New New Media Art

超最新メディア芸術

RHIZOME DIGEST: January 29, 1999でAlex Gallowayが紹介したメディア・アートの情報。

[全文]
Date: 1.28.99
From: Alex Galloway (mailto:alex@rhizome.org) and Rachel Greene URL(mailto:rachel@rhizome.org)
Subject: New New Media Art


New New Media Art

'I would be the first to take command of a united front against new media art.' -Alex Galloway

Each time that technology, subjected to certain cultural imperatives, ceases to be that which we expect of it, then art, always victorious, defends itself by inventing new tools. At the margins of the art world is new media art and at the margins of new media art is internet art. Here, art massively disengages itself from mainstream practices in order to find its own space. Net art is a nomadic space, a kind of rupture. All else will not be art.

RHIZOME maps this territory by publishing and indexing a wide range of net art discourse--from the self-promotional emails that may eventually prove to ground net art history, to critical writing, chatter and email art. These sometimes banal, sometimes personal, sometimes critical rivulets of data have revealed, lately, a certain topography. We see a shift, a shift from projects that are about 'interface' or 'virtuality' to ones that are about privileging content over the formal systems that usually control it. Take here a little glimpse through the RHIZOME prism into the current state of new new media art.

Forget net.art. It's over. All our heroes of yesteryear have moved on, to biotech, radio, and... the depths of hell. In fact, Hell.com (http://www.hell.com) is brimming over with the leftovers of the euro.net.art scene. But unfortunately you'd never know. You can't get into Hell. You have to be invited. As the signpost says, 'there are no guest privileges, no visitors, no previews.' Hell is a consortium of internet art sites--part art gallery, part club house. It's what they call 'a private parallel web.' The list of member sites is kept secret, but it's the usual suspects. We've looked.

As Hell spokesperson Ken Aronson notes, 'HELL.COM was conceived as a conceptual art piece in early 1995 as an anti-web that sold and promoted nothing and was not accessible to the public. For almost three years, HELL.COM, a site with no content, never listed in any directory or search engine nor linked anywhere averages in excess of a million hits per month from people typing the name in their browsers. ... The HELL project is devoted to establishing a new frontier in the digital world, that has no tethers to anything existing.'

Interesting. So, Hell is conceptual art, a new type of living web sculpture that connects artists together... a bit like RHIZOME, right?

'RHIZOME performs specific functions, provides relevant information and is a resource for and about actual people, organizations, & things in the world. HELL is unique unto itself we have no definable function. Other than perhaps to provoke discovery.'

But it's art, right?

'We try to avoid at all costs the scarlet letter 'ART.' Art is a definition, a box, an excuse for people to put what they don't understand into some context,' writes Aronson. 'The vast majority of our traffic is comprised of people who have never stepped a foot into a legit gallery. HELL.COM is a global magnet for people searching for the unknown. They have no expectations. We provide only more questions... not answers.'

Great. I've been to hell and back, and it's an art gallery.

Climbing the charts faster than the gloomy, 'browser.art' aesthetic of hell.com is an interest in the corporate, both through corporate endorsements (mostly fake) and corporation-style organizations. Everyone's doing it: Easylife.org, RTMARK, etoy. This is where the power of the corporate mogul happily merges with the aesthetic vision of the avant-garde fringe. Corporate stamps are popping up everywhere, partially because net art has historically been seen through a corporate lense. We look at Heath Bunting's or jodi.org's work and are reminded that it is the Netscape or Microsoft browser that has invaginated our hard drives. Corporate stamps have long been part of the literal picture, center stage left, but now artistic 'branding' is proving to resemble corporate identity more than ever.

Art saboteurs RTMARK URL(http://rtmark.com) are a corporation for practical reasons. It displaces liability for culturally subversive and sometimes illegal work. Incorporation also morphs the stereotype of saboteurs as terrorists into saboteurs as ... er ... mainstream straights. Unlike the disenfranchised Ted Kacynski or grunged-out Earth Firsters, RTMARK's representatives attend conferences in smart suits, and can talk about things like offshore investing. It is not just in uniform that RTMARK resembles a corporation--it works very much like an American financial services institution, offering a range of investment products to consumers. Where a commercial bank has a range of capital receptacles, from high-tech funds to IRAs, RTMARK offers a series of funds that represent different fields of subversive cultural production. Invest in culture, they say, not capital.

Like RTMARK, the Bureau of Inverse Technology is an art production entity that bleeds into a non-human agency. The BIT proudly identifies itself as a full-service agency for product, marketing and commentary, revealing a critical cynicism about the political fabric of techno-products and the persistent lack of 'transcendent poetics' in these products.

