Regards

Simon Biggs

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hi all

Thanks for your thoughts thus far... what seems interesting about

this exhibition is how little of it is actually about the net at all

(never mind the dotcom boom and the death, or not, of online art

activity)... and if MoMA is rewriting history (which I don't think

they are), I'm not sure to whose agenda. (They're not crediting

dotcom boom to a rise in net art, but to a rise in technology-based

arts, of which net art is one, which this show seems to leave out).

To be frank, on first glance at the website, I can't see anything

which ties these five installation works together, with the films,

and with the 'shorts' programme (and the 'artist and the computer'

section which also appear to be screening based, a mix of animation,

film and video... a bit like a OneDotZero programme, but with better

quality work, though not necessarily a stronger curatorial thread. I

would argue that very few of the artists in the 'Artist and the

computer' section identify themselves with the field of new media art

at all - by dint of the fact many of these works have been seen at

places like the Tate). The presence of anything net is their

del.icio.us links, so I'm not sure there will be an interface for the

web in the physical show at all.

Is it simply a 'range of newly invented art forms' at the expense of

any history or theme - aesthetic, political, economic or otherwise -

to bind them? Sorry if that seems overly harsh (I am in extra-

critical writing mode at the moment!). Is 'ambivalence to art'* a

defining characteristic of new media art? That could be a very

interesting debate!

Also, not to be pedantic, but the link says 'view the online

exhibition', which I think is a bit generous, as the website -- super

cool looking in a retro Walker Art Center kind of way ;-) -- is more

of an online catalogue, with links to the artists sites, than an

actual exhibition (i.e. Paul Pfeiffer's work is not online). Does it

matter?

*the marketing text on the website reads:

Now that "new media" excitement has waned, an exhibition that

illuminates the period is timely. Automatic Update is the first

reassessment of its kind, reflecting the artists' ambivalence to art,

revealed through the ludicrous, comical, and absurd use of the latest

technologies.

http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/automatic_update/index.html

I'll drop an email to Barbara and invite her to comment - especially

if you all want to start a list of questions (she's not subscribed to

the list at the moment).... meantime your perspectives are very

welcome of course.

Sarah [Cook]

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Hi everyone,

as far as I know -- and I may be wrong -- this exhibition actually is a 'collection show,' featuring the new media works in MoMA's collection. These shows are often / usually called 'Recent Acquisitions' (not a very sexy concept to market). I think in this case a concept has been wrapped around a show of collection works, which is apparently leading to confusion.

All best,

C.

[Christiane Paul]

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Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:08:27 -0500 (CDT)

From: Patrick Lichty <voyd@voyd.com>

Subject: Re: <nettime> no comments?

This is my draft-in progress on the exhibition.

Please mind the missing references. They aren't entered yet, and the text is

posted only for timeliness.

In regards to the upcoming "Automatic Update" exhibition at the

MoMA NY, there seems to be a great deal of question about a number

of issues. These are; the re-writing of history, the relevance of

net-based art, the perception of popular culture, and the role of the

New Media movement/Genre in the contemporary scene. What seems to be

a key dialectic about the state of New Media as force in contemporary

art derives from two poles; one from the MoMA colophon about the

Automatic Update show;

The dot-com era infused media art with a heady energy. Hackers,

programmers, and tinkerer-revisionists from North America, Europe,

and Asia developed a vision of art drawn from the technology of

recent decades. Robotic pets, PDAs, and the virtual worlds on the

Internet provoked artists to make works with user-activated components

and lo-res, game-boy screens. Now that "new media" excitement has

waned, an exhibition that illuminates the period is timely. Automatic

Update is the first reassessment of its kind, reflecting the artists'

ambivalence to art, revealed through the ludicrous, comical, and

absurd use of the latest technologies. [1]

The other comes from the near-historical perception of the New Media

community as “art ghetto”, residing in festivals/enclaves such

as DEAF, ISEA, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH [2], and others. As an

aside, this writer would like to remind the MoMA that there have

been other retrospectives of New Media [3], but not of this profile.

What is ironic about Automatic Update is that it suggests that New

Media’s time has all but gone, and that New Media artists have

ambivalence to art in general. Perhaps this is evident from Roland

Penrose’s assertion of Rauschenberg’s heritage to Dada [4], and

Rauschenberg/Kluver’s role in constructing key discursive threads

in contemporary art through Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT)

[5] that would spawn many tech/art event/sites, including New Media.

