Premier of
Queensland’s National New Media Art Award Eyeline, January 2009
By Linda Carroli
There are times
when it becomes apparent that typologies of convenience, such as ‘new media
art’, become unserviceable and, indeed, mendacious. For years, if not decades,
the term ‘new media art’ has been wrangled and wrestled with in international
discussion lists, publications and conferences. Quietly resisted assimilation
was witnessed when the Australia Council erased their program targeting new
media art to focus their funding of ‘new’ and ‘emerging’ forms, tendencies and
platforms on collaborative, research-driven and interdisciplinary practice.
When the
Queensland Government initiated the first of its biennial $75,000 acquisitive
awards for New Media Art at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) last year, it was
another sign that institutions are also at a loss about how to meaningfully
negotiate the terminology. In that instance, we might hopefully anticipate that
the institution would assume a task of casting some light across the semantic
uncertainties that riddle this field of many fields and that it might help us
cast off the strangeness of this art movement[1] where the media and/or the art
somehow ceases to be ‘new’. As such a grand gesture towards these practices, we
might feasibly expect the Award to make a grand, even brave, statement about
the problematic legacy of defining art by medium or technology.
Things can get
old very quickly these days. And this posits an unanswered question about
whether the institution should lead or follow in these debates. Institutions
have a vested interested in typology and category and, so, does GOMA evoke ‘new
media art’ as something that was, is or will be? In 2006, Mark Tribe and Reena
Jana mused about whether:
New Media art has
run its course as a movement ... As the boundaries separating New Media art
from more traditional forms like painting and sculpture grow less distinct, New
Media art will likely be absorbed into the culture at large ... It may end as a
movement but live on as a tendency – a set of ideas, sensibilities and methods
that appear unpredictably and in multiple forms.[2]
Tribe and Jana,
like others, suggest that this field is inherently transitional, amorphous and
mercurial. While the exhibition of the Premier of Queensland’s National New
Media Art Award appears as an exhibition of something that was, the State
Government, with its ‘Smart State’ message, should be applauded for instigating
it at GOMA, for seeding it in the state’s cultural and collecting infrastructure.
Collecting institutions have been slow to respond to the challenge of
developing appropriate preservation, curatorial and collecting strategies for
engaging the breadth of work that has sprung from the transversal of art,
science and technology.[3] Important works, like some of those shortlisted for
the Award, simply aren’t collected or preserved under current regimes.
The Award
exhibition features works by the eight artists and one collaboration short
listed for the prize: Peter Alwast (QLD), Julie Dowling (WA), Anita Fontaine
(QLD/The Netherlands), David Haines and Joyce Hinterding (NSW), Natalie
Jeremijenko (QLD/United States), Adam Nash (VIC), Sam Smith (NSW), John Tonkin
(NSW) and Mari Velonaki (NSW). There are more rifts than continuities in this distilled
technological terrain where shimmering interfaces and interactivities in dim
rooms do more than supplant or supplement older art forms. These works, with
some notable exceptions, emphasised installation (both online and offline) as a
relational mode that encompasses space for the viewer or participant. Our
bodies, as does our agency, engage when all our senses, except taste, are
stimulated.
The works of
Alwast, Dowling and Smith focus on digital video, sound and image production.
Alwast’s Everything, a three screen projected digital animation, was the
eventual prize winner. Everything collages multiple visual and representational
languages that (dys)function in a mode of excess. In Alwast’s engineered and
alienating world, assuming it is another world, there is a proliferation of
digital modelling sophistication and cliché. The merging, like the visual
environment of the world itself, is superficial and disharmonious: while
assemblage and remediation endeavours to mesh and equalise, those moments where
the modelled meets the photoreal can sometimes appear like fault lines.
