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 âart ghettoâ, 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
Mediaâs time has all but gone, and that New Media artists have
ambivalence to art in general. Perhaps this is evident from Roland
Penroseâs assertion of Rauschenbergâs heritage to Dada [4], and
Rauschenberg/Kluverâs 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 Twainâs
commentary on his obituary in the NY Times, âhighly exaggeratedâ?
Secondly, does this body or work aptly represent the âwaningâ
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 âdot.comâ 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 Amerikaâs Grammatron [7] and Davisâ
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 4300âs to the 1400âs [9].
Conversely, the beginning locates somewhere in the mid-90âs, 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 Manovichâs 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
Manovichâs book may be an encapsulation of the time, being released
the year after the genreâs apex.
However, pre-Web, (letâs 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
staffâs proclaimed âend of cyberpunkâ in 1993 with the release
of the Billy Idol album (or
