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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face="Book Antiqua"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;color:navy'>To the idc list:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face="Book Antiqua"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;color:navy'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>I’ve just come back from “REFRESH! The First International
Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology” in <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Banff</st1:place></st1:City><font color=navy><span
style='color:navy'>. Hrewith some brief </span></font>impressions of the
conference.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>I am an art historian (and ex-performance/video artist, from the Studio
for Interrelated Media at Mass Art) with a longstanding but hitherto relatively
untapped interest in new media. My own field of expertise is performance of the
late 1950s and early 1960s, including Fluxus projects, but I also teach on the
early part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century and am currently leading an advanced
seminar on what I call “mechanical transcriptions of the
real”—that is, following Kittler, those analog copying technologies
that have so defined 20<sup>th</sup> century experience and inflected much of
its art. I attended the conference as an observer, trying to learn more about
the subject. What follows is merely a report, but it comes filtered through
that complex of interests & preoccupations.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>The first thing to be said is that this was an enormously ambitious
conference: its four days were packed from morning to evening with panels and
events the overall distribution of which, in terms of topics and time, I
thought was pretty good, given the mission. Sessions ranged from “media
histories” to a session on “collaborative
practice/networking” to “history of institutions”; there were
3 keynote addresses—Edmond Couchot, Sarat Maharaj, and Lucia Santaella; a
poster session; an optional hike (<st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Banff</st1:place></st1:City>
is in the stunning Canadian Rockies); a walk-through of the media labs; und so
weiter. Meals were had communally in the Banff Centre’s dining room, and
at least for me, since I knew not a soul at the conference AND felt like what
one snooty panelist called a “clueless newbie,” these became
interesting moments of social anxiety and unexpected social pleasure. While
things did tend to split out into the old pros and the young nothings, they did
get a bit more productively mixed up on occasion. Before I launch into the
problems with the conference, the feeling I got from those I spoke with was
that it was a mixed success but a success overall. I do think the conference
provided a very good starting point for something, and this seemed especially
true after the final session.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>High points of the conference, in no particular order: <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Mario Carpo’s
paper on architecture in the age of digital reproducibility, which dealt
with the shift from a simply additive to an algorithmic modularity in
architecture. This was probably the most professionally delivered paper at
the conference, as well as the most intelligently amusing, and what Carpo
presented as a paradigmatic slide was fascinating, provocative. I learned
something.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Philip Thurtle and
Claudia Valdes showing footage of Alvin Lucier doing solo for brainwaves.
I’ve forgotten what the paper was about, but was thrilled to see the
footage and to have the piece presented.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Chris Salter on a
history of performance with media, beginning with a fantastically forceful
evocation of Russian Constructivis plays. I teach this material, but
Salter’s presentation was vigorous and made a very strong case for
its inclusion in a “new media” history. <o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Christiane Paul on
curatorial issues with new media. This was also a very professional (by
which I mean good, clear, to the point) presentation and very usefully
laid out the difficulties involved, from curators having to rebuild
settings to house work to problems of bitrot to audience development.
Impressive and useful.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Machiko Kusahara on
“device art” discussed Japanese aesthetics. This was an art
historically thin paper—no discussion of Fluxus, very loose mention
of Gutai and then Tanaka’s electric dress but not the
“painting machines” of her husband—but the presentation
of a different value-system for Japanese “device art” (gizmos
whose “art coefficient” is activated by their use) was pretty
convincing as well as very thought-provoking.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>tour of the labs AND,
surprisingly, the poster session, which was cluttered and weird but also
the one moment in the conference when people really talked to each
other’s ideas<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Tim Druckrey’s
screening of apocalyptic Virilio. He gave a very lazy but passionate
paper, basically asking why on earth new media would want to be included
in an old canon, and noting that a far bigger problem is present in
Nicholas Bourriaud’s blythe “relational aesthetics” than
in the October cabal’s control of high theory.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Michael Naimark’s
corporatist but useful analysis of the sustainability of new media
institutions.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Johannes Goebel’s
passionate and pragmatic overview of two such institutions.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l3 level1 lfo3'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>the final,
quasi-impromptu “crit, self-crit” session led by Sara Diamond.
This was where most of the lingering meta-issues were put on the table,
and it was done in such a way that those in the room I think felt it was
really a <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">high point</st1:City></st1:place>
and a great note on which to finish. Left the feeling that while there is
work to be done it will be done.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
</ul>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>I didn’t go to everything, needless to say, and doubtless there
were good things on other panels. I heard that Claus Pias’s paper on
cybernetics was excellent, for instance.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>That said, the conference overall suffered greatly from what Trebor
Scholz and Geert Lovink have dubbed “panelism”: a territorial
structure in which moderators also delivered papers within the format of a way
over-tight schedule and with virtually no time for questions; a few speakers
went beyond their alotted minutes in the first sessions and then panels were
policed to an almost draconian degree, making the entire assembly tense.
Discussions were notably truncated. In fact, to this art historian it seemed
weird that people would gather for a conference on something as shifting and
relatively openly defined as “new media” (how many papers in fact
began with loose attempts to list the salient features of new media) and then
sit and hear something they could have read already… for though the
organizers had posted quite a number of papers on their official website
beforehand, it was clear that most attendees hadn’t read those papers…
and then not discuss what they had heard.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>What surfaced in the tension around (non) discussion was a big mess of
anxieties. Topped by the anxiety over having “new media art”
categorized as “art” or as “new media,” these inflected
many of the panel presentations and discussions, and not in a productive way.
