Aesthetic Paradigms of Media Art

Claudia Giannetti

Art beyond art

The definition of ‹art beyond art› amounts to a negation of an understanding of art that is based on accumulative and historically linear findings. Interest focuses no longer on the autonomy of a work of art, a subject much discussed during modernism (and already wholly assimilated into contemporary art), but on art’s emancipation from art itself. This shift implies that the modernist tendency to take issue with the arguments of a discourse within the discourse itself has been overcome. It also signifies the demand for a ‹reconstruction of the area› on new foundations which place in question several of its basic theoretical generalizations and many of its methods.

The argument of the essays can be summarized as follows: explanations delivered by art are constitutively neither reductionist nor transcendental; the function of art consists in expanding realities, knowledge and experiences; this process can take its course dialogically or consensually (through seduction), or by means of canonization (through control or coercion). Further paradigm shifts specifically relevant to media art will be examined below.

Interdisciplinarity

Media art—in its diverse forms ranging from audiovisual installations to interactive systems, from hypermedia to artificial reality, from the net to cyberspace—reinforces the idea of ‹interdisciplinarity,› which reaches much further than the aforementioned considerations about the relationship of art and technology. In the context of interdisciplinarity, the intermeshing of art, technologies, and science refers to the process that brings about convergence, interference, appropriation, overlapping and interpenetration; a process successively leading to the generation of referential networks and reciprocal— non-hierarchic—influences.

Ubiquity and dematerialization

After the exodus of art from conventional presentation spaces such as museums or galleries and the conquest of public places, streets, towns, landscapes (e.g. Land Art, Performance, Happening), the fact that spatiotemporal expansion and the wider use of
materials arrived at a deeper significance of ubiquity (the possibility of being present at all place at once or simultaneously), dematerialization (independence of the physical-material existence of the object) and participation (the use of interactive network resources) is without doubt brought about by the deployment of so-called new media—such as the telecommunications system.

All of the telecommunications projects developed from the 1970s onward, such as those of satellite art, were basically attempts to transform the medium into a meta-medium permitting art spatial and temporal ubiquity. That was what gave Nam June Paik, for example, the idea that a work could be created in several different places at once, as outlined in the score in 1961. Paik’s efforts to accomplish meta-communication led to his most important contributions to satellite art, such as in 1977 «Nine Minutes Live,» his direct satellite telecast of performances in Europe and the USA for the opening of the Documenta 6 in Kassel, and in 1984 «Good Morning Mr. Orwell,» organized jointly by the Centre Pompidou and the broadcaster WNET-TV, with whichPaik succeeded in realizing a live satellite program that was participative as well as simultaneous. According to Paik, satellite art was destined to become the most important non-material work in post-industrial society.

The formation of international projects in the 1970s was a crucial stimulus for art in conjunction with telecommunication as well as for the notion of ubiquity. The Brazilian Waldemar Cordeiro,a pioneer of Computer Art, in 1971 identified the inadequacy of communications media as a form of information transmission and the inefficiency of information as language, thought, and action as being the causes of the crisis of contemporary art. Cordeiro asserted in his Manifest Arteônica that art whose main emphasis lies on the material object restricts audience access to the work and therefore meets the cultural standards of modern society neither qualitatively nor quantitatively. Cordeiro’s deliberations in regard to global networking and free, telecommunication-enabled audience access to a work of art anticipated the notion of ubiquity, participation, and net art.