articles...
Web art museum vs. Traditional art museum
May 3, 10:24 PM · Jo Choi
Museums conserve and display for purposes of studying education and enjoying collections of objects of cultural or scientific significance. (ICOM, UNESCO) In recent decades, they have undergone vast and rapid social and cultural changes owing to the birth of innovative developments in the Art world. Different museums have their distinct missions, whereas they share a common traditional goal for cultural development and enlightenment of people. Due to the rapid technological growth, many digital galleries and web art museums emerged. This emergence does fulfill the traditional mission. They select, collect, preserve and make accessible ‘the accumulated wisdom of the world’ by offering broad public access to a wide range of aesthetic, historical and cultural documents that ‘enable individuals to pursue learning at their own personal levels of interest, preparation, ability and desire, and help ensure the free trade in ideas and the right of dissent.’ (NYPL Digital Gallery) Besides, they also deliver diverse online exhibitions showing high-quality artworks and provide marketing places for promoting and selling artifacts. Artworks on digital galleries are created with graphics programs that are highly realistic or hypermediated. It often generates a fantastic effect. A strong sense for immediacy and dreaming imagination can be gained. (Bolter and Grusin 2000) Ippolito also states that despite the constraints on bandwidth and processor speed, it sometimes conversely encourage digital artworks to be made for distributing content rather than linear narrative, and seeking conceptual elegance rather than theatrical overkill. Therefore, digital galleries and web art museums can well co-exist with traditional museums.
The Country Artist
The Internet Art Gallery
Undoubtedly, the existence of digital galleries and museums benefit the development of museum-works. However, one should not be overlooked that visiting traditional museum physically is still an invaluable and relaxing learning journey. We experience real objects and create our artworks – all can explore our creativity and make a lasting impression. (Burcaw 1997; Chris Smith and David Blunkett 2000) Indeed, the status of traditional museum cannot be substituted. On the contrary, for the digital galleries and museums, the balance of techniques and education and who should have the professional right to manage them are vital issues to be seriously considered. Besides, I agree with Gauntlett that digital arts, its reproducible artworks and its side-effect on people of visiting museums physically, somewhat help undermine the ‘aura’ in traditional museums.
References:
Burcaw George Ellis. (1997). Introduction to museum work, Walnut Creek, Calif. ; London: Altamira Press.
Gauntlett D. and Horsley R. (2004). Web.Studies, New York: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Limited.
Great Britain. Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport. (2000). The learning power of museums: a vision for museum education, London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Department for Education and Employment.
Jon Ippolito (2002). Ten Myths of Internet Art. Source: LEONARDO, Vol. 35. No. 5, pp. 485-498. Last accessed: 05.04.2007
Art in cyberspace
May 3, 09:08 PM · Jo Choi
Kac suggests that Internet with great hypermedia quality enables the exchange of messages between distant people. Its wide-ranging and wide-spreading broadcasting feature brings about different forms of interactive Internet art. Meanwhile, dialogue and debate around art issues are also stimulated. Furthermore, different media artists would break out barriers from geographical locations, physical presence, and cultural bias and work in collaboration to nurture the Art world. So, the decrepitude of unidirectional and highly centralized forms of media and communication can be inhibited. (Kac 1995)
Undoubtedly, Internet art has become more popular in our everyday life. In order to gain a wider acceptance of mainstream to a larger culture, it is vital to consider the quality of the content, the innovation, the creativity and the sense of novelty finally leading to a contribution to the society. (Sisario 2004) Simultaneously, some aspects which cannot be overlooked: the emergence of incomprehensible digital artworks abstracting the Art world and the enormous amount of reproducible artworks – all are harmful to the Art world as well as the enhancement of the intellectual human development. (Gauntlett and Horsley 2004)
An Internet art project: Whitney Artport The Whitney Museum Portal to Net Art
References:
Gauntlett D. and Horsley R. (2004). Web.Studies, New York: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Limited.
Jon Ippolito (2002). Ten Myths of Internet Art. Source: LEONARDO, Vol. 35. No. 5, pp. 485-498. Last accessed: 05.04.2007
Temple N., Darach J., Rosch V. (ED) (2004). the:global:ideas:book, London: Institute for Social Inventions.
Developing Impossibilities
May 3, 05:57 PM · Susan Agnew
Katherine Hayles warns that there is a focus on information in our society, which has led to a devaluation of materiality and embodiment (Hayles, 1999, p.48)p.48). Eliminating the body in cyberspace reduces humans to bits of information and therefore suseptible to control and manipulation (Hayles, 1999, p.42).
The interdependance of information and materiality is evident in Simon Penny’s work Petit Mal, in which the content and form are integrated. This work manifests ways we interact physically and emotionally with machines and are changed in the process. The functionality of this work is human behaviour and by interacting, the participant and Petit Mal learn to accommodate and anticipate each others response.
Conscious of the origins of computing systems, Penny does not seek to control Petit Mal. Petit Mal is able to embark on its own journeys and through these experiences develops a “personality”.
Evident in this work is a phenomenological stance where the body is the essential condition and source of knowledge. The phenomenological body is ambiguous with constant interplay between external and internal(Vassleau, 1998, p.24). In this way it is open and intertwined with the world.
