RHIZOME DIGEST: 09.22.06

discussion

Posted Sept. 21 2006 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 09.22.06

RHIZOME DIGEST: September 22, 2006 Content: +note+ 1. Lauren Cornell: WiredNEXTFest – discounted tickets for Rhizome Members +opportunity+ 2. Kathleen Quillian: Call for Proposals - LMJ 17: My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo 3. digital@junction.co.uk: New Technology Public Art Commission 4. emwod33@hotmail.com: URBAN PLAY - Trampoline - Call for Submissions +announcement+ 5. Cary Peppermint: Open Enrollment: The Department of Network Performance 6. marcin ramocki: 8 BIT: world premiere at Moma 7. eb@randomseed.org: Interface and Society: conference, performances and exhibition +comment+ 8. Rob Myers: Open Source Art Again +Commissioned by Rhizome.org for KEYLINES+ 9. Patrick Lichty: New Media as Genre: Two Reflections, Parts 1 and 2 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome is now offering Organizational Subscriptions, group memberships that can be purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions allow participants at institutions to access Rhizome's services without having to purchase individual memberships. For a discounted rate, students or faculty at universities or visitors to art centers can have access to Rhizome?s archives of art and text as well as guides and educational tools to make navigation of this content easy. Rhizome is also offering subsidized Organizational Subscriptions to qualifying institutions in poor or excluded communities. Please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/org.php">http://rhizome.org/info/org.php</a> for more information or contact Lauren Cornell at LaurenCornell@Rhizome.org + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. From: Lauren Cornell <laurencornell@rhizome.org> Date: Sep 15, 2006 Subject: WiredNEXTFest – discounted tickets for Rhizome Members Hi, This year?s WIRED NextFest is happening at the Javits Center in New York from September 29th through October 1. Rhizome Members receive a 40% discount on tickets, all details are below. If you?re interested, please email tickets@rhizome.org with ?WIREDNextFest? in the subject line. Thanks! Lauren Executive Director Rhizome ++++++++++ Rhizome members receive 40% off General Admission Tickets to WIRED NextFest WIRED Magazine invites NYAS members to attend the third annual WIRED NextFest, at Javits Center, in New York City. WIRED NextFest is the premier event on future technology in the U.S., featuring over 125 exhibits on the future of communication, design, entertainment, exploration, green, health, play, security and transportation. WIRED NextFest, WIRED?s vision of a new world?s fair, is open to the general public from Friday, September 29th through Sunday, October 1. WIRED NextFest Friday, September 29,2006 Hours: 9 AM to 6 PM Saturday, September 30, 2006 Hours: 9 AM to 6 PM Sunday, October 1, 2006 Hours: 9 AM to 3 PM Javits Center, Hall 3B New York City Futuristic exhibits include robots, flying cars, private space planes, fuel-cell concept cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, hypersonic sound beams and much more, from inventors, companies and R&D labs around the world. Rhizome members can purchase tickets to WIRED NextFest by visiting www.nextfest.net <<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.nextfest.net">http://www.nextfest.net</a>> and entering the promo code RZNFDSC. Tickets cost just $12, that?s 40% off the regular general admission price. You must purchase your tickets online at nextfest.net to receive the 40% discount. For more information on WIRED NextFest, go to www.nextfest.net + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. From: Kathleen Quillian <isast@leonardo.info> Date: Sep 19, 2006 Subject: Call for Proposals - LMJ 17: My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo Leonardo Music Journal Call for Proposals LMJ 17: My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo If, as Marshall McLuhan so famously suggested, the medium is the message, then the gizmo must be the one-liner. From baroque violinists to laptoppers, sound artists have long fetishized the tools of their trade, the mere naming of which can provoke an instant reaction: Shout "LA-2A," "TR-808," "JTM45" or "Tube Screamer" in a room full of musicians, and you will notice the eyes brighten, the breath shorten and the anecdotes pour forth. But only to a point: Many a "secret weapon" is held close to the chest. This is the chance to get that secret off your chest: LMJ 17 will address the significance of physical objects in music and sound art in a time of increasing emphasis on software and file exchange. We are soliciting papers (2,000–5,000 words) and briefer artist's statements (500-1,000 words) on the role of purchased or homemade instruments, effect boxes, pieces of studio gear, "bent" toys, self-built circuits, and so on, in your work as a composer, performer, artist, producer, recording engineer, etc. Wherever possible, please include photographs of your subjects (300 ppi TIFFs preferred). Please submit a brief proposal by 23 October 2006 to Nicolas Collins at <ncollins@artic.edu>. Final texts and all materials (text, image, sound file) must be received by 2 January 2007. Contact Nicolas Collins <ncollins@artic.edu> with any questions. