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| Liverpool is a dynamic place with an amazing cultural vibe. This aerial shot showcases the now completed Liverpool One metropolitan plan that has transformed the heart of the city (image: architecture.com) |
My visit to Liverpool to attend and present
a paper at Rewire: The Fourth International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology proved both eye-opening and thoroughly
enjoyable. First of all, Liverpool is an incredibly dynamic city—one that has
recently undergone an amazing transformation in its metropolitan core and is
clearly living up to its title as one of Europe’s cultural capitals (an honour
it officially held in 2008). Housing three major universities, two art schools,
and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool is also the
perfect place to host a dialogue about the current state of new media art, with
all of its challenges, opportunities, and rapidly changing parameters.
Coming from Vancouver, a city comfortable
with the idea of accepting new media forms in an art context, I was most surprised
by how many artists and art institutions represented at the conference from
other parts of the world still face serious challenges exhibiting and finding
audiences for digitally based media. Still, the conversation around the future
of new media art I heard in so many of the papers pointed to the rapid changes
that the uses of new technology are bringing about in how artists engage with
digital platforms, transforming the very definition of what “art” can be.
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| Rewire 2011 was a three-day conference event hosted by FACT and held at Liverpool John Moores University Art and Design Academy. |
One of the ideas I explored in my own
paper (titled "Intersecting Worlds of Commerce and
Experimentation: Creating Legitimacy for the “Art” of Media") concerned how questions of innovation are increasingly dictated by consumer
habits and end-user preferences as never before. At the level of simple
application, the speed and accessibility of ever more sophisticated software platforms
to non-specialist users has foregrounded the social dimension and speed of
dissemination of new media, but also accelerated and blurred previously
established boundaries in how the “art” of new media can be understood.
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| The "original" Abramovic performance |
One very recent example that I shared,
first brought to my attention via a link sent by a student (thanks Andrea!),
raises these issues within a clever technological framework. Pippin Barr, an artist and media studies
professor at the University of Copenhagen, borrows from the visual language and
commercial context of gaming to reconfigure meaning around high concept art
exhibitions such as Marina Abramovic’s recent retrospective of performance art
at MOMA, “The Artist is Present”—an exhibition I attended and blogged about last year. As Barr explains on his blog, his project challenges artists to expand
the potential audience for contemporary art by rethinking how notions of
gaming, play, and interactivity operate in the conceptual underpinnings of
their projects:
“Critically,
these alternate games seem like they're not going to be fun. And it's all very
well to talk about how games don't have to be fun, they can be
"interesting" or "challenging" or "disturbing"
and so on. This is true, but it's also true that basically nobody's going to
play those games except the brave vanguard. The question then becomes whether
the vanguard can convince anyone else to play them too.”
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| Three video stills from Pippin Bar's creative game "The Artist is Present" reconfiguring Abramovic's performance into a form of gaming. |
With these unusual juxtapositions, we see
the unpredictable and unruly path that the blurring of boundaries initiates in
conversations around what can constitute the “art” of new media. What then can
be done in the face of these developments? And is there perhaps a new space for
an avant-garde sensibility to re-emerge and challenge what is shaping up around
entrenching notions of the “art” of new media?
To be sure, It becomes a question of how to
engage audiences differently, and understanding that notions of the
avant-garde, counter-cultural practice, social interaction are all elements
immanent within the technological framework of new media. How, where, and through
what means the designation of “art” is aligned to this framework is proving
today, as it has in the past with previous new media forms such as
photography and film, to be a constantly evolving discourse. As I left
Liverpool, I couldn’t help think that much of the debate and critical
discussion that took place at the conference only reinforced the productive
potential of this evolving form of art. This should serve as some comfort then that the discourse around new media can never remain fully
divorced from the potential for radicality and resistance.