Dear friends, thank you for this strange conversation.
To start somewhere: Like some others I don't think that media art festivals etc. should be considered as gateways to museal recognition. They are sites of discourse and celebration, and laboratories, where of course a lot of the time things don't succeed, but we continuously learn to fail better next time. (If you prefer commercial TV shows, whether streamed or cabled, maybe the messiness of art labs is not for you.)
The danger of technical obsolescence of media art has been the concern of some people, not least in the museums that collect such artworks; some of them struggle to create protocols for preservation, others have made efforts to document and contextualise artworks so that they can be shown in class etc. (like for instance mediaartnet.org and digitalartarchive.at). Anybody who is seriously worried about potential loss or inaccessibility should support these initiatives.
As regards the topics which artworks deal with, I'm surprised, like Eric, about the call for "humanness". Of course human relations and emotions are important potential topics and they are relevant in much digital and postdigital art. But the engagement with technology, which forms such an important kernel in media art, brings about a necessary and often critical anti-humanism when addressing, for instance, the "human-machine conundrum". Aesthetically, it can give pleasure and pain, and pleasurable pain.
If we seriously engage with what concerns us and other people, how can we be embarrassed about that? Of course, there are moments of failure and things that turn out to have been a waste of time, but that's what everybody does (a coral waiting for plankton to drift by...). And there are also the moments of gratification. Artists whose work I respect have, for instance, challenged the fallacies of Virtual Reality, they have raised questions about the efficacy of online agency, or highlighted the political and ecological dilemmas of digital culture.
This last point might in fact be something to be embarrassed about, i.e. the complicity of the way we live - "we" here meaning the people who read this message on Nettime, using some digital device that is chained to the ecological desaster of modern industry, and capitalism. But again, I see a lot of people struggling for a way out of this embarrassment, fully aware that even doing our best might not be enough.
Regards, -a # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