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. From: digital@junction.co.uk <digital@junction.co.uk> Date: Sep 20, 2006 Subject: New Technology Public Art Commission The Junction in Cambridge, UK, is seeking to commission an artist (individual or collective) to produce an innovative and exciting high profile public artwork encompassing new technologies for the south façade of its original auditorium. This is the second of two commissions funded by Turnstone Partners and Arts Council England East for the site, the first being Bins and Benches by Greyworld in 2005. Expressions of interest are invited from artists, to be received before the 1st October 2006. The budget for this commission is £60,000 (to include fee, production and installation costs). For more information, including a detailed brief, please see www.junction.co.uk/publicart + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Support Rhizome: buy a hosting plan from BroadSpire <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/hosting/">http://rhizome.org/hosting/</a> Reliable, robust hosting plans from $65 per year. Purchasing hosting from BroadSpire contributes directly to Rhizome's fiscal well-being, so think about about the new Bundle pack, or any other plan, today! About BroadSpire BroadSpire is a mid-size commercial web hosting provider. After conducting a thorough review of the web hosting industry, we selected BroadSpire as our partner because they offer the right combination of affordable plans (prices start at $14.95 per month), dependable customer support, and a full range of services. We have been working with BroadSpire since June 2002, and have been very impressed with the quality of their service. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. From: emwod33@hotmail.com <emwod33@hotmail.com> Date: Sep 21, 2006 Subject: URBAN PLAY - Trampoline - Call for Submissions Trampoline Nottingham ? Platform for New Media Art Call for Submissions Urban Play www.trampoline.org.uk Deadline: 23rd October Event to be held on 23rd November The Theme - Urban Play: The city is paved with pixels, the flow of traffic becomes the flow of bits, the flow of people, the flow of electrons. Streets and circuit diagrams become meshed. The race has begun. Each one of us becomes a player in the game of the city, furiously manipulating the control pad, tapping buttons, flicking switches. Leaping from platforms, scaling the walls ? the concrete/media playground is before us. Hurtling around corners, lunging up surfaces, shooting through the streets. Join the rush and surge of the city, find new ways to play the game. Trampoline invites you to participate in ?Urban Play? a one day event held on 23rd November in Nottingham, UK. Its objective is to merge video gaming, art and design with the investigation of the city space. The structures of the city are increasingly pervaded by new media with screens, cctv, electronic networks, mobile devices, implements often designed to control our movement through urban space and even to remove us from our surroundings. We wish to investigate how new media can form an even tighter relationship with our immediate environment ? challenge and subvert its conventional structures ? hacking the city. What we are looking for: We are searching for work which explores urban space and methods of play, in particular projects which combine these areas in examining and utilising new media elements of the city, We invite you to submit proposals of urban games, creative computer games, video, interactive installation, audio guides, sound, music and performance ? exploring play, gaming, new media and the city. We especially encourage the submission of participatory works which promote a high degree of audience involvement ? this includes informal exploratory workshops as well as completed projects. Key points to focus the proposal on are: · The relation between the work and the city · The element of play and · Its encouragement of audience participation How to Submit work: Please fill in the Submission Form, downloadable from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.trampoline.org.uk/Applicationform.doc">http://www.trampoline.org.uk/Applicationform.doc</a> Submissions should include: Images/documentation/videofootage Description of work CV Please note for those submitting video works: We would request that you send the full version of your video works in PAL avi data format if possible Deadline to submit proposals is October 23rd 06 Submissions should be postmarked by this date Please send your applications to: Emma Lewis Trampoline 14-18 Broadway Media Centre Broad Street Nottingham NG1 3AL UK Urban Play intends to challenge our notions of gaming and the city; Going beyond the playstation Going beyond the screen Going beyond the wall Any queries please contact Emma Lewis emma@trampoline.org.uk +44 (0)115 8409272 Notes: ·We will not be able to pay for artists' travel costs to Nottingham ·Work, which requires production budgets or extensive set-up times, cannot be taken on. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. From: Cary Peppermint <snp@restlessculture.net> Date: Sep 19, 2006 Subject: Open Enrollment: The Department of Network Performance Open Enrollment 9.19.2006 The Department of Network Performance <a rel="nofollow" href="http://myspace.com/deptofnetworkperformance">http://myspace.com/deptofnetworkperformance</a> Network Performance - Arts 404.JO Times: Ongoing, Always, 24-7 Professor: C. Peppermint Dept. of Network Performance Fall 2006 - current Course Outline This is not MySpace. This is Arts 404.JO, simultaneously a networked course and performance intended to assist students in the conceptualization, development, and implementation of online instances of networked performance-art practices. Course Requirements and Objectives (1) Arts 404.JO is an information-arts course titled "Network Performance Art - Arts 404.JO" Arts 404.JO is intended for: Artists, Hackers, Cultural Purveyors, Imaginative Housewives, Creative Construction Workers, Creative Workers, Creative Chocolatiers, Urban Homesteaders and Back to the Land Types, Special Teachers, Special Education Teachers Who are Fighting Corporate / State Mandates, Cosmopolitan Farmers, Innovative People and Animals, Eco-minded Global Citizens, Cultural Readers, Whole Food Eaters, Savvy Art Critics, Curators, and Art Historians Who Aren't Afraid to Ride In The Back of Pick-up Trucks, Cyborg Mycologists, AIs Masquerading As Musicians, Information DJs, Print-makers, Painters and Ceramicists Who Set Information Free, etc. For more info: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://myspace.com/deptofnetworkperformance">http://myspace.com/deptofnetworkperformance</a> *** Image for Blog posting *** <img src=?<a rel="nofollow" href="http://restlessculture.net/images/dnp1.jpg">http://restlessculture.net/images/dnp1.jpg</a>?> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. From: marcin ramocki <mramocki@earthlink.net> Date: Sep 19, 2006 8 BIT a documentary about art and video games Premiering October 7th in New York at the Museum of Modern Art (8 pm) (212) 708-9400 11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, New York, NY. Second screening: Wednesday, Oct 11, 8.30pm Marcin Ramocki ? Director/Original Concept Justin Strawhand - Producer/Co-Director organized by Barbara London poster design by Eboy Featuring: Cory Arcangel, Isabelle Arvers, Bit Shifter, Bodenstandig 2000, Bubblyfish, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, Gameboyzz Orchestra, GLOMAG, Rachel Green, Ed Halter, Paul Johnson, John Klima, Johan Kotlinski,Nullsleep, Joe McKay, Tom Moody, Christiane Paul, Akiko Sakaizumi, Eddo Stern, teamtendo,Treewave, Carlo Zanni + additional artwork by Chiaki, Jodi, John Simon, Velvet Strike and many more. 8 BIT is a hybrid documentary examining the influence of video games on contemporary culture. A mélange of a rocumentary, art expose and a culture-critical investigation, 8 BIT ties together seemingly disconnected phenomena like the 80?s demo scene, chiptune music and contemporary artists using machinima and modified games. Produced in NYC, LA, Paris and Tokyo, 8 BIT brings a global perspective on the new artistic approaches of the DIY generation which grew up playing Atari and Commodore 64. Some of the artists featured in 8 BIT include Cory Arcangel, BIT SHIFTER, Bodenstandig 2000, Bubblyfish, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, Glomag, Paul Johnson, John Klima, Johan Kotlinski, Nullsleep, Joe McKay, Tom Moody, Akiko Sakaizumi, Eddo Stern, TEAMTENDO, Treewave and Carlo Zanni. With the help of media critic Ed Halter and new media curator and writer Christiane Paul, these very recent artistic strategies are put in the historical context of modernist and postmodernist discourse and examined as potential examples of a transition into fresh, uncharted territory. 8 BIT insists that in the 21st century Game-Boy rock, machinima and game theory belong together and share a common root: the digital heritage of Generation X. www.8bitmovie.com + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 7. From: eb@randomseed.org <eb@randomseed.org> Date: Sep 20, 2006 Subject: Interface and Society: conference, performances and exhibition INTERFACE and SOCIETY investigates artistic practices and strategies that deal with the transformation of our everyday life through electronic interfaces. CONFERENCE: 10th and 11th of November EXHIBITION: 10th to 19th of November PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITION OPENING: 10th of November at 20h PLACE: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway See <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.anart.no">http://www.anart.no</a> for detailed information. + CONFERENCE 10TH AND 11TH OF NOVEMBER Erich Berger (at/fi) - Interface and Society Bruce Sterling (us/cs) - Spime: a map of ideas Susanne Jaschko (de) - On the virtuality of public space Laura Beloff (fi) - Not imagined, it is real Per Platou (no) - Failure is success (is failure) Truls Lie (no) - On Guattaris concept of the "machin" as