As Alwast’s world
keeps us at bay, Dowling’s invites our gaze as a movement towards the recovery,
through the grains of memory, what has been lost. Her story of cultural rupture
is attenuated through healing and reclamation in Oottheroongoo (your country),
a ‘purposely low tech’ four screen still and video projection that features
images of the artist’s family, herself and Badimaya country. The recitation of
traditional language by her nephew, as he participates in language lessons,
forms the soundtrack – words touch, enlivening the land and the spirit.
Smith’s
sculptural work Control Structure also explores the digital production
environment and its relationship with the material world. A giant timber head
extrudes a lens in place of an eye, with a screen (a window to the mind
perhaps) protruding from the side. As both subject and process, Smith’s inquiry
posits the rift between the dual realities of the material and immaterial.
These realms cannot neatly intersect nor can they conveniently reproduce the
other or merge, yet they offer new morphologies.
Nash and
Fontaine, working within more recent media platforms and environments, draw us
into other worlds as players or protagonists. Their virtual worlds are more
permeable and less rhetorical. Both works position us to seek out experience
and knowledge, to willingly journey forth. Entry into Fontaine’s gameworld
CuteXdoom II drops us into a cultish mystery where the life you save may be you
own. As the single player, you become the game’s protagonist, Sally Sangrio,
who, having been lured into unknown terrain and poisoned by a cult of cuteness
worship, must acquire healing objects before the moon sets. The game, a mod of the
PC game Unreal Tournament 3, is disorienting as the sitting user’s body strains
to keep up with Sally’s sense of urgency. Fontaine has presented the work in a
specially designed installation space covered with wallpaper that replicates
the graphic style of the game, providing the user with a sense of continuity
between the real and virtual worlds.
Created as a
Second Life installation, Nash’s 17 unsung songs also prompts corporeal
displacement as we search the virtual world, seeking out the ‘unsung songs’ on
an island called East of Odyssey. Nash has developed an intricate praxis
involving the reinvention of harmonic, spatial and media relationships in ways
that are more responsive, perhaps natural, to the online world. The user
embarks on an odyssey, endeavouring to find a series of ‘interactive sound
installations’. However, perhaps these installations are, instead, a kind of
impossible geometry or architecture – architectonic ‘games’ that can be played
and that, in turn, play us. 17 unsung songs considers the semantics of
‘playing’ in the virtual world: playing as harnessing, releasing and authoring.
Velonaki, Tonkin,
Haines and Hinterding, and Jeremijenko have consistently explored and engaged
informational, technological, engineering and scientific ideas in their work.
Their merging of scientific and artistic processes and knowledge, emphasising
experimentation, results in richly textured and technically complex works that
integrate idea and investigation.
Velonaki’s Fish
Bird project was a 10 year research driven collaboration that explored
interactivity through robotics and artificial intelligence. Circle D: Fragile
Balances is one of the works from this project that recounts the love story:
fish and a bird are characters from a Greek story who fall in love but are
unable to be together in their respective environments. Having taken the form
of timber boxes in Circle D: Fragile Balances, the characters are programmed to
communicate with and respond to each other in text on the high resolution
crystal screens embedded in the boxes and through Bluetooth links: gentle and
fragmented messages about desire and longing. Velonaki is concerned with the
relationship between humans and machines and in this installation the viewer is
able to handle the small boxes. However, if the boxes are handled without the
respect that living entities warrant, the texts become illegible.
In Tonkin’s time
and motion study v2, users are imaged into the artwork’s memory (database),
fixed into a timeline of blurred and endless moments, like Zeno’s paradoxes or
the bullet in Calvino’s Time and the Hunter. Having custom-programmed the work,
it seems to exist only to keep a record of those who have visited, who have
passed through. The installation is comprised of four wall-mounted monitors –
one has a camera and mouse control, and another has a mouse control. As the
user moves, the camera captures a sequence of images, which immediately become
woven into the work’s timeline. Using the mouse at the other monitor, the recorded
images can be viewed and skewed. The other two monitors playback the archive.
