In offering up Some Thoughts About “New Media” in Quotes, Gordon Winiemko notes: I could perform on cue myself, and provide a list of “new media” work that I like. I just recently took Janet Cardiff’s video walk-through of San Francisco MOMA again and, like the first time, it did not fail to move me. So too, as always, did a recent show of Jim Campbell’s work. Janet Cardiff’s site specific walk-through of the SF MOMA was originally part of the institution’s 2001 show on art and technology called 010101:Art in Technological Times. Visitors were given video cameras with headphones and led via Cardiff’s voice on a performative “tour” of the gallery. Jim Campbell is an artist who manipulates video and images with a host of specialized processes, and works in the SF Bay area.
Winiemko goes on to say, however: I could also easily rack up a list of work that has struck me as little more than “gimmicky,” half-baked. I’ve lost count of the number of bells and whistles I’ve triggered by the sounds I make, or my movements in a public space like a gallery or plaza. Nice effects, but what do they do, except fetishize technology and passively recapitulate the paradigm, or the received knowledge, of interactivity?
This line of questioning is taken up by Meg Walker in an article called “I Want M+O+R+E: A Complaint About Interactive Art And Feeling Like a Trigger,” published in a recent issue of Les Fleurs du Mal magazine dedicated to Interactive Art:
We can push buttons, add images, insert text - even insert our bodies. That’s action - but doesn’t interaction imply a two-way stream of decision-making and more than one “event”? Brian Kim Stefans’ “interactive poetry page” (http://www.arras.net/kluge) includes several movable-text poems. Click on “Winter was hard” and the line enlarges until it’s in your face and unreadable; click again and it shrinks back to screen size, but has become another line of text. It’s great reading, but this is no more interactive than turning the pages of a book, except that you don’t know what page you’re turning to next.
Confronted with the label new media, Gordon Winiemko goes on to say, I remember an old saying: it’s the singer, not the song. The other applicable adage is, of course, McLuhan’s “The medium is the message.” When considering these kinds of portentous displays, I find myself not infrequently wondering, “isn’t film already interactive?”
It could be said that a film asks no more than to be passively observed, but I would argue that the diegetic, experiential process of communication in which film engages asks more of its audience than the mimesis of image/object based fine art. “Diegetic” indicates a two-sided process, after all. Even though the audience and the film (makers) are not literally in conversation, there is an exchange taking place.
Consider work that is informed by discursive practice, such as the “dialogic” projects by the artists Grant Kestor references in Conversation Pieces – artists like Stephen Willats, Suzanne Lacy, and the Austrian collective WochenKlausur – where the locus of the piece is not an object, or even in a so-called “interactive” experience had by a spectator, but in the ephemeral and downright analog conversations shared by people who are all participants, even co-creators.
Gordon Winiemko / Some Thoughts About “New Media” in Quotes
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