The most challenging art that has to do with the Internet isn't just pixelized pictures or lifelike digital animation; it's a way of expressing how technology shapes ways of seeing and behaving. When in 1996 artist and curator Mark Tribe opened a listserv to propagate contemporary art that dealt with technology, he chose the title "rhizome," a botanical term for plant roots that grow horizontally, instead of from the ground up. Tribe's listserv grew quickly and became a website, Rhizome.org. The celebrated non-profit database now includes editorial content and supports international artists and writers with commissions. Tribe is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University and the co-author of New Media Art, which is available and fully editable as a wiki book. Here he explains why artworks that deal with Internet technologies don't stop when you close your browser.
"As a generic term, 'new media' has existed since the '70s, to refer to things like satellite broadcast. 'New Media Art' was a very rarely used term until 1994, and it was very broadly used in 1995-96, when the Internet boom launched. New Media Art started to describe what we could view as an art movement: networks of artists making work in relation to each other, whose work was being treated by journalists and critics with certain terminology, curators also creating organizations and publications around this network. It's probably the only art movement of the '90s, but sometime after the dotcom bubble burst, new media art basically fizzled -- more and more artists were working with media, but it was dispersed.
Recently I have been working on a series called the "Port Huron Project," re-enactments of protest speeches from the New Left movement of the Vietnam era. They take place at the site where they were originally given, and it's important that they be given in public spaces, where anybody can come and be able to participate. We take the speech out of the archives and bring them into the present, to re-activate them and re-enter them in the political discourse. I document the performances with photos and video and audio recordings, and I put all of that media online, always under creative commons licenses, which means you can both appropriate them and remix them. On the one hand, it's oriented toward contemporary public spaces that are largely de-politicized, and to re-politicize them and turn them into spaces for a specific dialogue. It is also an intervention into the archive itself, into the way we understand this history. Comparing the oratorical strategies of Stokely Carmichael, for example, the man who created the term Black Power in 1966, with the style and the content of Barack Obama's speeches. In 1967, it would be hard to believe we have an African American being nominated by the Democratic Party, but then again, the content of the platform is far less radical.
One of the big questions I have is about what forms protest can take today while remaining effective. Strategies most successful in the '60s -- getting a bunch of people out in the street to march -- have been co-opted in a sense. I think two million people worldwide marched to protest the Iraq War, and it had no impact. If anything, the Blair and Bush Administrations were able to point to the protests as examples of what we were fighting for. I'm interested more in disrupting the media apparatus. There's a lot of talk about online community, and the connection of online and offline communities. We look to use the Internet to reach out to people on Facebook, MySpace, email lists and blogs, to get these people to congregate in physical space."
TRIBE'S POST-DIGI PICKS
WILLIAM
CORDOVA: The House that Frank Lloyd Wright built 4 Fred Hampton
and Mark Clark, Whitney Biennial 2008
HASAN ELAHI:
Tracking Transcience: The Orwell Project
SHARON HAYES, DAVID
THORNE, ANDREA GEYER, ET AL: 9 Scripts from a Nation at
War
OMER FAST: For Spielberg's List,
Godville, The Casting
COCO FUSCO: Dolores
from 10 to 10, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert; Operation
Atropos
OTABENGA JONES AND ASSOCIATES: The Uhuru
Squad (work-in-progress)
[From top to bottom] Mark Tribe: "Port Huron Project 5: The Liberation of Our People," the Angela Davis reenactment in Oakland. Photo by Nick Davis. Coco Fusco: Stills from Dolores From 10 to 10, 2002, Courtesy of the artist. William Cordova: "The House that Frank Lloyd Wright built for Fred Hampton and Mark Clark," 2007, Collection of the artist, Courtesy of Arndt Partner, Zurich, 2008 Biennial exhibition (March 6-June 1, 2008) Whitney Museum, Photography by Sheldan Collins Hasan Elahi: "Altitude v2.0.6," 2005-2006, courtesy of the artist.
RSS