New Media Art From here, where?

As a  form of art, new media cuts across generic boundaries. Even in 2017 it is neither fashionable nor accepted among critics to try to examine the variegated landscape it covers. A settled term of acknowledgement, new media art does not perplex but encodes art practices and instruments that are fairly well understood, if in a simplistic way. There is a reason Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser's Pedestrian is new media art, but Henry Moore's lithograph Hands I or Nasreen Mohamedi's series of Untitled ink and graphite drawings are not. It is then the use of new and digital technologies that qualifies new media art resulting in a loosely defined yet multitudinous scene. As Domenico Quaranta describes it: ‘New media art is the art that uses new media technologies as a medium – period. No further complexity is admitted.’¹ Perhaps it is not surprising that this dearth of complexity in the critical framework – simplification – often adds to the inscrutability of new media as a category.

Medium based classification is not an innovation in the art world. It is the default practice among several other forms of classifications. Watercolour, oil, acrylic, charcoal, ink, photography, video – they each communicate a familiar typology, which has mostly to do with curatorial practices at museum departments.² Working much like an online  tagging system,  medium based groupings use a logic of coherence that is mostly functional. After all there is not much to argue about whether a work of art is or is not watercolour. And much like online tagging which appears  insufficient,  even reductive and  scattered at times, these categories fulfil an obligatory taxonomical function when combined with other intersecting groupings (style, location, era, and so on). Then there are movements such as expressionism, surrealism, cubism, and the like. An expressionist painting in a specific medium, oil for example, sets the work within a tradition of pre-modern or modern lineage. There is a story to tell here with these categories, even if it is the one sanctioned and scrubbed by institutional curatorial staff. There are of course other stories, other ways of seeing and interpreting a work, without being restricted byinstitutional expediency or strictly structural and genre-specific interpretations. The process of naming is undeniably arbitrary, imperfect. Yet, it is still a mode of understanding without which meaning, any meaning, risks collapse.

But art is as much about adhering to meaning as it is about questioning inherent or accepted  meanings, or reinventing them, or even dismantling or circumventing them. It is as much about conforming to well-understood genealogies of meaning and concepts as about tearing them apart. At the turn of the 20th century, movements such as dadaism and cubism sprang out of confrontations with well-accepted modes of interpretation and thus challenging the predominant structures of interpretation  formed the heart of those movements. Although not exactly a movement in the strictest sense, at the  turn of the 21st century, a new phenomenon known as new media art emerged challenging he existing conventions of form and meaning. It was of course inevitable, as newer technologies ingrained in everyday artistic expressions would reflect these entanglements. And so, technologies as wide ranging as ‘digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, video games, computer robotics, 3D printing,’ and even, biotechnology, folded under the genre known as new media art.³

In  understanding  new media art, the problem is not that it allows too much freedom in terms of  breaching boundaries; the problem lies with something more fundamental. That is, an amalgamation of practices and forms developed by bending genres cannot escape the demands of traditional art establishments sprung around museums, art fairs, galleries, collectors and curators. And that is   how   art is slotted into genres for ease of identification and circulation. A porous understanding of art, here, still conforms to  maintenance of generic boundaries – affecting the choices that new media artists make in terms of mediums and functions.  These classifications are to some degree inescapable ; however,  the more important question to ask is: whether these classifications  still remain relevant.

As Quaranta argues,  a classification system hemmed in by concept of medium and function that looks at  new media art as rooted in technology use is untenable since technology itself is a malleable term. But then Quaranta does not settle for the obvious explanation:

An easy argument against this could be that technology won't be always new. We got used to TV monitors and projectors in galleries; we will get used to computers as well. The youngsters currently drawing their first pictures on an iPhone at the age of two will eventually grow up, and new media art will look more natural to them than it does to us. Yet this is only true up to a point. The hype surrounding the ‘new media’ has not died down over the last two decades, quite the contrary: it burgeons any time a new gadget is launched on the market, reaching an even wider audience.^4​​​​​​​

Even if new is not new anymore, there are always newer technologies to occupy the space of the new. So, at a definitional level, we can have new media art as a stable category, even if what constitutes new evolves over time. But can novelty as an organizing principle sustain an entire art practice? At what point does gimmickry overtake novelty? When do experimentations bleed into shticks? The promise of new media art is its shape-shifting capacity, one that  spins and spreads on the temporal plane that is newness. Newness also signals an arrival, therefore an absence before, but that absence is not a lack of any prior signs at all. Where then do we situate the new? 

Then there is technology. Imagining technology only as digital lends itself to a rather messy use and application of the word. Derived from the Greek techne, technology is a process, a mediation, an instrument of transformation. As a mode of transformation, printmaking equipment was a valid claim to technology as a digital one. Why then shouldn't Mohamedi's prints be new media art? If technology as a medium seems too amorphous, a literal meaning that loosens the boundaries to the point of infinite pliability, then technology only as digital is similarly shorn and pervious. In other words, the category new media art allows too much and not enough all at once.

When we imagine technology as digital, as something to do with computational mediation, technology as a ‘term of convenience’ for the advancements that now envelope and saturate our lives, we must extend that understanding to new media art and situate it in context. Particularly, new media art springs from the observed  entanglements of everyday life. Here, a digression: ‘everyday’ does not necessarily mean mundane, though there is certainly a banality to the extent technology has seeped into and permeates every aspect of lived experience and perhaps beyond. But  these entanglements are inescapable, boundless, and they have  transfigured our selves, subjectivities and the social relations in between.⁵

New media art cannot and do not stand at a remove from these developments. Which is to say, the modes of understanding and situating new media art, and categorizing them cannot be disjunctive, stripped of the connective tissues that for better or worse sustain them. Which is why, when engaging with new media art, it is not technology in and of itself that is interesting, but the workings of technology, from conception to development to deployment. Our algorithmic selves, our  surveilled selves, our atomized, alienated selves, our biotechnological selves, our autonomous selves --  eparated from one another -- are all inventions and interventions of technology and it is those inventions and interventions and the inquiries they generate, questions and answers they open and foreclose are where new media art inhabits.

Understood that way, new media art is not merely about the medium or the form. The medium is only a weak substitute for a multilayered practice and it is the practice that is paramount here. A system of categorization that relies on these qualifiers, developed from museum-based classifications of medium-centric art, limits a full consideration of new media art, relegating the practice to instruments rather than an examination of instrumentalization. At a time when the mutual reconstitution of and symbiosis between IRL and virtual is growing apace, understanding and situating new media art requires a similar reconstitution beginning with the idea of category itself.

 References  

1. Domenico Quaranta, What's (Really) Specific about New Media Art? Curating in the Information Age. Rhizome. December 6, 2012. 
2. Ibid.
3. Lorenzo Pereira, Why Is It So Difficult to Define New Media Art? Widewalls. 
4. Domenico Quaranta, What's (Really) Specific about New Media Art? Curating in the Information Age. Rhizome. December 6, 2012.
5. Mark O'Connell, 'Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.' The road to immortality.The Guardian. March 25, 2017.

PARSA SANJANA SAJID teaches at Independent University, Bangladesh and edits Fragments Magazine.