I just realised that I’ve been living with new media technologies as the locum of “what I’m doing in the art world” for the past seven years. And that I’m totally sick of them.
So I deleted 97 feeds from my RSS reader.
What I’m bored of is people who don’t understand the difference between an artistic impulse and a technical idea. They are not the same thing. I also don’t have any great wish to see a large swath of poorly-done art, which is the category that a large amount of new media work falls into. This means that I can rule out seeing artworks that are described by any of the words “gestural control”, “GPS”, “Processing”, or “arduino”. These are technical terms, and as we don’t describe second-rate schlock movies as being an amazing use of processed nitrate film stock, those technical terms should be stricken from the description of any artistic endeavour.
*Disclaimer: there are some people whom I will still listen to their discussion about the technical nitty-gritty.
Comments
3 Comments so far. Comments are closed.Who? Who?
In some cases the terms are descriptive, they describe the media, but not the message(so i am agreeing with you). As two oil paintings will not neccesarily be similar(or even comparable), this holds for arduino, or gps or processing based works. And the media dosent suggest anything about the quality of the piece, just because it contains arduino donsent make it good.
Pete, can you find some text descriptions where these media are in the forefront, would like to see.
Favorite work currently (but is it art?) is http://www.eyewriter.org/ there is technology there but it is subservient to the Idea.
Next time I see a really blatant example, I’ll bring it to your attention.