the mental and social apparatus that directs our everyday praxis Adam Greenfield (us) - Everyware: Some thoughts on the social and ethical implications of ubiquitous computing. Artificial Paradise (uk) - Instruction Sets Marius Watz (no/de) - It`s all about the software, baby Sabine Seymour (at/us) - The Epidermis as Interface, Dynamic Textile Surfaces See schedule, ticket information and lecture abstracts at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.anart.no">http://www.anart.no</a> PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITION OPENING FRIDAY 10TH OF NOVEMBER AT 20H Art by Accident (Kalle Grude, Jan L&#65533;chst&#65533;er) (no) Franz Alken and Karl Rueskaefer (de/uk) Artificial Paradise (uk) Norene Leddy (with technical lead Andrew Milmoe) (us) Agnes Meyer-Brandis (de) Silver Daniel Skoglund (se) Leonardo Solaas (ar) Marius Watz (no/de) See detailed information on the performances and exhibition at http:// www.anart.no + INTERFACE AND SOCIETY In our everyday life we constantly have to cope more or less successfully with interfaces. We use the mobile phone, the mp3 player, and our laptop, in order to gain access to the digital part of our life. In recent years this situation has lead to the creation of new interdisciplinary subjects like Interaction Design or Physical Computing. Currently we live between two worlds, our physical environment and the digital space. Technology and its digital space are our second nature and the interfaces are our points of access to this techno sphere. This division will dissolve into a seamless distribution of information technology into most aspects of our life, advertised as ubiquitous computing. Immaterial information and physical objects will fuse into an Internet of Things. Our world will transform into an interface as a whole. Since artists started working with technology they have been developing interfaces and modes of interaction. The interface itself became an artistic thematic in its technical, social and political dimensions. INTERFACE and SOCIETY investigates artistic strategies and practices which deal with and build upon the transformation of our everyday life through information technology and electronic interfaces. With the rapid technological development a thoroughly critique of the interface towards society is necessary. The contribution of the artist thereby is relevant. S/he takes the freedom to deal with technologies beyond form, function and usability. The utilisation of an eclectic range of strategies and practices guaranties a diversity of results. + Interface and Society is produced by Atelier Nord in collaboration with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and Le Monde Diplomatique (Nordic Edition). Supported by Arts Council Norway and Freedom of Expression Foundation, Oslo. Trolleys provided by ISS Lufthavnservice AS + See <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.anart.no">http://www.anart.no</a> for detailed information. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org 2005-2006 Net Art Commissions The Rhizome Commissioning Program makes financial support available to artists for the creation of innovative new media art work via panel-awarded commissions. For the 2005-2006 Rhizome Commissions, eleven artists/groups were selected to create original works of net art. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/commissions/">http://rhizome.org/commissions/</a> The Rhizome Commissions Program is made possible by support from the Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial, the Greenwall Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support has been provided by members of the Rhizome community. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 8. From: Rob Myers <rob@robmyers.org> Date: Sep 22, 2006 Subject: Open Source Art Again Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of ?commons based peer production?. This means work made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals. For Eric Raymond the virtue of Open Source is its efficiency. Open Source can create better products faster than the old closed source model. Many of the most successful software programs in use today, particularly on the internet, are Open Source. Applying the ideas of Open Source to other projects, be they political, philosophical or artistic, is more difficult than it might seem. The idea of Open Source as a more efficient means of production has nothing to say about what Open Source politics or art should be like. To take the example of the Open Congress event at Tate Modern, artists struggled to find an Open Source ideology to apply to their art, activists struggled to find an Open Source ideology to apply to their organisations, and theorists grinned and invoked Deleuze and Spinoza to cover the gaps. This confusion is not a problem with the idea of Open Source. Rather it is the intended result of it. The name ?Open Source? was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness and ideological vacuity. This was intended to make the results of a very strong ideology more palatable to large corporations by disguising its