+DIGITAL OBJECTS: Katarina Soukup+

RHIZOME recently asked Katarina Soukup of Studio XX, a women's digital
media resource centre in Montreal, Quebec, to contribute to DIGITAL
OBJECTS, a feature series that explores the place of new media art in
the gallery. Interviews with gallerists and curators offer critical
appraisals of new media art by arts presenters on an international
level.

+ + +

RHIZOME: How would you define "new media art?"

Katarina Soukup: New Media is work that not only employs new
technologies such as computers, networks, digital production, but also
takes advantage of the potential for *interactive* art that these
technologies offer.

R: What challenges or issues need to be addressed when presenting new
media projects in traditional art spaces?

KS: I think art projects employing digital and network technologies, for
instance, will force artists to confront several challenges to the way
they traditionally create and exhibit their work. One thing that new
media such as the Internet & WWW challenge is the whole notion of
authorship and the integrity of artwork. When you incorporate your
photos, sound pieces, or graphic design into a web page, for instance,
the process of 'browsing' entails making a digital copy of them on a
remote hard drive. This raises interesting questions about the
reproducibility of an art work: Benjamin argued that through mass
reproduction, art loses its 'aura', but what if it's an exact digital
copy? Is the aura lost? Can digital art even have an aura?

Beyond this, work for the WWW entails other questions surrounding the
reproducibility of art. Since the audience has access to an exact
digital copy of an artist's work, it can be altered, modified,
embellished, distored and 're-cycled' if that person so wishes. Indeed,
the web is increasingly confounding traditional definitions of
copyright. As someone who has always been interested in poaching,
piracy, "illegitimate" art like scratch video, and bricolage, I don't
see this as necessarily a bad thing for artists. If anything, it exposes
the creative process for what it is: flowing from the inspiration,
integration, and sometimes direct citation of disparate elements, from
books, films, the media, conversations, to the work of other artists.

This interactive potential means that art can no longer be seen as
beginning & ending with the individual artist, but rather, involving a
larger public (something I think has always existed, but which new media
has a hand in making more explicit). Iain Cook, a web designer and sound
artist I know, told me that doing art for/with the web means "letting
go", relinquishing ownership and authorship of your work. Artists who
want to use digital and network media may have to come to have a less
proprietory relationship to their art.

For me, the most exciting projects in new media are therefore those that
really explore & problematize the concept of 'interactivity' (something
that has been hyped ad nauseum in the marketing around new
technologies). This means integrating the public as an active co-creator
in a work, whether in the gallery or on the web. Ever since I was young,
I've been disappointed with gallery set ups which distance the public by
cordonning off the art. How I've longed to run my (admittedly grubby)
fingers over, say, the lumpy texture of a painting, or even to smell it!

[…]

R: Is your space presenting or planning to present any new media
projects?

KS: I'm currently involved with Studio XX, a women's digital media
resource centre in Montreal, Quebec. We've been in existence since 1995
and are a loose collective of "feminist techno-perverts": women artists,
activists, and academics interested in exploring, critiquing and playing
with new media and digital technologies. Beyond supporting and
displaying women's creative use of new technologies, we are committed to
demystifying the 'hype' surrounding new media such as the Internet and
WWW. We do this by employing art & performance to critique the rapidly
changing world of digital media. We are interested in playing with the
internal characteristics and exploring the possibilities new media
offers artists, but feel it's crucial to connect these new forms of
communication to wider social and cultural questions.

[…]

Studio XX info: http://www.internauts.ca/~studioxx/index.html
studioxx@internauts.ca