'The cultural force of products frame how we work, how we incorporate nonhuman agency in the mundane daily interactions that form human habit, which then gets called human nature,' they write. 'The Bureau produces a brand legacy and brand story with ambitions not unlike Nike and Disney. Brand loyalty for the sophisticated consumer is produced through heterogeneous networks of material and ephemeral culture in which products are embedded. Technoart engages this, unwittingly or not.'

Similarly, in her early net art project 'Bodies INCorporated' URL(http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc) Victoria Vesna is interested in both corporate business practices and the corporeal body, playing on the meaning of the word 'incorporate.' In this virtual world users earn shares based on how involved they are in the various activities and options offered to them. Consequently, more shares allow for greater participation in the community of body-owners.

Biotech. It scares us to death. We can't stop doing it. Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting are there already with their 'Biotech Hobbyist Magazine' URL(http://www.irational.org/biotech/). Judging from past work, Bunting is keen on making 'fake' sites with real links. While Jeremijenko, of Bureau of Inverse Technology fame (see above), brings her own interest in technology. The Biotech Hobbyist Magazine claims to be 'THE place on the Web for biotech tinkerers, builders, experimenters, students, and others who love the intellectual challenge and stimulation of hobby biotech!' Is it a sham? No. Rather, in the tradition of the Terrorist's Handbook or the Young Poisoners Handbook, it brings potentially frightening recipes to eager, new readers. 'It's a real magazine, will make money from advertising and eventually be sold for a good profit,' claims Bunting with characteristic exuberance. Why biotech now? 'it's the next big technological push that will affect concepts of property and representation.'

Playing on fears of techno-science, The Biotech Hobbyist displaces biotechnology to a realm of irony and subversion. It connects, for example, instructions for growing skin with charming historical anecdotes. It connects friendly looking links to companies with icky names like 'BioRad' and 'Clonetics.' The Biotech Hobbyist suggests that the shock value of a resistive act (hacking a search engine for example) has been muted--the frontier has shifted away from moneyed software companies to those who are exploring what it means to be a person at the genetic level. The editors of the Biotech Hobbyist hardly seem aggressive, that's not their style. Instead they identify and encourage a demographic of homebody-curious types: 'We recognise that some of the greatest cultural and technological advances have emerged from peoples bedrooms and are therfore committed to tranferring the hitech life sciences to the bedroom biotechnician (sic).'

Elsewhere it's hit or miss on the biotech topic. Despite its focus on biotechnology, Critical Art Ensemble's (http://mml.fsu.edu/cae/) most recent effort, 'Flesh Machine,' is disappointing. It seems quickly wrought, and has too many disses on the internet as a medium. Yet like The Biotech Hobbyist also suggests, CAE sees well that the physical body is the next front for the kulturkampf.

EastEdge's project 'Tyrell.Hungary'
URL(http://www.shiseido.co.jp/s9808tre/realindex.html) captures nicely both the corporate aesthetic and an interest in biotechnology. We found the following description somewhere... 'In this project, a virtual corporate website 'Tyrell.Hungary' is set up, which provides various services to meet the needs of contemporary people. ... By establishing a virtual corporation on the net, it allows users to tap into issues between providers of information and themselves in the information-environment of the Internet and focus on boundaries between local/global and real/fictional. For example, the issue of ethics concerning the treatment of life (which we now face through the development of bio-technology) obscures the border between self and others, and between humans and that transcendental being above the level of humans. It also questions how humans can be defined in this contemporary era. Tyrell.Hungary is, in a virtual sense, a slice of reality.' Amen.

All in all, RHIZOME has chronicled symptoms that suggest the interface-centrism and playful email culture of net art are recherchaM New plagues, such as the penetration of corporate protocols into all areas of life, the rise of bio-tech and terrordomes like hell.com invite different strategies of responses. Invest in cultural terror. Clone your pet at home. Go to hell. Welcome to the world of new new media art 1999.

URL(http://www.rhizome.org)
URL(http://www.hell.com)
URL(http://rtmark.com)
URL(http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc)
URL(http://www.irational.org/biotech/)
URL(http://mml.fsu.edu/cae/)
URL(http://www.shiseido.co.jp/s9808tre/realindex.html)
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ITEMS OF INTEREST in the cafe, at random:
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RHIZOME DIGEST is edited by Rachel Greene and Alex Galloway.
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RHIZOME would like to thank The ThingのURL(http://www.thing.net/) and Postmasters Gallery のURL(http://www.thing.net/~pomaga) for their generous support.
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