A meta-theme Greene - Voiceover - New Media Art and the Internet - Brief Article

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Gloria Sutton

A meta-theme Greene identifies is that conceived of as "systems of innovation," where new media are often read as the compilation of discrete units reducible to finite forms. A parallel operation occurs in the race to historicize new media art as a specific aesthetic medium situated at the end of a sequence of designated art forms or "movements." In this version, net.art is the latest installment within a positivist history built on the seamless accretion of film and video technology, which conflates artistic movements with advances in image production. This linear reading traces the evolution of the camera and collapses, to take one example, Eadweard Muybridge's photographic motion studies into time-based forms such as avant-garde cinema and video art, and it inaccurately interprets net.art as a cohesive category of art that simply produces images with a computer rather than a camera.

A problem with this materialist approach is that the computer and its screen falsely stand in as a mode of representation or depiction. Unlike the camera (still, film, video, digital or Web), image production is not the exclusive or even main operation of the computer. As Manovich so thoroughly relays, its the interface. This fact goes unrecognized by the plethora of chronological surveys of media art that do not differentiate between work that is edited, calculated, but in the end, out put by the computer and art work that exists in various forms within the network that is made accessible via the computer. The resulting narrative has nothing to do with art, Instead it becomes a history of the screen or a timeline of the pixel. Since the emphasis is always on the end product, not the process, the assumption is that art is located in the hardware, not the software. This line of reasoning also propagates the artist/engineer dichotomy inflating the myth of technomastery that Greene questions. My guess is that we will have to wait for the publication of Manovich's work on "Info Aesthetics" before the significance of projects like Mongrel's LINKER will be fully recognized.

As contemporary art becomes interdependent on software expertise, artists are either adopting highly marketable skills (through any of the MFA programs that have recently added digital arts or net.art as a degree focus) or sub-contracting out the labor. Under the material conditions that define and often determine artistic production, new media art cannot be seen as separate or distinguishable from the cultural mechanisms in which the issues of labor and art production are negotiated. So the reliance on "systems of innovation," while defunct in application, are perpetuated because they provide a structure for art institutions. Art museums in particular have an investment in the clear differentiation between the fine artist and the commercial programmer even though within the field of new media art, they are often one and the same. Moreover, these institutions are not prepared to deal with the collaborative nature of web-based work. Those individuals who provide the invaluable programming expertise are not us ually credited as collaborators and instead find a precedent in the anonymity of studio assistants or the invisibility of out-sourced labor in the museum's effort to identify proper names within the field.

By complicating the tropes of medium specificity, ner.art no longer deals with the "traditional cultural domain of representation." Manovich reasons that through telecommunication, we enter "a new conceptual space that alters the paradigm for an aesthetic object." By shifting the analysis away from product to process, net.art must be read not just in technologically determinist terms, but as a discourse object that has the potential to address a different type of collective audience located somewhere between the singular modernist viewing subject, associated with photography and cinema, and the mass audience of broadcast television and radio. This hybrid listener/viewer/user is addressed through discursive practices, such as those by the Bureau of Inverse Technology and Mongrel and web-based documentaries like 360degrees.org. If more attention can be paid to the phenomenological conditions--human subjective experience--of new media, not just the false sense of agency Greene aptly critiques that accompanied th e notion of creating new identities through the Web, then it becomes possible to recognize that net.art is concerned with changing perceptions, not just image refinement.

People may read net.art in visual terms, but the point of reception is clearly demarcated by their bodies. The location where people are dialing up from--universities, corporations, the wired home that Greene mentions-reflects by default the political and economic realities of new media since access resides with a connection. The mechanism of exclusion that sanctions these distinctions is manifested in the empty rhetoric of a digital democracy, which has yet to receive any sustained critical attention outside of the conference at MIT on "Race in Digital Space" in April 2001. If we can move away from the wholesale import of positivist models from computer science and impart a sense of doubt, then the tools for modeling non-discrete operations like collaboration may become evident. Just as Manovich looks to earlier forms to explicate the tools of new media, we can look to analog models of communication for systems of collaboration, namely discourse and dialogue.