17/05/2018 Media Art Redone | transmediale

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Media Art Redone

"Media art" might sound like an outdated term,
but Elvia Wilk argues that its persistence is a
good omen, 19.12.2016

Pulled from the archives: the flyer from transmediale 2007: unfinish,
where the Media Art Undone panel took place.

Unearthing a decade-old panel discussion

from the transmediale archive suggests that
discourse about digital culture might not
change as fast as we think—which,
transmediale editor Elvia Wilk argues here, is
a good omen. This post is the first in an
ongoing series revisiting and reviving
discussions, events, and media from the
recently digitized, 30-year transmediale
archive.

Assuming that technology evolves very quickly,

we might also assume that art made with and
about technology changes very fast too. If this
were the case, a decade would be an eon when it
comes to the evolution of media art. Yet the very
fact that it’s still possible to use the term “media
art” to describe contemporary practices might
have been surprising ten years ago. Many artists
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and theorists alike predicted the term’s
17/05/2018 Media Art Redone | transmediale

irrelevance and demise long ago, and yet for a menu

panoply of interwoven reasons it persists—albeit
with new connotations, instrumentalizations, and de en
proponents.

A panel discussion called Media Art Undone that

took place at transmediale in 2007 revolved
around the categorization of media art as a term
and a practice. Unearthing this discussion from
the festival archive is to discover a time capsule
that, when cracked open, reveals contents much
less dated than one might think. From today’s
vantage point, the discussion not only remains
highly relevant, but in its relevance also suggests
a continuity to a discourse that is often reliant on
rhetoric of change and rupture.

2007 was an important year for transmediale’s

own self-positioning within tricky terminological
territories. In only the previous year, the festival
subtitle had been officially changed from
“international media art festival” to “festival for art
and digital culture,” explicitly broadening its
scope from art to societal issues, and moreover
from the “media art” pigeonhole to a spectrum of
creative practices. As became evident in the
Media Art Undone panel, a simple change in
context or framing fundamentally changes any
artwork, and so the new moniker was not only
symbolic of a broadening scope but had marked
effects on the way the work functioned in
context. The panel addressed this reorientation,
questioning the power of terminology in
transmediale and in the field in general.

The title of the 2007 festival was “unfinish!”—

described in the press materials as both the
“battle cry” and the “curse” of digital artwork.
That is to say: in its ephemerality, media art has
historically offered a critical counterpoint to
marketable object-commodities, but this
impermanence (and dependence on fragile digital
mediums) has also hindered its historicization
and canonization. Given that by 2007 media art
had become a truly “mature medium,” as many
speakers on the panel noted, it was time to ask:
should media art “graduate” to join the realm of
contemporary art, embedding itself into a broad
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artistic canon? Or should its actors focus onMedia Art Redone | transmediale
17/05/2018

continuing to write a separate, if parallel, menu

institutional history?
de en
Moderator Miguel Leal began by framing the
discussion around the term “operative”—how
does a term operate in social context, who does
it operate upon, and who operatesz` it? “The title
Media Art Undone,” he said, “points out to
something unfinished or not yet done […]
something that needs an un-do: one of those
magic operations under the edit menu.” With this
he highlighted the irrevocability of terminology
once it’s ingrained in practices and surrounding
discourse; a term can be steered, borrowed, or
appropriated—but undone?

The first panelist was Inke Arns (who is also

incidentally co-curating the exhibition program of
transmediale 2017). Arns began her presentation
by giving examples of the wide-ranging projects
that could technically fall under the media art
umbrella—citing everything from concrete poetry
to social networking experiments. She asked:
“why are wall paintings, digital prints on canvas,
the infection of the mass media with
disinformation, journeys by lorry, or climbing trips
all ‘media art’?”

As she and other speakers made clear in their

talks, by 2007 media art had clearly
“emancipated itself” from the use of the specific
media technologies from which it may have
originally relied on—and from which it had
inherited its name. This had led to a paradoxical
situation: a media-specific category was still
being widely used to describe a set of practices
that were not only unspecific in their use of
media, but may in fact be defined as to their
disregard for traditional media categories. Media
art, after all, had long eschewed the medium-
specificity on which the market-driven art world
depends. And so, paradoxically, works described
as media art could be said to be united precisely
in their lack of dependence on any particular
media.

“What defines Media Art today is not its range of

media,” explained Arns, “but rather its specific
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form of contemporaneity, its content-relatedMedia Art Redone | transmediale
17/05/2018

examination of our present.” Implying that it menu

might best be described as an examination of
contemporary media culture rather than in any de en
way reducible to any technological, medium-
specific substrates, Arns even suggested that
media art might better be described just as
“Concept Art.”

However, she admitted there are several reasons

the term had stuck for so long, which were
largely sociological, cultural, and economic: a
separate institutional apparatus of festivals and
venues; the focus on festivals as an “appropriate
format” for presenting media art in the first place;
and an unhealthy obsession with “gadgetry” on
the part of those who call themselves media
artists. Arns ultimately argued that this
“ghettoization” of media art might be detrimental
to its evolution, and advocated for its entrance
into contemporary art at large.

transmediale 2007 | Media Art Undone

The following speaker, Diedrich Diederichsen,

honed in further on the complicated relationship
between media art and contemporary art,
emphasizing that such categories are outlined by
rhetoric, self-contextualization, and social milieu
as much as by anything intrinsic to the work
itself. He pointed out that all aesthetic artifacts
are to some extent dependent on context as
opposed to intrinsic properties, and he gave a
telling anecdote to explain the often self-imposed
divergence between artists in different contexts:
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 “I want to tell a tale of two artists. They'reMedia
17/05/2018
both Art Redone | transmediale

—at least they were for a long time—working menu

at the same academy in the same kind of
media art or new media department. They de en
were both doing installations with new media,
and not so new [media…] But they would
never, never ever, be included in the same
show, because one was the media artist and
the other was a gallery artist. One had an
upbringing of art departments and Soho shows
and reading October, and the other of Ars
Electronica and media labs. So they would do
exactly the same kind of work, they would get
along quite well, but they would never show
together. Why is that so?”

