Fwd:REFRESH! conference, some impressions

[_dream.thick[ener]_]

>I’ve just come back from “REFRESH! The First International Conference on 
>the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology” in Banff. Herewith 
>some brief impressions of the conference.
>
>I am an art historian (and ex-performance/video artist, from the Studio 
>for Interrelated Media at Mass Art) with a longstanding but hitherto 
>relatively untapped interest in new media. My own field of expertise is 
>performance of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Fluxus projects, 
>but I also teach on the early part of the 20th century and am currently 
>leading an advanced seminar on what I call “mechanical transcriptions of 
>the real”­that is, following Kittler, those analog copying technologies 
>that have so defined 20th century experience and inflected much of its 
>art. I attended the conference as an observer, trying to learn more about 
>the subject. What follows is merely a report, but it comes filtered 
>through that complex of interests & preoccupations.
>
>The first thing to be said is that this was an enormously ambitious 
>conference: its four days were packed from morning to evening with panels 
>and events the overall distribution of which, in terms of topics and time, 
>I thought was pretty good, given the mission. Sessions ranged from “media 
>histories” to a session on “collaborative practice/networking” to “history 
>of institutions”; there were 3 keynote addresses­Edmond Couchot, Sarat 
>Maharaj, and Lucia Santaella; a poster session; an optional hike (Banff is 
>in the stunning Canadian Rockies); a walk-through of the media labs; und 
>so weiter. Meals were had communally in the Banff Centre’s dining room, 
>and at least for me, since I knew not a soul at the conference AND felt 
>like what one snooty panelist called a “clueless newbie,” these became 
>interesting moments of social anxiety and unexpected social pleasure. 
>While things did tend to split out into the old pros and the young 
>nothings, they did get a bit more productively mixed up on occasion. 
>Before I launch into the problems with the conference, the feeling I got 
>from those I spoke with was that it was a mixed success but a success 
>overall. I do think the conference provided a very good starting point for 
>something, and this seemed especially true after the final session.
>
>High points of the conference, in no particular order:
>    * Mario Carpo’s paper on architecture in the age of digital 
> reproducibility, which dealt with the shift from a simply additive to an 
> algorithmic modularity in architecture. This was probably the most 
> professionally delivered paper at the conference, as well as the most 
> intelligently amusing, and what Carpo presented as a paradigmatic slide 
> was fascinating, provocative. I learned something.
>    * Philip Thurtle and Claudia Valdes showing footage of Alvin Lucier 
> doing solo for brainwaves. I’ve forgotten what the paper was about, but 
> was thrilled to see the footage and to have the piece presented.
>    * Chris Salter on a history of performance with media, beginning with 
> a fantastically forceful evocation of Russian Constructivis plays. I 
> teach this material, but Salter’s presentation was vigorous and made a 
> very strong case for its inclusion in a “new media” history.
>    * Christiane Paul on curatorial issues with new media. This was also a 
> very professional (by which I mean good, clear, to the point) 
> presentation and very usefully laid out the difficulties involved, from 
> curators having to rebuild settings to house work to problems of bitrot 
> to audience development. Impressive and useful.
>    * Machiko Kusahara on “device art” discussed Japanese aesthetics. This 
> was an art historically thin paper­no discussion of Fluxus, very loose 
> mention of Gutai and then Tanaka’s electric dress but not the “painting 
> machines” of her husband­but the presentation of a different value-system 
> for Japanese “device art” (gizmos whose “art coefficient” is activated by 
> their use) was pretty convincing as well as very thought-provoking.
>    * tour of the labs AND, surprisingly, the poster session, which was 
> cluttered and weird but also the one moment in the conference when people 
> really talked to each other’s ideas
>    * Tim Druckrey’s screening of apocalyptic Virilio. He gave a very lazy 
> but passionate paper, basically asking why on earth new media would want 
> to be included in an old canon, and noting that a far bigger problem is 
> present in Nicholas Bourriaud’s blythe “relational aesthetics” than in 
> the October cabal’s control of high theory.
>    * Michael Naimark’s corporatist but useful analysis of the 
> sustainability of new media institutions.
>    * Johannes Goebel’s passionate and pragmatic overview of two such 
> institutions.
>    * the final, quasi-impromptu “crit, self-crit” session led by Sara 
> Diamond. This was where most of the lingering meta-issues were put on the 
> table, and it was done in such a way that those in the room I think felt 
> it was really a high point and a great note on which to finish. Left the 
> feeling that while there is work to be done it will be done.
>
>I didn’t go to everything, needless to say, and doubtless there were good 
>things on other panels. I heard that Claus Pias’s paper on cybernetics was 
>excellent, for instance.
>
>That said, the conference overall suffered greatly from what Trebor Scholz 
>and Geert Lovink have dubbed “panelism”: a territorial structure in which 
>moderators also delivered papers within the format of a way over-tight 
>schedule and with virtually no time for questions; a few speakers went 
>beyond their alotted minutes in the first sessions and then panels were 
>policed to an almost draconian degree, making the entire assembly tense. 
>Discussions were notably truncated. In fact, to this art historian it 
>seemed weird that people would gather for a conference on something as 
>shifting and relatively openly defined as “new media” (how many papers in 
>fact began with loose attempts to list the salient features of new media) 
>and then sit and hear something they could have read already… for though 
>the organizers had posted quite a number of papers on their official 