Unlike other works, which set us on paths of discovery, time and motion study
v2 gives us only ourselves and those who came before to discover. It provides a
space for spontaneous self-expression and momentary self-awareness.
As artists who
work with scientific instruments to apprehend elusive frequencies and
illuminate our awareness of natural phenomenon, Haines and Hinterding have
developed an installation of poetic deliberation. In Earthstar, we can see,
hear and smell the sun. The installation is centred on a projection of the sun,
captured using a Hydrogen-Alpha telescopic lens attached to a camera, within a
real time audio environment comprised of solar frequencies captured by very low
frequency antennae in the middle of the room. The filtered image and sound
allow us to experience and sense the sun in ways that we cannot without this
kind of technological intervention. The artists have also synthesised an
intoxicating perfume using ozone scented aroma molecules. Samples on cardboard
strips are included in the installation and this imparts a heady scent to the
space.
The sun also
plays a vital part in Jeremijenko’s installation Green Light System. It is an
ethical and sustainable oasis, as a carbon neutral installation, in the midst
of an energy gobbling environment. Jeremijenko’s work has consistently engaged
science and engineering to communicate ideas about ecology. Reflecting on a
role for art and design in activating environmental solutions, the artist
highlights the need for redirecting our cultural practices to incorporate
metabolic processes and clean technology. Comprised of living sub-tropical
plants, light-giving sculptures and solar energy collectors on GOMA’s roof, the
installation creates a dynamic mini-ecosystem that also filters air with
potential for urban agriculture and other urban or architectural
interventions.
As this
exhibition attests, the terrain of new media art pushes and pulls in many directions.
It evokes many of the historical, aesthetic and typological problems associated
with ‘new media art’. With the Awards’ promise of ‘some of the most exciting
developments in contemporary art today’, there is more explaining and
development to do in terms of how GOMA or the State ultimately builds and
frames its collection, as well as an effective exhibitions and public program
to support it. The exhibition catalogue is equally silent about the driving
vision and logic of this initiative, other than it was the Premier’s idea. What
of a meaningful engagement with industry? For example, Spain’s ARCO/BEEP New
Media Art Awards aims to ‘foster communication between the
manufacturers/creators of this new technology and those who create art’. In a
state that enshrines its smartness in policy, what of seeding science,
education and innovation programs with interdisciplinary imperatives? While not
a state award, the Prix Ars Electronica grows out of and with an international
community of practice, a centre and a festival with its locus in Linz, Austria.
While the
imperative for the Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award
inspires perplexity, that is no reflection on the work or the curatorial
experiment that lets audiences chart conceptual pathways between these
differential interrogations of ‘digital aesthetics’, as one construct of aesthetic code. Perhaps a more compelling and critical idea lies in the 'coded aesthetic'. The digital, the
recombinant, the interactive and the confluent are obvious tendencies in new
media art – non-linear and decentralised production, processes, aesthetics and
distribution now proliferate. However, coding presents another dimension for some generative, interactive and relational art. For all the pleasures of these works, we are
ultimately confronted with a conundrum about the force of the ‘new’ in ‘new
media’ given a catalogue reference to ‘early adoption’. What and how does that
‘new’ do? What and how does it produce? Hopefully, the second incarnation of
these awards won’t leave those critical questions begging.
NOTES
1 Mark Tribe and
Reena Jana (2006) describe New Media art as a movement rather than an artform,
citing a relationship with Video art but not necessarily a confluence. In their
historical account, the web browser precipitated New Media art as a movement.
2 Mark Tribe
& Reena Jana, New Media Art. Koln: Taschen. 2006. 25
3 Geert Lovink
(2005) comments that historical accounts of ‘new media art’ can “lack
institutional awareness. Whereas technology developed fast, institutional
understanding in this sector has been equally slow. In this respect, new media
art is a misnomer, since it reproduced time and again the modernist dilemma
between aesthetic autonomy and social engagement.” See
http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129753681/