Penny sees the Cartesian split as responsible for the view that the machine is the form to be filled with software content. Similary, educator Paulo Freire is critical of the dichotomous view that humans are separate from the world. This he feels has led to the Banking Concept of education in which information about the world has simply to be put into the passive pupil (Freire, 1970, p.2)
Petit Mal presents learning through experience in which the body and interaction play an active part. Given the complexity of interactions, control over the outcome (as aimed at in the banking system) is impossible (Biesta p.150).
This questions the level of control in our society and Modernisms desire for certainty.
Drawing on Derrida, Biesta states that impossibility is not the opposite of possible (Biesta, p.159). Recognising that what we are striving for is impossible releases …
References:
Biesta, G. (2005) “What Can Critical Pedagogy Learn From Postmodernism?” in Gur-Ze’ev, I. (ed.) Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today Haifa: University of Haifa
Freire, P. (2007) The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education http://www.thinkingtogether.org/rcream/old/F2004/Comp/freire.pdf last accessed 01.05.07
Hayles, K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Vassleau C. (1998) Textures of Light, London: Routledge
Shifting Connections
May 3, 02:40 PM · Susan Agnew
Nothing can ever be simple, absolute identity with itself; identity always relies on something else (Woodward, 1997, p.9). As some differences are marked, others are obscured. Identities exclude but are not exclusive.
Marilyn Friedman presents a view of the self as inherently social; identity is constantly forming in and through relationships and networks of relationships (Friedman, 1993, p.68). The complex entanglements of these interactions result in conflicts and differences erupt within the self. Conceptualising the self as social blurs the distinction between self and other (Friedman, 1993, p.68). In this way the self is complex, contradictory and changing. Identity is therefore perpetually a becoming rather than being (Woodward, 1997, p.21).
Virtual communities and online gaming worlds, present opportunities to explore multiple and contrasting aspects of the self. Identity can be played with and [re]created. Sherry Turkle shows that computers make explicit anxieties about identity which were already present (Turkle, 1999).
Friedman suggests that it may be necessary to seek new communities, as those of origin may offer troubling identities (Friedman, 1993, p.250). Communication technologies create opportunities for people to connect in new ways. For Howard Rheingold the seeking of virtual communities is inevitable as traditional public spaces are lost (Rheingold, 1999, p.282).
Both Turkle and Rheingold describe virtual communities which do not take precedence over real life (RL), in which members invest emotionally. The internet offers possibilities to meet people and explore different identities.
As well as modes of interaction changing, Rheingold notes that through using computers new vocabularly is developing (Rheingold, 1999, p.282). If identity is formed through social interaction and language, it follows that any changes to these will affect further changes.
In the process of using computers to explore new relationships and identities, computers change us. Even as we develop and build computers, they are training us, moulding us (Hayles, 1999 p.47). New technologies question what it means to be alive and the distinction between human and machine (Turkle, 1999, p.301/302).
References:
Friedman, M. (1993), What Are Friends For?, New York: Cornell University Press
Hayles, K. (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Rheingold, H (1999), “The Virtual Community: finding connection in a computerised world” in Mackay H. & O’Sullivan, T. (eds.) The Media Reader: Continuity and Transformation, London: Sage
Turkle, S (1999), “Identity in the Age of the Internet, in Mackay H. & O’Sullivan, T. (eds.) The Media Reader: Continuity and Transformation, London: Sage
Woodward, K. (1997), “Concepts of Identity and Difference” in Woodward, K. (ed.) Identity and Difference, London: Sage
jam is sticky
May 2, 01:44 PM · Susan Agnew
Some social commentators have show how the power of mass media can be used creatively for direct action. Organisations such as RTMark have launched successful campaigns against large corporations employing mass media tactics such as press releases and attention grabbing stories.
Sheller and Ury have commented that many critics blame the decline in democratic participation on erosure of the public and private spheres (Sheller and Ury, 2003, p.114). Arguably this slippage can promote participation by highlighting that what we do in our private lives matters publicly.
A small act can have implications across the globe; globalisation has not effaced the local but connected it to a larger network.
As Sheller and Ury note, some groups such as Reclaim the Streets activists see “the political significance of a private that is at once public” (Sheller and Ury, 2003, p.120).
Significantly, the examples given by Sheller and Ury are all of people working together against large corporations. Together people can ‘jam’ corporate communications networks. Like the medium they use these groups are fluid and mobile existing temporarily. Results can be shared instantaneously around the globe.
Another example of culture jamming is in the parodying of adverts and logos to subvert the corporate message. Such adverts can at first be indistinguishable from their counterparts and as such are surprising and memorable (Nome, 2007).
This anti-corporate activity aims to destroy the value of commercial brands (Nome, 2007). Reputation acts as “symbolic capital or power” (Sheller and Ury, 2003, p.119) as such it is hoped that a threat to a corporations reputation will force them to re-consider their practise, although perhaps not their motivation.
Such tactics adopt the language and mechanisms of large corporations. However, socially conscious groups should be cautious of adopting a vocabulary that may ultimately consume them.
References:
Nome, D. (2007) Culture Jamming http://www.anthrobase.com/txt/N/Nome_D_01.htm last accessed 04.05.07
Sheller, M. and Ury, J. (2003), “Mobile transformations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life” in Theory, Culture and Society, vol.2 no. 2, pp.205-228