>website beforehand, it was clear that most attendees hadn’t read those 
>papers… and then not discuss what they had heard.
>
>What surfaced in the tension around (non) discussion was a big mess of 
>anxieties. Topped by the anxiety over having “new media art” categorized 
>as “art” or as “new media,” these inflected many of the panel 
>presentations and discussions, and not in a productive way. Part of the 
>problem, as Andreas Broeckman pointed out in the final crit session, was 
>that the mission of the conference was probably too broadly and vaguely 
>defined. But what I heard over and over again was “traditional art 
>history” can’t deal with new media. The first thing I’d want to know is, 
>what precisely is “traditional art history”? From Simon Penny’s 
>castigation of art history as racist, imperialist, classist, etc., it 
>sounded to me like what was meant was Berensonian connoisseurship; this 
>seemed overwrought, but his excursus was only the most vigorous and 
>politically thought-through of a frequent plaint. Yet while he was quite 
>right to note that cultural studies wasn’t mentioned once at the 
>conference his characterization of art history is way behind the times. 
>Art history and new media share Walter Benjamin and, for better or worse, 
>Rudolf Arnheim; new media people would do well to read Panofsky and 
>Warburg, just as I and at least some of my colleagues read Weiner and 
>Kittler. Art history may not yet be able to deal with new media, but 
>perhaps it is also the case that new media doesn’t know how to deal with 
>art history.
>
>On this score a truly low moment was struck on the first day by Mark 
>Hansen, whose hatchet job on Rosalind Krauss was so lame that even the new 
>media theorists were bugged. Instead of new media bemoaning its lack of 
>recognition by art history and then its savaging of same (“we want to be 
>with you; we hate you” or “I love you; go away”) it might be more 
>productive to stage a genuine encounter. Leaving aside Andreas Broeckman, 
>who gave a very nice but grossly amputated (ran out of time) presentation 
>on aesthetics and new media, and the truly awful presentation comparing 
>the websites of the Louvre and the Hermitage, the art historians who were 
>at the conference were either working with medieval Islamic art or with 
>the visual culture of science. That is, there were no art historians 
>dealing with contemporary art who were not already part of the inner 
>circle of new media people; yet this is precisely the encounter that needs 
>to be staged. Meanwhile Mark Tribe, not an art historian, gave an 
>extremely art historically lame presentation on appropriation, and while 
>the broader point was, well, okay, his presentation of the historical 
>material was painful and for at least this listener undermined his 
>credibility. (On the other hand, Cornelius Borck, a historian of medicine, 
>gave a terrific presentation­historically nuanced, intelligently read, and 
>carefully researched­on the optophone of Raoul Hausman and Hausman’s 
>complicated relationship to prosthesis.) From my perspective this suggests 
>a serious problem of disciplinarity: surely just as new media 
>artists/theorists expect a sophisticated treatment from art historians 
>(Simon Penny again: art historians should learn engineering, cognitive 
>science, neuroscience before they discuss new media…) so new media artists 
>and theorists should treat the work that comes before­both art and 
>media­with the historical complexity (without going to Pennyian excess) 
>art history at its best demonstrates.
>
>Other issues that came up:
>    * Problems of storage & retrieval of new media work. From an 
> historical point of view this demonstrates a remarkable degree of 
> self-consciousness on the part of new new media­something new, 
> incidentally, in the longer history of media, and interesting as a phenomenon.
>    * Huge anxiety about the “art” status of new media, alongside a 
> subthematic of the relation to science and to scientific models of research.
>    * Adulatory fetishizing of cognitive science, engineering, and 
> neuroscience (in marked contrast to the dissing of art history).
>    * Lack of a fixed definition of new media, with repeated nods to 
> hybridization, bodily engagement, non-hierarchical structure, networking, 
> and so on.
>    * Disconnect of the keynote speakers. Couchot had difficulty with 
> English and seemed, while emphasizing hybridity, to be speaking from 
> another time. Sarat Maharaj rambled for nearly 2 hours about Rudolf 
> Arnheim and the Other; I found this talk excruciating, though I later 
> spoke with someone (media artist, go figure) for whom it had been a high 
> point. And Lucia Santaella’s beautifully delivered, rigorously 
> near-hallucinatory and religious but to me quasi-apocalyptic vision of 
> the “semiotic” and “post-human” present/future of the “exo-brain” was a 
> chilling picture of species-death.
>    * Ongoing problem of gender and geographic distribution. While 
> non-Western topics cropped up here and there at the conference, the one 
> panel that dealt in any extended way with non-Western paradigms was also 
> the one panel that was almost all female­and also the panel that got the 
> most flak in its few minutes of discussion, in part because most of those 
> dealing with non-Western paradigms were Western. This relegation of 
> dealing with the Other to the women is typical. There was also some 
> grumbling that many of the non-Western projects had been tucked into the 
> poster session rather than elevated to panel status. It would have been 
> good to have some representation from Africa, or even a panel on doing 
> new media in less media-rich environments than Euro-Ameri-Nippon.
>    * Comical reliance on and then debate about Powerpoint…. And then, as 
> one member of the audience pointed out, nearly all of the people at the 
> conference in their ppt-critical right-thinking wisdom had little glowing 
> apples at their desks. No sign of Linux.
>
>That’s a sketch, replete with opinion. I’d encourage anyone interested in 
>more specific information about the conference to check the website at 
><http://www.mediaarthistory.org/>www.mediaarthistory.org, which has some 
>papers up as well as abstracts.



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