The questions posed by Automatic Update are many. First, is New

Media a genre that is quickly being assimilated/deconstructed

by the contemporary, or is its death, to paraphrase Twain’s

commentary on his obituary in the NY Times, “highly exaggerated”?

Secondly, does this body or work aptly represent the “waning”

dot-com/New Media era, and does it represent the material/info

culture that is reflected in the work? What are the linkages between

the assertions of interactivity and response as absurdist reactions

through technological art?

Before continuing this analysis of the exhibition, I want to frame

the argument of this essay more explicitly. On the CRUMB New Media

discussion list, Christiane Paul noted that most of the works in

this exhibition are from internal collections [6], which is a point

well taken. Even with this taken into account, there seems to be a

dys-connection between the absurdist practices of the artists in

context with how they fit with other contemporary threads, the role

of interactivity in the exhibition, and the locating of curatorial

focus in context of the conceptual grounding of the show in terms

of Automatic Update being representative of the “dot.com” era,

which apparently is congruent with that of the historical framing of

New Media. Lengthy sentences aside (which, by the way, coincide with

early New Media works like Amerika’s Grammatron [7] and Davis’

world's first collaborative sentence[8]), my analysis is not so much a

critique, but query into the dialogue between the contemporary and New

Media worlds and how their memetic trends translate.

First of all, let us look at some dates where we may frame some

of the considerations of art terminology and economic trends. The

dot.com crash can be located in March/April 2000, when the tech-heavy

NASDAQ stock exchange dropped from the 4300’s to the 1400’s [9].

Conversely, the beginning locates somewhere in the mid-90’s, with

the 1995 IPO of companies like Netscape. This coincides with the rise

of the Web in 1994, and the founding of Rhizome.org in 1996 by Tribe &

Galloway [10], which also follows with the online publishing of many

of Lev Manovich’s essays that would become The Language of New Media

[11] in 2001. If Automatic Update is loosely suggesting the era of New

Media to be approximately 1996-2000, then it may also be ironic that

Manovich’s book may be an encapsulation of the time, being released

the year after the genre’s apex.

However, pre-Web, (let’s say, 1995) there was the era of Cyberarts,

as this was the common parlance for digital/computational art. For

example, Compu- Serve Magazine published an issue in 1994 on the

subject [12], and the creation of Mondo 2000 in 1989 [13] to the

staff’s proclaimed “end of cyberpunk” in 1993 with the release

of the Billy Idol album (or possibly the founding of WIRED Magazine).

The pattern that emerges is one from ’89-’94 of a bohemian

cyberpunk culture and related arts based on digital technology to one

that became more mass-cultural and linked to capital with the creation

of the Web and its cooptation by business. What seems to be evident

with in the decade of the 90’s and the emergence of the implied era

of New Media is the shift from Cyber to Wired.

If Automatic Update is truly a reflection on the era of New Media

and its cultural issues, then perhaps the greatest singular driving

force of the dot.com boom is unquestionably the rise of the World Wide

Web, and not robotic pets (the Sony Aibo robotic dog was introduced

in 1999 and Furby in December 1998), the cultural context for New

Media must be heavily tied to the Web. In the years stated here, there

were shows like net.condition (ZKM, 1999), Art Entertainment Network

(Walker Art Center, 2000), and the Whitney Biennial 2000 for which

web-based art figured prominently. In addition, during the renovation

of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s galleries in 2000-2002,

they hosted a partially net-based gallery during that time. Therefore,

from a formal perspective, at least three or four years of the “New

Media” art era of the dot.com boom saw some of the greatest activity

in web-based art.

What is ironic in the online exhibition is that there are no web-based

works online, only some net-based networking through de.licio.us,

and the only piece that seems to directly acknowledge the browser

is the video by PaperRad, Welcome to my Home Page. For that matter,

23 of the 25 works featured in the online documentation are largely

video-based. If one considers events like the “Sins of Change:

Media Arts in Transition” New Media summit (2000), which was the

successor of a similar video art summit nearly a decade and a half

prior, a key irony is the expression of waning media/media becoming

canonized in terms of a canonized, or stable, medium (video). As an

aside, the Automatic Update page borrows stylistically from late

90’s Walker Art Center Gallery 9 New Media exhibitions, including

Art Entertainment Network, which was launched in conjunction with the

Sins of Change summit. From this, the question arises as to whether

institutional expression of media art forms can only come through the

translation into institutionally-supported media, such as video. It

reinforces the New Media community’s dialogue as to whether museums

will be able to support Web-based or otherwise more “formal”

types of work from the genre, or whether the equivalent of video

documentation will be de rigeur for the time being. While vaguely

disappointing, it is not far from this author’s contention that,

due to the ephemerality of technology and technical upkeep required

maintain most New Media works, the key archive of New Media art will

probably be the book.