origins. That ideology is Free Software. Free Software is a set of principles designed to protect the freedom of individuals to use computer software. It emerged in the 1980s against a backdrop of increasing restrictions on the use and production of software. Free Software can therefore be understood historically and ethically as the defence of freedom against a genuine threat. Once software users freedoms are protected the methodology that we know as Open Source becomes possible and its advantages become apparent. But without the guiding principles of Free Software the neccessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which taasks are neccessary or important. Free Software requires freedom, which is a practical goal to pursue. Free Software is a historical development, a set of principles, and a set of possibilities. Free Software projects have converged on the methodology that Raymond describes as Open Source because of this. To describe this methodology as ?commons based peer production? causes further confusion. There are no peers in a Free Software project. If contributions are deemed to be of acceptable quality, they are added to the project by its appointed gatekeepers. If not, they are rejected and advice given. This methodology is a structured and exclusive one, but it is meritocratic. Any contribution of sufficient quality can be accepted, and if someone makes enough such contributions they themselves may gain the trust required to become a gatekeeper. This confusion leads to projects such as Wikipedia trying to create an open space for anyone to use as they wish. This leads to social darwinism, not freedom, as the contents of that space is determined by a battle of wills. Wikipedia has had to evolve to reproduce many of the structures of a real Free Software project to tackle these problems. But people still regard its earlier phase as a model for emulation, whereas it should serve as more of a warning. It is therefore the condition of Freedom rather than the condition of Open Source that art should aspire to. Prior to the extension of copyright to cover art as well as literature, art was implicitly free. The physical artefacts of art were expensive to own and difficult or impossible to transport. But the content of art was free to use. Michaelangelo could rip off christian and pagan imagery to paint a ceiling, generations of artists could riff on the theme of the cruxifiction, and anyone could carve a statue of Venus. The representational freedom of artists, part of which is the freedom to depict and build or comment on existing culture, to continue the conversation of culture, is the freedom of art. With photography and now electronic media, copyright and trademarks have increasingly restricted the artists freedom to continue the conversation of culture. Where once artists could paint gods and kings, they must now be careful not to paint chocolate and the colour purple or they will infringe Cadbury?s trademark. And new computer technology makes it possible to physically lock artists out of mass media imagery, closing off part of the world from art?s freedom of representation. In this context artists are not volunteers when they take on issues of cultural freedom. They are exemplars. Free art, a free culture, is of vital importance for a free society. Part of this freedom may be ideas of ?commons based peer production?. But it is important not to confuse the results of an ideology with its principles. It is these principles that artists should pursue. How then can art learn from Free Software? * Artists should campaigning to oppose the extension of copyright and trademark law and the reduction of fair use. * Artists should use copyleft licensing to ensure the free circulation of ideas. * Artists who are interested to do so can investigate the use of collaborative project management. * Artists who are interested to do so should produce work to show the value of fair use and the public domain. * Artists who are interested to do so should challenge copyright maximalists and censors by using mass media imagery and transgressive imagery. * Artists should use Free Software and free (or ?open?) file formats for accessibility, and help drive improvement of them. What mistakes of Open Source can people avoid? * Read ?Free Software Free Society? and ?Free Culture?, not ?The Cathedral And The Bazaar?. * Don?t try to organise your organisation in an ?Open Source? way. That methodology is for content, not structure. * Don?t try to emulate early Wikipedia?s world-writeability. Emulate the meritocratic model that Wikipedia is converting to instead. * Don?t hide your ideology. Renaming ?Free Software? to ?Open Source? has cost the people who have done so the biggest software market in the US, as the military are much more comfortable with ?freedom? than they are with ?openness?. What are good examples? * Joy Garnett. * Kollabor8. * Open Clip Art Library. * Remix Reading. * Me. ;-) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 9. From: Patrick Lichty +Commissioned by Rhizome.org+ For KEYLINES, a Project of Rhizome's Tenth Anniversary Festival of Art & Technology <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.rhizome.org/events/tenyear/keylines.rhiz">http://www.rhizome.org/events/tenyear/keylines.rhiz</a> +Please visit KEYLINES to respond or post your own essay!