Since the industrial revolution we have struggled to reconcile the now twined notions of progress and obsolescence. Consider Rilke’s 18th Sonnet to Orpheus, written in 1922:
Do you hear the New, Master,
droning and throbbing?
Its prophesying promoters
are advancing.
No hearing’s truly keen
in all this noise;
still, now each machine
part wills its praise.
See, the Machine:
how it spins and wreaks
revenge, deforms and demeans us.
Since its power comes from us,
let it do its work
and serve, serene.
In his essay Some Thoughts About “New Media” in Quotes, TCR 2-50 contributor Gordon Winiemko writes:
When considering technology, one need not pit the new against the old, or the rhetoric of liberation against determinism. Perhaps what is called for is a new way of thinking, one that goes beyond the binary either/or.
I could reach for the ballyhooed model of gaming as such an alternative, a model in which play, rather than slavish, linear, goal-directed production, holds sway, where there is no conclusion, but a process encompassing a field of complex, interlocking actions – but behind this, ironically, are ones and zeroes, either/or.
I’m much more inclined to sidestep the matter of new vs. old media altogether and revisit the question of mimesis vs. diegesis. Indeed, I find the latter binary opposition far more relevant to contemporary artistic practice. I come down firmly on the side of experiential communication as opposed to the (re)presentation of an image and/or object. In doing so, I’m consigning images and image-makers to a ghetto of the regressive. But how is it any less regressive, the idea of communication? “I want to change the world,” a friend and fellow artist told me recently. So you’ll do that by being a Great Communicator, and aping the model of Capital? The object that is ostensibly absent from diegetic, experiential art practice can be located in the form of the information or the message that The Communicator wants to convey, commodity-like, to the spectator-consumer. The artists who make careers out of tackling important issues are ones who often have to resort to a defensive mantra like “all art is political.” If that’s the case, then why do they (why do we) persist in making work nominally pre-classified as “political art”? Perhaps, such a tendency merely mimics common tactics within post-industrial capital, where the best way to make a living seems increasingly dependent upon defining some particular niche market.
J. R. Carpenter’s note: TCR 2-50 contributer Sandra Seekins picks up on this issue of art production in a capital, commodity, consumer continuum in her essay: Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art. In a section called Brief Encounters with Biotech Art she writes:
Contemporary art practice is being transformed (as art has always been) by technological imperatives, and art has a contribution to make in terms of raising the level of public awareness about the technical, economic, political, and social discourses surrounding biotechnologies. […] In advanced biological science there is, on the one hand, the ideal that scientific inquiry benefits the public good, and, on the other, that a free market drives innovation. Art is equally caught between goals of personal expression, social relevance, and commercial value.
Seekins writes extensively on “artists who make careers out of tackling important issues” in biotech art. For many of the artists Seekins mentions, “all art is political” indeed. Read more in this post: Co-opting the Lab
other islands in this text-fed stream