In short, Diederichsen traced those reasons to

ones of patronage and lineage. Artists and
theorists, like anyone else, often feel a need to
inscribe themselves in historical tradition for
community, and of course in order to know which
grants to apply for. Calling oneself a media artist
enmeshes one into a community of those who
also use that name; it’s a wearable identity that
forges a sense of institutional belonging.

That’s why Olia Lialina, the panel’s third speaker,

declared: “If today you introduce yourself as a
media artist, it says only at what events you show
your works and from what institutions you may
be getting grants, but does not say anything
about your work, area of expertise, or source of
inspiration.” Calling oneself a “net artist or web
artist or satellite artist or game artist or home
computer musician” would be more appropriate,
she said.

Unlike Arns, Lialina did not believe media art as a

whole should melt itself into contemporary art.
Neither did she seem to believe that would or
could happen. She pointed out certain zones of
crossover between them to explain how such
adoption (perhaps cooption) happens on a more
atomized level. For instance, the subset of
practices known as net.art had clearly migrated
from media to contemporary art by then, a
movement made possible by several particular
developments. These included both the ubiquity
of home computing, leading to the possibility for
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huge audiences for online work, and the
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development of more attractive, smaller hardware menu

suitable for showing digital work in gallery
settings. “Reducing a computer to a screen, to a de en
frame that can be fixed on the wall with one nail,
marries gallery space with advanced digital
works.” In these ways net.art (understood as a
subset or particular strand of media art) made
itself attractive to the contemporary art market,
which other subsets had not.

For his part, fourth speaker Timothy Druckrey

focused on the illusion of progress that changing
terminology perpetuates—updating the label of
media art wouldn’t fundamentally change it, but
possibly even distract it from changing—and also
the outsized dominance of the contemporary art
canon in defining what progress means. He
expressed resentment at “the October school”—
those who have decided to speak for an entire
twenty-first century, half of which belongs not to
them but to us.” Us in this case referred to the
media art world.

Diederichsen, during the discussion, took issue

with the idea that there was an “us” and a “them”
when it came to media and contemporary art.
“You need a large enemy” for that kind of talk, he
said, “and I kind of [suspect] this enemy doesn’t
really exist, except if we talk about some real,
large enemy like capitalism.” He implied that
positioning oneself squarely against an
abstracted “contemporary art world” might be
more akin to splintering the left than to taking a
useful political stance.

However, in discussion, theorist Florian Cramer

spoke from the audience, pointing out a
distinction between the theoretical use of “media
art,” which he said “doesn’t make any sense at
all,” and the “tactical use,” which has precisely to
do with its political capacity. There are, surely,
valid reasons to position oneself at an angle to, if
not precisely oppositional to, mainstream
contemporary art discourse. This is done
precisely through naming oneself as part of a
separate set of practices with their own
institutional and cultural legacy.

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Today, one could frame this back-and-forthMedia
17/05/2018
as aArt Redone | transmediale
conundrum of branding. Media art as a term is menu
obviously rife with problems as a brand: it
antiquates a work before it’s even made by de en
putting a time-stamp on it; it depends on linear
concepts of progress that are widely disputed;
and the very notion of media specificity is an
outdated one. “Contemporary” would really be
the best qualifier for such work that sees itself as
continually relevant, including but not limited to
engaging with media as necessary and reflecting
upon use of media in society—but obviously, the
qualifier is already taken.

As Lialina alluded to, the market mechanisms of

contemporary art, which venues like festivals
attempt to provide alternatives to, have the
capacity and tendency to subsume and rebrand
any practices deemed marketable, leaving others
aside. Rather than ask how media artists and
theorists choose to position themselves in
relation to contemporary art, a better question
might be now: is it at all possible to evade the
eye of contemporary art in the first place?

Media art, for better or for worse, is still a term in

widespread usage, though perhaps more
commonly with the prefix “new” or “post-.” These
addendums are attempts to both rebrand and to
self-historicize: to simultaneously update and to
provide continuity. Whether or not this continuity
contributes to a continuing “ghettoization” of the
field, it also, crucially, allows forgotten or
ephemeral practices to be brought to light. Even
with the knowledge that all lineages and origin
stories are cultural constructions, one needs to
trace a lineage to write a history. They are also
attempts to unravel the paradox Arns mentioned
in 2007 of the media-specificity implied in the
term.

If media art was “finally growing up” in 2007, as

Arns asserted, it’s certainly old enough now to
have had children, who may look nothing like
their antecedents. The important thing is that
contemporary practitioners are aware of their
antecedents, that they have access to
information via which to position themselves in
relation to what came before. Luckily, one
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development
17/05/2018
over recent years is that “the Media Art Redone | transmediale
October school” (and its own children) no longer menu
has anything like a monopoly on art discourse. As
much as media developments have engendered de en
new platforms for artistic practice, they have
fostered new platforms for discourse too.

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Related participants: 

Inke Arns de, Diedrich Diederichsen de, Florian

Cramer de, Timothy Druckrey us, Olia Lialina ru,
Elvia Wilk us

Related texts: 

The Blue Screen Interviews: 1995/2017

02.03.2017

Related media: 

Media Art Undone

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