+ "New Media as Genre: Two Reflections," Parts 1 and 2 By Patrick Lichty genre noun A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. category noun ( pl. -ries) 1. a class or division of people or things regarded as having particular shared characteristics : five categories of intelligence. 2. Philosophy: one of a possibly exhaustive set of classes among which all things might be distributed. _ one of the a priori conceptions applied by the mind to sense impressions. _ a relatively fundamental philosophical concept. -Oxford American Dictionary, from my MacBook I- QUERY: Ever since its emergence, New Media has resisted definitive categorization, as in seeking to do so many questions arise. What 'media' constitute New Media? How do these media combine to create forms that we can determine aesthetic and formal criteria from which concerned parties can have a basis for critical discussion? Is New Media only Web-, or Net-based? How does New Media (sic) locate itself within the larger discourse of Art History? And, as a mild satire, how long can one justify calling New Media "New"? Will it, after Dietz and Cook, be called "The Art Formerly Known as New Media"(1), "Pretty New Media, but Not As New as it Used to Be, but that's OK", or some other nomenclature? Of course, each of these questions begs a discussion in itself, but are only posed to make a point or drive a polemic. New Media, for the strength of its fluidity in form, and the resultant communities that have formed around it, also has the drawback of being difficult to categorize because of its chimaerical quality. So, when considers New Media as genre, there is the general problem of categorizing that which resists reduction to a singular class of forms. I will not return to the stream of queries that issued forth earlier, but merely state that New Media's openness returns very context-specific answers to the interrogator. Lev Manovich, comes as close as anyone has to defining New Media in his book, The Language of New Media.(2) In it, he posits five definitive aspects of the form, numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. The problem in creating such definitions is liked to the sheer diversity of the field. For example, Manovich's criteria are well suited to the context of screen-based New Media, but exceptions begin to pop up everywhere - robotic works (Feingold et al), purely algorithmic forms that do not use databases, and so on. This leads this author to suggest reducing his criteria even further to numerical representation, computation/automation, time, and perhaps transcoding, which conversely broadens our search for categorization. That is, if a non-context sensitive categorization can be done at all. At this point in our investigation, it appears that New Media is the epistemic slippery pig at the county fair, popping out of our grasp the moment one thinks they have a firm grip on the situation. Again, let us ask the question again as to whether New Media can be considered as genre, given our assumptions regarding its fluidity and only our few general criteria. Perhaps New Media reflects the recursive and inclusive nature of the culture from which it came. That is, in programming parlance, there can be sets of criteria that are then defined by subsets of other criteria and parameters (as in object-oriented programming), which could also be set by others. Another way to think of this is a big Venn diagram that has one, large, ill-defined circle that, within it, holds other smaller, equally ill-defined circles, and so on. Perhaps what is more definitive is Martin Wattenberg's IdeaLine (3), a fluid, bifurcating tree of genres and event-sites that are contained within the overall rubric of the IdeaLine itself, like a Barr-esque art-genealogical underwater crinoid. From this, what seems to be one of the most compelling works to define New Media itself is one that exhibits a fairly fluid, inclusive, and equally recursive set of categories that suggest broad fields of formal exploration, rather than a canonical definition. II - THE MORPHOLOGY OF NEW MEDIA Perhaps one of the problems in the categorization of New Media is the way one seeks to define it. Since one of the essential qualities of New Media is Time, then can we not assume that the nature of New Media as such has evolved, or better yet, morphed over time? This is the thought of this author, and I would like to suggest an alternative schema as part of our inquiry regarding the nature of New Media. This will include my thought of New Media as Genre, Medium, and future as Movement. Some of these ideas have not fully manifested themselves, and others can only be argued for phenomenologically, as even I sometimes disagree with the definitions that I am about to propose. Therefore, I ask the reader to consider the following as possibility but not as an authoritative speculation on the nature of New Media as genre. In the early days that I