Another aspect of New Media that is often at odds with the

sensibilities of the American museum patron is that of Interactivity.

It is no surprise that of the 25 works documented, only 2 are

interactive. While it is not surprise, it is at odds with the

curatorial vision’s emphasis on interactivity, and with the

pervasiveness of interactivity in much, if not most, New Media. This

stems from two factors; one, the traditional gallery practice of

“not touching” the work, which is a known issue, but a complex

one that is beyond a full discussion in this essay. Secondly, and

this is an issue I intend to write about more fully at another

time, are the issues of time and engagement, what I call the

“time-function”.

What I mean by this is that for different venues, audiences expect

different slippages in time-based work for different contexts and

genres. In the case of the video festival, work must have the rhythm

and span more attuned for entertainment, i.e. shorter form, quicker

pace, etc. There are, of course, exceptions where the framing of

festival screenings specifically include experimental formats, but

this commentary is aimed at broader contexts. Moving on, the gallery

permits slower slippages. The time flow can be slower than the

festival, as the patron can engage with partial attention, contrasted

with that of the “captive” in the theater seat. As long as there

is the perception of change between glances, conversational pauses, or

sips of Chardonnay at the occasional vernissage, the temporal contract

is fulfilled. What is more problematic is the context of the Museum,

where the role of the time-based screen/projection work must fulfill

the dual role of Sublime/Static and Cinematic/Kinetic. It must be read

as a single image in Gladwellian “blink-time”, but then withstand

the engagement of longer timeframes. A key example of this effect is

Viola’s “The Passions”, where the figurative high-definition

video reads as late Renaissance painting, but also as protracted

cinema.

The challenge of the time-function in the museum context is where much

New Media fails to engage Contemporary Art audiences. Interactive

New Media, by and large, do not convey their intent iconically in a

blink. Much interactive New Media requires the direct dialogue with

the viewer through touch or motion over numbers of minutes in order

for the intent/content to reveal itself to the viewer. Interactivity

in the museum is often restricted to gesture. Therefore, because of

the “attendance” of interactor and support personnel to much New

Media work of the 1995-2000, as well as its modes of representation,

it would not be surprising to see little truly interactive New Media

in a larger museum context, even for a show reflecting on the genre.

In addition to the matters of time in the gallery, the issue of

cultural location in terms of time as era in context of Automatic

Update is an issue. Of interest is the inclusion of only 9 of 25

pieces from the 1995-2000 era, with Laurie Anderson’s 1986 video,

What You Mean, We? As part of the exhibition, Anderson’s piece,

although seminal, is curious because it neither takes place within

the implied New Media era nor reflects upon the specifics of the

rise of computational media art, as Anderson’s piece is clearly

about the 80’s art milieu and late-stage analog video technologies.

That leaves 15 of 25 works from the post dot.com boom era, given the

framing of reflection on the role of technology in contemporary art,

is appropriate for the exhibition.

What may be revealed in the works of Automatic Update is not a reflection

upon the “New Media era”, but a filtration of technological artworks through

US Contemporary Art agendas. This interface between art genres/communities

is important to understand the translation of works under differing

institutional contexts (museum/market/festival/academia) that are more

specific to the given bodies of work. For example, many of the artists in

the show (Arcangel, Lucas, July, PaperRad, Rist) at the time of the works’

creation is a juxtaposition of the creation time of the work with the early

2000’s obsession with youth/young artists. The obsession with young artists

is rife in the art fairs, with personal experience at the 2007 BridgeArt

Chicago, Basel, and others, and has been shown in recent years with the

apparent doubling of Boomer geriatric anxiety, the rise of Millennial youth

artists, and the denial of acknowledging mortality in the US through mass

culture.

The other art-meme evident in the Automatic Update exhibition is

that of the prevalent nature of the Neo-Pop/Superflat movement

created in part by Murakami and his KaiKai Kiki stable (Nara, Mr.,

Aishima, Takano, and others). Huyghe et al’s No Ghost, Just a Shell

demonstrates the Western/ Eastern dialogue in technological art, as

Murakami employed digital techniques to update Warhol’s Factory

concept through contemporary Japanese terms. Conversely, Huyghe’s

project juxtaposes virtual identity, intellectual property, and the

post-millennial abjection through Murakami’s “poku” (pop/otaku)

lens of the “Kawaii” (cute) character of Annli. Anime, as a

prevalently youth culture, although it does span well into late

Boomer- aged culture in the States, and far beyond that in Japan)

reiterates the desire for endless youth or even childhood in both

cultures. Murata’s “Melter 2” video also shows similar motifs

in color and form to Murakami’s flowers, without anthropomorphizing

them, but the influences/concurrence of styles is clear.

