an interview with
Victoria Vesna
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/bodiesinc/
by
Robert Simon
robertms@euronet.nl
The aesthetic significance of contemporary digital media remains an open, perhaps premature question. What counts as Art is determined within a discursive field and a community of participants, while the privileged object is not, in some mechanical or magical fashion, a necessary corollary of new technologies.
Most interesting about the "new media" events that took place in Rotterdam this past September, ISEA96 (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) and DEAF96 (Dutch Electronic Arts Festival), was precisely the tension between the ragged, uneven development of communities and discourses, terms and languages of discussion--very much a "work-in-progress"--and the belief that the new media technologies have somehow definitively rearticulated the paradigms of contemporary artistic production, distribution, and reception.
This is not to say that the installations, performances, on-line initiatives and design experiments displayed in Rotterdam were not often quite compelling in their own right.* And to be sure, throughout ISEA and DEAF a critical consciousness was much in evidence in many of the sessions. But the sense I have is that new media art and aesthetics is a field that has not yet come into being: perhaps wild heterogeneity, incoherence, dispersal, perpetual lack of finish and open-endedness will be its fate and its virtue, but this remains to be seen and developed, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
VICTORIA VESNA is a multimedia artist and teacher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and was a participant in ISEA96.** The following interview took place via e-mail in late October.
Robert Simon: It seems a commonplace claim of new media art theory that current digital and networked art is essentially process rather than--as in "old" media--object based. To my mind such a distinction makes little sense in light of traditional performance arts such as music or theater, or when one thinks of the ephemeral site-specificity of an exhibition, or considers literature and painting in terms of processes of production and reception. So is this claim to be understood as yet another instance of polemical, avant-gardist ground-clearing? Or is new media art truly and fundamentally distinct from what has come before? And is it useful to make such a distinction? For the sake of whom or what?
Victoria Vesna: Consider the phenomenal rise of Netscape's stock, which to date still has shown no profit. Our collective imaginations are driving this economy--technology allows for "process" and ideas to become commodity. Conceptual art has moved into a corporate world! New products replace old ones, good guys fight the bad ones--these binary distinctions are necessary in a market economy with competition claiming to have the newest, best, greatest!!! In my mind the same is true of the art market. What we are witnessing is not necessarily a strictly philosophical discourse of defining work which has no tangible existence or value but attracts large audiences and carries with it a significant amount of hype. This hype is already the driving force of the new economy centered around technology. The art market is seeing, on the one hand, grants disappearing, and on the other, large amounts of money being generated by information technology. So, the real question the art world is grappling with is how to market this work as art and whether the places to do it in are museums and galleries.
R.S.: Electronically networked art allows for enormous, nearly instantaneous accessibility, as well as possibilities of spontaneity and interactivity that seem to reconfigure traditional positionings between artist and audience, between producer and recipient. Given the fact of the Internet, what is the future (or the present) of the new media museum or gallery exhibition? And what are the actual or potential relationships between these venues (i.e. the Internet and the gallery/museum)?
V.V.: Museums and galleries have historically functioned as spaces which sanction and decide what is considered as high art. The same still holds true even with networked art. Even if it is accessible from any computer at any time, there is a very different aura attached if it is also being privileged to be projected in a museum or established gallery. The important difference is however, that work may be recognized by the audience first (a popular site for instance) which then brings it to the museum. This shifts tremendous power over to the audience and artist in the selection process which to date has been incredibly insular if not downright incestuous. Museums could potentially be revitalized by this media not only by attracting larger and more varied audience but also to act as community centers offering access to high end technology. Finally, it is important that the museum itself has a presence outside its limited geography which helps decentralize the art world still dependent on major cities in the West.
*An overview of the projects and events is available at http://www.eur.nl/ISEA96 and http://www.v2.nl/DEAF.
** One of Victoria Vesna's recent projects is Bodies© INCorporated, which can be accessed at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc.