<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>shelf life</title></head><body>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">Hello, everyone,</font><br>
<font size="-1" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">Trebor has kindly asked me to
start a topic on the list. I am interested in asking some
questions about the longevity or 'shelf life' of new media art, as it
affects individual studio practice, curation and archiving-
particularly from the pov of the practitioner. The question of shelf
life as it applies to the currency of ideas or movements or the
historical record is tangential, but could play some role in the
discussion. </font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">First, let me introduce myself: I
am an artist who began her career as a painter, and began working with
digitally manipulated images in the late 80s; I started making
web-based projects and video in the early 90s while continuing to make
still images. I'm interested in the visual language of architecture
and how the built environment and the intrusion of media in public
space shape our psychological sense of place, and ultimately our
behavior and perception. I'm currently working on a series of
still images based on 3D models that are hybrid representations of
constructed urban space. I'm also working on a web project that
reinterprets a series of texts on urbanism through changes of visual
presentation. I am a professor at The City College of New York where I
founded and teach in the BFA of Electronic Design and Multimedia,
although I'm now taking a short turn as Department Chair.</font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">I started thinking about shelf
life some time ago when It became evident that if I was going to
preserve some of my earlier web-based work, I would have to go back
and 'update' it. I did this, but not without some small resentment,
because I prefer spending time making new work as opposed to reworking
the past, and also not without some uneasiness that at some future
date I might have to do this all over again. (of course, one response
might have been to leave things alone). I began to look at my video
and print work with a different eye-it had an agreeable stability,
the work was 'finished,' fixed in time, and aside from possible
conservation issues had an independent existence in the
world.</font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br>
Art is not always about object-making, and perhaps for web-based work,
non-objectification is an essential attribute which comes with a
different expectation of the work's lifespan or perpetuation. That may
be true of other kinds of new media practice as well. However I
increasingly am getting the sense that many new media artists have a
kind of retrofit fatigue that has little parallel in other kinds of
artistic practice. There seems to be an odd paradox of 'long
gestation, short lifespan' that seems very particular to new
media.</font><br>
<font size="-1" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">Frequently, in conversations with
students or peers, I've struggled to describe work created in a
technological climate that no longer exists, or tried to give context
to work that was created when some particular web mechanism spawned a
run of very interesting projects that no longer work because the
underlying browser technologies have changed. Not only is the work
literally unavailable, but the creative climate in which it was
created sometimes seems increasingly remote, even after just a few
years.</font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">Ephemerality in art is nothing
new, but perhaps this is a different kind of transience than that of
other modes of art that exist momentarily and then reside in memory or
photo documentation-performance, conceptual art, body art, and
site-specific work come to mind. The Kinetic Art of the 60s was more
purely sculptural; although perhaps it can be better categorized just
as sculpture that came with built-in, future mechanical problems.
While performance or conceptual art can be spontaneous, gestural,
open-ended and casual, that's often not the case of new media
production. Many new media artists work on large-scale projects that
involve a period of research into new technologies, prototyping,
collaborations with others from other disciplines or other practices
for which a long period of development is often the norm.</font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000">Mythically, art objects have been
imagined [or hoped] to have a kind of eternal life. Barring physical
destruction, but acknowledging cultural difference, contextual change,
and continuous reinterpretation, the [traditional] art object has a
kind of inner stability/integrity that defies time. This is often
irrespective of judgments of quality or fashion, but something that
resides in the object itself, an indissoluble lamination of medium and
idea. The Tamayo painting that recently was found in the trash went
through cycles of loss and discovery, but it remained recognizable as
a painting, and even buried in trash was 'available' to be
rediscovered.</font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br>
What do we claim for new media art? Do works expire when the
technologies that are their raison d'ętre have become commonplace
and are rendered invisible by change? Is there a quality of reduced
shelf life in new media, in which technologies experimented with and
then abandoned or surpassed go the way of Bruce Sterling's Dead Media
Project? And if so, what does that mean for individual studio practice
in this area?<br>
<br>
I'm most curious to hear from those of you who have orphaned
interactive projects, web pieces that break in the current
browsers and garages full of boxed-up installations that run on
equipment that's no longer produced.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Annette Weintraub<br>
http://www.annetteweintraub.com</font></div>
<div><font size="-1" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
</body>
</html>