SITUATED

The policy of the Museum for Contemporary Arts in Antwerp towards Media art.

MEDIA ART

‘Multimedia’, ‘new mediums’, ‘media art, ‘net art’…The ever changing, at times dynamic field of new audiovisual technologies and their constantly evolving artistic applications is difficult to subsume under one greatest common denominator and it is just as difficult to pinpoint, the unavoidable choice for one of the many denominations – i.c. ‘media art’ instead of ‘new mediums’ or ‘image mediums’ demands some explanation.

The term ‘media art’ in the first place refers to art, to an application of other mediums than the traditional painterly, sculptural, photographic and/or cinematographic ones and whose intention or nature is an artistic one.
In medias res, or the medium as a means AND in the middle: media art as an art form in which different practices, disciplines and traditions meet each other halfway. An artistic praxis which is not solely visual, which does not merely make use of the dominant medium of the moving image (film, video and television), but rather transgresses the confines of the traditional creation of imagery and enters into the obscure no-man’s land in between different artistic disciplines (which is ‘trans’ and ‘inter’ in between visual art and film, performance and ‘theatre’, music and architecture, design and image technology ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts) and bases its status of an autonomous field of art on thee very tactics of crossing of boundaries and hybridisation.
Quite often, the techniques and strategies of borderline crossing and hybridisation from which medium art borrows its status and character have a strongly technologically determined character, for the very reason that it is precisely this field of new technologies of representation and visualisation which makes these transgressions at all possible. Artistic practices which are inextricably linked with the 9super-)technological mature of their medial supports , and which, for this reason, as a whole can be called ‘medium art’. An artistic praxis which thematises and makes explicit the very own conditions of mediation and mediatisation, and which, for this reason, is well-equipped to chronicle and chart a society which is as transfixed with mediation and mediatisation as is ours. ‘The medium is the message”, as the threadbare cliché of the father of modern media theory McLuhan goes; in medium art, the message has once again become the medium.
Furthermore, the technological, ‘instrumental’ and per definition also utilitarian – but therefore not necessarily user-friendly – nature of much medium art warrants an increasing degree of participation by the public than usually is the case in more traditional artistic practices. Medium art ‘mediates’ between the public as an active producer of experiences on the one hand and the contents of a technologically stylised idea on the other hand. In this sense, medium art also shows us the way to the basic democracy of a future praxis of art: art which means what the use of each and every spectator/participant of good will makes of it.

Insofar as medium art makes us of ‘new’ mediums such as the internet, VR-technology, streaming, laptops, mobile telephones, smart materials or even gameboys, playstations and other game consoles – regarding such matters, it goes without saying that nothing is so relative as the predicate ‘new’, and this is all the more so the case in our contemporary society which is obsessed with speed and with acceleration. – we are in fact dealing with a very young ‘genre’ in full (and promising) development and it is to be approached with some caution and goodwill. Much of medium art is actually so ‘new’ – the internet as a publicly accessible and/or commercialised phenomenon hardly is one decade old – that it would be unfair to attempt to draw the balance of its artistic legacy or to already try to write its history. In this respect, painting, for instant has died a great many deaths only to resurrect just as often; the fact that as of late, it seems to have regained that much momentum has to do with its ability and willingness to call itself into question, to question its underlying conceptual premises in and by means of its own praxis. Conversely, medium art is an artistic praxis which is in full expansion and probably still is too much intertwined with its own technological moment to be able to call itself into question from a critical distance or to become a subject of debate. (It will take some time before somebody will report the deat of a new medium !). And this is the very challenge which the MuHKA takes upon itself: to follow up on the unpredictable adventure of this adventure from nearby as well as from some distance, in demonstrative moments of display – festivals, presentations, exhibitions, web projects – as well as from the safe distance of reflection and ‘critique’, in lectures, publications (amongst other ones in its own media magazine AS), dialogues and discussions, also on its own website, which evidently wants to and ought to take the potential of medium art quite seriously.

Posted by kris_r on October 7th, 2004 in: Uncategorized.