The Computer and New Media Chapter 11 a Worlf of Arts

The following excerpt comes from the concluding chapter of my book Media, New Media, Postmedia, recently published in Italian by Postmediabooks, who kindly gave Rhizome permission to republish it in English language. The book is an attempt to analyze the electric current positioning of so-called "New Media Fine art" in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history.

The starting point of the book is that the label "New Media Art" does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed - as it usually is - as a unproblematic medium-based definition. On the contrary, a work of fine art - whether based on technology or not - is usually classed equally New Media Art when it is produced, exhibited and discussed in a specific "art world," the world of New Media Art. This fine art world came into being as a cultural niche in the Sixties and Seventies, and became a bona fide art world in the Eighties and Nineties, developing its own ways of product and distribution, and cultivating an thought of "art" that is completely different from that entertained past the contemporary art world. If you are familiar with Lev Manovich's distinction between "Duchamp Land" and "Turing State" (1996), you already go the point. According to Manovich, Duchamp Country (the gimmicky art world) requires art objects that are "oriented towards the 'content'", "complicated" and that share an "ironic, self-referential, and oftentimes literally destructive mental attitude towards its material"; on the other hand, Turing Country (the New Media Art globe) is oriented "towards new, state-of-the-art computer engineering science," and produces artworks that are "simple and usually lacking irony" and that "have technology which they use always seriously." ¹ Both fine art worlds have changed a lot over the last decade, but the distinction is notwithstanding valid to a indicate.

This is, still, just the starting time of an in-depth assay of what happened in the following decade. From the mid Nineties, the ascension of the spider web and consumer technologies and the new approach of artists to the medium pioneered past the cyberspace.art movement turned this linear situation into a much more circuitous, conflicted phenomenon that is nigh impossible to summarize in a few lines. Technology-based art grew exponentially, and the New Media Fine art world grew appropriately, but without adapting to these new developments. The New Media Fine art earth became inadequate to an art practice that was increasingly sharing the idea of art and the organization of values of the contemporary art world. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, however, most of the attempts fabricated to bring New Media Art dorsum to Duchamp Land failed as a outcome of an approach based on importing the system of values of Turing Land into Duchamp Land. In the contemporary art world, art is non appreciated as creative research on a given medium, but as a powerful statement on the world nosotros are living in.

The following excerpts attempt to respond to iii questions that remain unanswered at the end of the book. If the fine art formerly known as New Media is moving from its native world to the contemporary fine art world, is there a future for the New Media Art world? If the conceptual paradigm of creative research on the medium has proven to be weak, obsolete and inadequate in promoting the art formerly known as New Media on the contemporary art platform, is there another approach that tin help the states telephone call attention to its specificity and topicality? And finally: is it actually necessary to insist on this specificity?

- Domenico Quaranta
January, 2011