Currents 2013

The third annual large scale installment of our only non-coyote/sunset art event (instantiated by the master impresarios of Parallel Studios, on a much smaller scale, in 2002) is drawing to a close at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. It is billed as an International New Media Festival and contains work loosely categorized as Installation, Single-channel/Animation, Multimedia Performance, Experimental Documentary, and Web-based. There were partnerships with other venues, galleries and schools, and a number of panel discussions, performances, and presentations. A full listing can be found here:
http://www.currentsnewmedia.org/currents2013part.html

So...What is New Media then?

The go-to wikipedia has this, somewhat impenetrable, definition:

New media refers to on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation. Another aspect of new media is the real-time generation of new, unregulated content.

Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive. Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, video games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media does not include television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity.

the main definitions come from:
Flew, T. (2002), New Media: An Introduction
and
Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort, ed (2003), The New Media Reader

In the context of the Currents' categories we have:

• Installation -- Almost entirely multi-projection or multi-media video with sculptural elements. There was one example of non-digital art, but it did use an electric motor (counting an opening night performance/installation which used electricity only for illumination, there were two), and two more which used digital thingies but no video;
• Performance -- Theatrical video with sound components, the one un-electric performance/installation on the opening night (plus the sans-digitalis sculptural installation which was mainly a performance as well), and one piece comprising a live performer with user input via video;
• Single-channel -- Stuff you could see at home, i.e., good old movies, albeit often open ended and/or non-narrative, also including web-based applications.
  

Notice that there is some disjunction between Wiki and Currents, especially in the non-interactive Single-channel and non-digital Performance aspects. To my mind New Media should include Installation and Performance as conceptualized in the latter 20th century. Thus I would argue with the more narrow Wiki definition but not enough to open the can'o'worms required to edit it.

So lets just call this a Video show.

As such I was fairly disappointed.

Full disclosure: My entry to the show (a tip'o'th'hat to the exactly 100-year-old original New Media work) was declined because, while it was "interactive", it didn't even use electricity. None-the-less I helped install the show (if you liked the lighting, in some places, thanks), and will help dis-install it because, in the larger context of Art Santa Fe, these guys are Doing Gods Work.

Life is Short. Video is Long

While touring the show I began a discussion with a friend who will probably be writing the review-of-record (this posting is to establish a time-stamp on just who has plagiarized whom). She said (something on the order of), "I wish I had the artist(s) standing next to me to explain things." And herein lies the rub...

To appreciate any art one needs some background knowledge. By virtue of growing up in our culture this sort of knowledge is, nearly, innate when viewing, say, representational painting. Portraits and Landscapes automatically make sense, thus we can quickly move on to how much we like the treatment of the subjects. With a little more cultural inculcation one can even have the same appreciation for abstract painting, up to and including (for many of us) the Ab-Exers.

However, Video Installation has a much shorter and diverse history. Most of us don't have the background to appreciate the advances made by a particular piece. (...I am going to be gracious and assume that the artist's themselves know that which they are advancing...).

A corollary of the innate knowledge argument is that we quickly recognize whether we are going to get something out of spending time with an Old Media work. It has a Hook which makes us willing to invest. I will gladly spend minutes standing, or better sitting, in front of Monet's Water Lilies (yeah, yeah, that's just me) or Dali's The Persistence of Memory. And I was once able to spend long periods with Duchamp's Large Glass -- back when I could remember the various after-market commentaries on the Green Box Notes.

So the trouble with New Media then is two fold. To start with, we are not sure what we are looking at; and then, it takes time to figure it out. Some work has a visceral hook and many of us may be willing to invest a moment or two more.  But it often takes longer. Much longer.

Truisms, Not

Video Art has its roots in the 1960s and much of it was originally driven by the hallucinations, culturally and visually, of the period. A number of pieces in the Currents show hark back to this with psychedelic feedback, ever expanding mandalas, and fractally twirling multiple-images. This generally makes me nauseous philosophically, and sometimes physically.

Quite a number of others take a stab at New Media with multiple Old Medias, using many screens, son-et-lumiere, or, often, all of the above. Gratuitously. Many of these installations had headphones, which could easily be ignored, for the son part. Some did not.

There are also projections onto or into stuff. One onto an existing painting. I'm not really clear on why.

There was one swarm driven piece where ants crawled to your outline over a background-still of the ground. OK. Good. I wonder if I could introduce you the 2001 Swarm Development Group?

Then a new human-interface comprised of a 3x6 foot sheet of stretchy material onto which a pattern was projected. When you pushed on the material a piano played. It had one degree of freedom for about 20 sqft of interface. The (probably synthesized) piano sounded quite nice if you like noodle-music.

Another new interface used a head-mounted EEG sensor to control a video projection. Ostensibly. I was not able to get it out of a tight loop alternating a blurry ocean rescue with a slow aerial track of the Manhattan skyline that always stopped just before I could pick out the hotel where I last stayed.

And one video-game installation which purported to produce a psycho-analysis. I could not get myself out of the second room.

Those last two disappointments can certainly be credited to my lack of inner complexity.

But on to the truisms..these were both important absolutes when first established however they now need updating:

The Medium is -- not the entire -- Message

and

The Personal is -- not always -- the Political

Much of the content, as such, in the show fails in this update phase. Come on folks. We need to move on.

Also: In the interim between leaving school and being canonized, Post Modern jargon doesn't help your cause.

I attended two of the Panels:

 

Art and the Legacy of Artificial Life

This panel discussion was peopled by friends and was right up my alley so I prepared a manifesto in order to be argumentative. Fortunately all it took was a pointed question to get them to (mostly) agree that the system's behavior, rather than its artifacts, are what is of real interest. Maybe I get a point for being conciliatory. One the other hand, none of the panelists has spoken to me since.

New Media: Arts & Sciences

Presented by the 1st Mile Institute's Scientists/Artists Research Collaboration program, this was a series of video and in-person (plus two skype-presences) talks. Out of 18 video/talks there were: one artist-naturalist who is observing the sky in ways not quite done before, Heliotown; two holographers who use sciency tools to examine the nature of light and perception; and one art/science duo who made a juicy data set it into a pretty swell web page, Wind Map. Otherwise it was cool-visualizations that might have once seen an artistic hand or cool-technology that artists might want to use sometime. So, for the most part, no real collaborations were used in the making of this event.