What makes ‘new media’ new?

Something special took place a couple of weeks ago.

It began with an e-mail call for local media (more encompassing than "visual") artists to present their work to Gunalan Nadarajan, formerly connected with the La Salle-SIA College of the Arts in Singapore, and now professor and associate dean for research and graduate studies at the College of Arts and Architecture, Penn State University, and Yoshioka Hiroshi, who is professor of philosophy and media aesthetics at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Ogaki, Japan. The two gentlemen were in town as part of an Asian tour to select artists for the 2006 Ogaki Biennale, a media art festival organized by the Center for Media Culture, IAMAS and Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

The circumstances under which the selection was conducted was itself reason enough to mark this as a landmark event. As forum/discussion co-organizer, Fatima (Fats) Lasay, herself a highly regarded media artist, researcher/writer and independent curator, reflected on later in her blogsite (www.korakora.org):

"…The forum/discussion was special because it somewhat diverged from the established protocols of artistic presentations to an international "biennale" selection committee. The call to participate in the forum/presentation was made public – through public mailing lists and individual e-mail invitations to artists, galleries, organizations and artist’s groups. I thought that this was unusual because I remember how some artists would speak in low whispers whenever a foreign curator arrived for purposes of selecting artists for an international exhibition. Supposedly, the intention was to inform only those who are best suited to present to the selection committee, and thus prevent a stampede. I liked the way (media artist) Lena Cobangbang (on Mideo Cruz’s http://groups.yahoo.com/group/art_forum/Artforum Yahoogroups) described the scene (should a) selection for the Venice Biennale (come to pass): "’Di naman kaya parang pilahan ng portfolio pa rin ‘to na parang nag-aaply sa Saudi?"

Even more telling was how Lena described the power of curators:

Yet there’s always this picture in my head of the curator as a globe-trotting, intellectual tyrant balancing chardonnays and Moets and pates in one hand, and volumes of French art theory in the other while looking through tiny opera glasses the improvised portfolios of artists all queuing up for a millisecond of the curator’s time. Of course he/she wouldn’t be looking at the works that much as he/she is trying to label each one according to a historic/stylistic/theoretical model, enunciating so carefully the term for the eavesdropping neophyte."

Fats qualifies her quote of Cobangbang’s comment in her blog and indicates another way of looking at this condition:

"The source of the power of curators are the artists themselves. Thus, the limits of a curator’s tyranny (are) defined by the artist. It is quite right, then, in the midst of the lively discussions at the forum/presentation, what (Nadarajan) remarked that it is the artist and not the theorist or curator who defines the categories of art. Although I would only agree to the indirect implications of this remark – that is, it is the artist who serves as fodder for the theorist/curators’ can(n)ons – I would not agree to this in practice, that is, I would interpret this in terms of the theorist/curator’s power to define the limits by which an artist creates his or her art."

Fats gives further credit to Yoshioka for presenting "a very unique position" to the concept of international art festivals:

"The fact that the biennale takes place within the context of a ’small quiet town’ of Ogaki in Gifu as opposed to the spectacular cities within which ‘biennale cultures’ are organized proposes the viability of small, alternative and fairly independent creative communities concerned with what are often regarded as big and ambitious projects involving high technology. Beyond the hype of technology having the ‘power to change the world and the way we live,‘ Ogaki proposed the rethinking of our relationships with technology to the simple and the basic. Perhaps only through the small-scale and independent is it truly possible (and safe!) to question many of the most tenacious perpetuations and assumptions we have been bombarded with through media, society and our education."

The occasion likewise turned out to be a rare opportunity to evaluate contemporary media art practices in the country. Pity that it had to take the visit of Ogaki’s co-artistic directors to coax us out of our comfort zones, reach beyond our circle of confreres and prod us, in tech-y parlance, to have this "EB."

The more or less 10- to 20-minute presentations, held over the course of four hours, served up a panoply of works, "…from paintings (Jevijoe Vitug) to video (Yason Banal, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez for Claro Ramirez), performances (Ronaldo Ruiz, Kleng/Jeffrey for Mideo Cruz/NewWorldDisorder and Mannet Villariba and friends from Tupada) to prints (Amiel Roldan) and sound ("Autoceremony Blog" by Jing Garcia and Tad Ermitaño)."

The richness, diversity, and ever-extending parameters within which media art was being conceived and executed led to perhaps the most important topic of discussion during the forum, which pertained "to the anxieties (if any) towards the term "new media."" (i.e. What makes "new media" new? Who’s to say what is "new"? What media are we speaking of?)

Judging from the pieces that were shown, it was clear that the traditional concept of "new media" as pertaining only to computer-generated art and other technologies simply did not suffice, and that it was the freshness of approach to media in art-making that constituted the definition of "new."

The forum was punctuated by the reasoned criticality of media artist Trevor Batten. Enlivening as it was, time and the constraints of available physical space conspired to bring the discussion to a close.

While the final selections for Ogaki are keenly awaited, I believe that what was being hatched by everyone present was something bigger: awareness, openness, and the constancy of intellectual challenge in order to generate meaningfulness in practice.

The media art speak continues on the Korakora blogsite.

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