Some of the more interesting intersections of US and Japanese

Neo-Pop, youth, and techno-cultures are in the area of 8-Bit culture

(like New Media, another oddly named genre). Ramocki’s documentary,

8-Bit, along with PaperRad’s 414-3-RAVE-95 that show at least the

Gen Y nostalgia for 80’s digital video game culture. The nostalgia

mentioned here relates to the fact that many of the artists working

in 8-Bit genres (Arcangel, Neill, Slocum) are just old enough to

have taken part in the first wave of the Nintendo culture. Nintendo

is probably the key term here, as while PaperRad mentions their

intent of using machines that they can have complete control over

so that artists’ intents override any external programmers’[],

the cultural resonances of 8-Bit override technical formalism.

G4 television is releasing an animated series for young adult

demographics entitled “Code Monkeys”, along with mass-media

influences in design from both the 8-Bit and Neo-Pop influences.

And lastly, with Arcangel’s Nintendo Duck Hunt hack, I Shot Andy

Warhol, the historical linkages are made explicit, from Pop to US

8-Bit Neo Pop, and thus through color styles and linkage to a gaming

“poku” mentality back to an intertextual conversation with

Murakami & KaiKai Kiki. The importance of these linkages is that

my assertion that Automatic Update is only superficially about New

Media, but actually it illustrates the art world’s ambivalence to

the ongoing procession of technological forms and methods, as opposed

to New Media artists’ ambivalence to art.

This ambivalence, not by the artists as much as the curators, is

part of the ongoing dialogue to understand the role of digital

technology and its intricacies in a contemporary scene still dominated

by Pop/Neo-Pop and the Sublime. The fractured dialogue between

cultural clades is well illustrated through a personal experience.

is encapsulated in a personal experience. In Fall of1999, I was

given a Best in Show in a regional exhibition in Northeast Ohio for

a large mixed-media digital print based on recontextualized Japanese

pornography. When awards were given, and I stepped down, the curator

proclaimed to the audience, "By the way, the Best in Show was done

with a computer!" For the next three hours, almost every conversation

entailed analogies of programs and oil paints, and little about the

content at all. But this is a relatively universal experience for the

digital, let alone New Media artist, and endemic of the era.

What is evident in Automatic Update is a quirky show on "artists

and computers", and one that does not engage the issues and genres

related to new media, despite its linkage through the mention of

the “waning” of the era. The idiosyncratic Walker-esque design,

combined with ironic, Neo-Pop/ 8-Bit sensibilities with the focus on

'younger artists' is in line with contemporary culture's Nintendo

nostalgia. Automatic Update does try to address a desire to understand

how artists could make use computers to make contemporary art,

and address that to an audience (MoMA) who (apologetically) has a

large non/pre-digital audience. The mass audience is wrestling with

contemporary art/entertainment issues in the mass culture, and are

still unreconciled with Duchamp, let alone Lippard, and how that could

possibly relate to technology or even personal computers.

As mentioned earlier, Automatic Update is a Contemporary Art show,

and not one that addresses the New Media art movement its cultural

specificities and formalist concerns. The issues here are ones that

stem from Duchamp. Paik, Rauschenberg, and include Anderson. Actually,

they seem to be more akin to Murakami, Warhol, and Nauman. as

opposed to Manovich, Csuri, Kluver, Ascott, Davies, Verostko, Cosic,

Schwartz, et al. Again, as part of this conversation, Furthermore,

Whitney New Media curator Christiane Paul noted on the CRUMB New

Media Curating list that Automatic Update appears to be a show

compiled from the collection works from the MoMA. This may be just

the case, and as such, presents an interesting set of works in an odd

juxtaposition that illustrates the uneasy cultural dialogue about art

and technology, whether New Media has reached an apex, and what the

perceptual difference between practitioners, public, and institutions

regarding tech and art might be.

References

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9] NASDAQ charts online,

http://dynamic.nasdaq.com/dynamic/IndexChart.asp?symbol=IXIC&desc=NASDAQ

+Composite&sec=nasdaq&site=nasdaq&months=84

[10] http://www.boingboing.net/blogosphere.html

[13] http://www.totse.com/en/ego/literary_genius/mThe issue of

timeondo2k.html