Inquiry One: What is New Media?
This is part of my coursework, where I’m trying to define the area that hackerspaces are working in from an artistic perspective. This text is a fragment of writing that I couldn’t fit into the two larger pieces that I’m writing at the minute.
In his essay, “DIY: The Militant March of Technology”, Marcin Ramocki links the means of production in the information age to the classical Marxist model, and then goes on to posit that New Media art works are one way of countering the alienation of labour that Marx claimed as an effect of the industrial age. He writes:
“The work happening right now comes from the first generation born into a world with personal computers, video games and the internet and on-line media. Their first frame of reference is not the linear narrative of a film but an algorithmic one of a game or a website. There is no more reverence toward technology: there is a need to question and make sense of it.”
This new generation’s attitude toward computers, media, and technology is one that is seen in the willingness to deconstruct and reconstruct the tools of the information age for individual purposes. Sometimes, these purposes serve the community of makers and doers that enable modern interaction with technology, leading to Open-Source tools such as programming languages. Sometimes, these purposes are artistic, in which case they can be presented in a gallery (or other arts-related) setting.
In one sense, the willingness of artists to work with these tools was predicted by Nam June Paik, an early adopter of technology within the artistic milieu, when he said “ Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk”, although he could not have known from his vantage point in the sixties the importance of computers half a century later.
But those working today do; whether in art or any other field, the computer is a ubiquitous object, both at home and in the workplace. It is this ubiquitousness that makes them invisible (when they work) and therefore give no reason for the lay-person to investigate them further than as objects for work or leisure, depending on the location they encounter a computer.
Ramocki refers to hackers – by which I mean the people who do investigate computers, rather than in a criminal sense of the word – as “individuals who rise above the proletarian alienation of labor (sic) and fully embrace… the means of production, their hardware and software.” Political context of his language aside, his writing mirrors a growing trend in contemporary culture to return to the making of things, as opposed to the packaged product that consumer society provides.
Examples of this include the magazine Make, which exists to educate it’s audience about DIY technology projects, encouraging it’s readers to “void the warranty” in order to make something new, and a raft of new books encouraging creative actions such as cupcake making, textiles, and other activities.
If the computer, as a packaged object, becomes the modern-day locus of alienation, then it is not surprising that there is a backlash against that which comes pre-packaged. It is to be expected that there are those questioning the relevance of technology in their creative lives, and that as a flip-side, those reclaiming the technology by making it the site of their creativity.
Richard Colson’s introductory text to digital art lists six major themes of the field: history, using responses (which he also refers to as live art), data, coding, networking and digital hybrids. And yet even these deliberately wide-open themes still have trouble containing all of the varied approaches to art and technology happening in the contemporary artworld.