Part of the problem, as Andreas Broeckman pointed out in the final crit
session, was that the mission of the conference was probably too broadly and
vaguely defined. But what I heard over and over again was “traditional
art history” can’t deal with new media. The first thing I’d
want to know is, what precisely is “traditional art history”? From
Simon Penny’s castigation of art history as racist, imperialist,
classist, etc., it sounded to me like what was meant was Berensonian
connoisseurship; this seemed overwrought, but his excursus was only the most
vigorous and politically thought-through of a frequent plaint. Yet while he was
quite right to note that cultural studies wasn’t mentioned once at the conference
his characterization of art history is way behind the times. Art history and
new media share Walter Benjamin and, for better or worse, Rudolf Arnheim; new
media people would do well to read Panofsky and Warburg, just as I and at least
some of my colleagues read Weiner and Kittler. Art history may not yet be able
to deal with new media, but perhaps it is also the case that new media
doesn’t know how to deal with art history.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>On this score a truly low moment was struck on the first day by Mark
Hansen, whose hatchet job on Rosalind Krauss was so lame that even the new
media theorists were bugged. Instead of new media bemoaning its lack of
recognition by art history and then its savaging of same (“we want to be
with you; we hate you” or “I love you; go away”) it might be
more productive to stage a genuine encounter. Leaving aside Andreas Broeckman,
who gave a very nice but grossly amputated (ran out of time) presentation on
aesthetics and new media, and the truly awful presentation comparing the
websites of the Louvre and the Hermitage, the art historians who were at the
conference were either working with medieval Islamic art or with the visual
culture of science. That is, there were no art historians dealing with
contemporary art who were not already part of the inner circle of new media
people; yet this is precisely the encounter that needs to be staged. Meanwhile
Mark Tribe, not an art historian, gave an extremely art historically lame
presentation on appropriation, and while the broader point was, well, okay, his
presentation of the historical material was painful and for at least this
listener undermined his credibility. (On the other hand, Cornelius Borck, a
historian of medicine, gave a terrific presentation—historically nuanced,
intelligently read, and carefully researched—on the optophone of Raoul
Hausman and Hausman’s complicated relationship to prosthesis.) From my
perspective this suggests a serious problem of disciplinarity: surely just as
new media artists/theorists expect a sophisticated treatment from art
historians (Simon Penny again: art historians should learn engineering,
cognitive science, neuroscience before they discuss new media…) so new
media artists and theorists should treat the work that comes before—both
art and media—with the historical complexity (without going to Pennyian
excess) art history at its best demonstrates. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>Other issues that came up: <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Problems of storage
& retrieval of new media work. From an historical point of view this
demonstrates a remarkable degree of self-consciousness on the part of new
new media—something new, incidentally, in the longer history of
media, and interesting as a phenomenon.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Huge anxiety about the
“art” status of new media, alongside a subthematic of the
relation to science and to scientific models of research.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Adulatory fetishizing
of cognitive science, engineering, and neuroscience (in marked contrast to
the dissing of art history).<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Lack of a fixed
definition of new media, with repeated nods to hybridization, bodily engagement,
non-hierarchical structure, networking, and so on.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Disconnect of the
keynote speakers. Couchot had difficulty with English and seemed, while
emphasizing hybridity, to be speaking from another time. Sarat Maharaj
rambled for nearly 2 hours about Rudolf Arnheim and the Other; I found
this talk excruciating, though I later spoke with someone (media artist,
go figure) for whom it had been a <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">high
point</st1:City></st1:place>. And Lucia Santaella’s beautifully
delivered, rigorously near-hallucinatory and religious but to me
quasi-apocalyptic vision of the “semiotic” and
“post-human” present/future of the “exo-brain” was
a chilling picture of species-death.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Ongoing problem of
gender and geographic distribution. While non-Western topics cropped up
here and there at the conference, the one panel that dealt in any extended
way with non-Western paradigms was also the one panel that was almost all
female—and also the panel that got the most flak in its few minutes
of discussion, in part because most of those dealing with non-Western
paradigms were Western. This relegation of dealing with the Other to the
women is typical. There was also some grumbling that many of the
non-Western projects had been tucked into the poster session rather than
elevated to panel status. It would have been good to have some
representation from <st1:place w:st="on">Africa</st1:place>, or even a
panel on doing new media in less media-rich environments than
Euro-Ameri-Nippon.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal style='mso-list:l0 level1 lfo6'><font size=2
face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Comical reliance on and
then debate about Powerpoint…. And then, as one member of the
audience pointed out, nearly all of the people at the conference in their
ppt-critical right-thinking wisdom had little glowing apples at their
desks. No sign of Linux.<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
</ul>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face="Book Antiqua"><span style='font-size:
10.0pt'>That’s a sketch, replete with opinion. I’d encourage anyone
interested in more specific information about the conference to check the
website at <a href="http://www.mediaarthistory.org/">www.mediaarthistory.org</a>,
which has some papers up as well as abstracts.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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