was involved with technological art in the 80s and early 90s, there wasn't even a definition as clear as New Media for this broad field of artistic engagement. There was "Cyber-Art", "Techno-Art", "Computer Art", and so on. Communities of digital artists existed in pockets on bulletin boards and online communities like CompuServe, Delphi, Prodigy, and so on, but these were still isolated pockets of interest. However, after the advent of the Web in 1994, online communities like Rhizome and The Thing emerged that created larger communities with an intense interest in the developing potential of new digital forms, and worked openly among themselves to help one another develop them. >From this, New Media emerged as a genre defined by its community rather than its form. It seemed like there were a profusion of different technologies that could be used for artistic engagement that just had not been used before. I believe that at the time most of the listserv denizens were less intent on defining themselves or their methods than trying to figure out what tools and methods were available, and further still, possible. However, in the double bind of increasing recognition through major international exhibitions, a field that had once been an extremely tight niche with no criteria gained greater visibility, In addition, it also defined sub-genres like Net.art, Web Art, Browser Art, and so on that (more or less) are included in the criteria of New Media but are not definitive of the form(s). By the turn of the millennium, New Media emerged as a descriptor for a wide field of computational arts, and this essay suggests that as of 2006, only broad consensus exists for the definition of this odd 'genre of genres'. However, in the last few years, I have heard the term New Media as 'medium', as awkward as that sounds. This is the phenomenological quandary I have with such a definition; what does it mean to define New Media as a medium? I see this as an effort to create an identity for a wide range of practices, as mentioned before, in institutional terms. Academies have programs in Painting, Sculpture, Print, and Photography, but often find it difficult to justify a loose set of practices without defining a 'medium as genre', if I can make so dangerous a distinction. But then, museums have curators of Asian Art, Modern Art, Classical, Medieval, African Art, and so on. While there is a broad consensus on methods and forms within its communities (an New Media Artist probably can't tell you exactly what it is, but they sure know what they do), and institutions try to integrate new categories into their structures, I believe that historians and curators will create another cultural overlay. While communities and institutions have at least begun to integrate sets of practices to create a set of consensus regarding New Media, curators and scholars will seek to historicize the form as New Media ceases to be "New", and other "newer than New" forms emerge. At this point, this will be seen as the establishment of New Media as a historical movement. In some ways this is evident in the formal declaration of New Media as an (albeit loosely) definitive nomenclature that may eventually come to be associated with a general sense of a Movement. As a larger oeuvre is created over time, the overall body of work will come to be associated with a period of time and associated zeitgeist, which may then be considered to define the criteria for that scholarly mnemonic. New Media - a movement in all directions. In this brief couple of pages, I've sought to theorize New Media as a genre that defies categorization as such, a mercuric 'genre of genres' that recurses and shifts like a Schrodinger's Cat whenever you look at it, to a cultural strand that has changed as culture, community, and practices change its form. If an epistemology of New Media follows its developments, forms and effects, perhaps New Media as a 'genre' will continue to be defined in broad terms, but may be more sharply defined as time goes on. But what seems to be evident is that New Media's breadth of practices provides grist for a healthy dialogue on the nature of art, culture and technology; one that is sure to continue. References: 1. "The Art Formerly Known as New Media"September 17 to October 23, 2005, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff New Media Institute, Banff, Alberta, Canada <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibitions/2005/formerly/">http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibitions/2005/formerly/</a> 2. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, (2001) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA 3. Wattenberg, Martin. Idealine, Whitney ArtPort, Whitney Museum of American Art, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/idealine.shtml">http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/idealine.shtml</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Marisa Olson (marisa@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 11, number 36. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. 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