Archive for the ‘new media’ tag
What happens when…
What happens when mid-career art stars suddendly discover the potential of the digital medium?
This question is rolling into my head since when I read, last week in Art Basel, a short article on The Art Newspaper, enthusiastically endorsing Thomas Ruff‘s recent series of prints, Zycles (2008 – 2009).
I already knew about David Hockney‘s even more enthusiastic praise of the virtues of the computer, but Ruff’s naive remake of the computer art of the Sixties put a new light on it. Nevertheless, I still don’t have any answer for my question – just many incongruous feelings. Can anybody help me?
More soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this funny quote by his majesty Hans Ulrich Obrist (about Hockney’s Photoshop paintings):
“I’ve never seen anything like it… At first I thought it was a painting. The more I examined it, the more I wasn’t sure.”
Damn, Mr. Obrist, Adobe Photoshop was first released in 1990. Where did you live in the last couple of decades?
DON’T SAY NEW MEDIA!
Domenico Quaranta, “DON’T SAY NEW MEDIA!”, in FMR Bianca, n° 5, Franco Maria Ricci, Bologna, December 2008, pp. 92 – 107.
“Don’t say new media – Say art!” Gazira Babeli
“Forget the new, drop the media, enjoy art.”1 Régine Debatty
Queste due citazioni, entrambe molto recenti, sono emblematiche per vari motivi. La prima è l’ammonizione con cui Gazira Babeli, un’artista che vive nel mondo sintetico di Second Life, accompagna la spettacolare punizione che infligge a chiunque osi pronunciare la parola “new media” davanti ai suoi lavori: un tornado che solleva per aria il nostro alter ego digitale, o avatar, finché quest’ultimo corregge il tiro, dicendo semplicemente “arte”. Régine Debatty è una critica d’arte di origine belga che ha raggiunto la celebrità grazie a un blog intitolato We Make Money Not Art, per poi stupire – e, in certi casi, contrariare – il suo pubblico spostando l’enfasi della sua indagine dalla tecnologia all’arte senza prefissi. I due commenti rivelano, innanzitutto, che esiste un’area, ambiguamente definita “New Media” o “New Media Art”, a cui sia Régine che Gazira sono ricondotte loro malgrado; un termine e un’area in cui forse, un tempo, si sono riconosciute, ma che ora non le soddisfa più.
Let’s get loud ! INTERVIEW WITH HELEN THORINGTON
Let’s get loud ! INTERVIEW WITH HELEN THORINGTON, DIRECTOR OF TURBULENCE.ORG
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 5, 2005, pp. 12 – 17, © Cluster 2005
They began with the radio, producing over 300 projects in 15 years. Then while it was still the dawn of a new genre, they started with net art. Today TURBULENCE.ORG has around eighty net projects running, many of these making history in net art. With an enthusiasm and energy that’s hard to compare, they continually enrich their collection, in which one of the most important and most visited blogs of those dedicated to the relationship between creativity and new technology can be accessed. It doesn’t have a physical space, but it doesn’t need one, considering it can boast to be one of the most interesting places on the web.
We asked the artist and co-director of Turbulence.org, HELEN THORINGTON, the projects backbone right from the start, to tell us the story, enlighten us on the structure and the problems it has had to face and to take a glimpse at what the future has in store.
WHAT KIND OF INTERACTION? Interview with Lev Manovich
WHAT KIND OF INTERACTION? Interview with Lev Manovich
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 3 (Interaction Design), Summer 2004, pp. 30 – 33. © Cluster 2004
«Today the interactive media asks us to click on an underlined phrase in order to pass to another one. We are asked to follow pre-programmed associations, that do and don’t exist, in other words [...] we exchange the mental structure of others with our own. [...] Interactive media asks us to identify ourselves with someone else’s mental structure.»
In 1999 with these words Lev Manovich closed the paragraph dedicated to the “myth of interactivity” in his book The Language of New Media. This affirmation purposely goes against a rather naive diffused enthusiasm regarding the potentials in digital media; however the questions brought up, aside from the controversy, are still now decisive: To what extent does the interactivity of new media limit as opposed to extend, our freedom of thought and action? To what extent does it contribute to forgetting the real interactive potentials of traditional media, that don’t perform by moving a joystick or clicking a link, but by writing text- that could be a book, film or a drawing- that we have before us? And how much does the unconditional exaltation of interactivity penalize the development of a true interaction between man and the machine, and between man and man through the machine?
