Literature Review: Introduction

Part 1 of my literature review is by far the largest part, it is planned to be as long as parts 2, 3 and 4 together. Part 1 of my literature review provides the background and theoretical rational for my research project. It explains the general area within which my subject of study is located and it reviews literature on media art, its, definition, histories, institutions and infrastructures, key positions, issues and theories. It closes with a critique of media art and the description of a new situation which traditional media art theory is unable to cover. This is where my own practice based work comes in. As described in my abstract, I use speculative practice as a way of research which aims at generating constituitive elements of a new theory of media art. Parts 2, 3 and 4 of my literature review map onto my main content chapters 4, 5, and 6. The literature review for those areas necessarily is shorter as the intention is here to let practice take the lead and those areas are still pretty much work in progress.

Introduction

My work starts from the admittedly bold claim that there is no suitable theory of media art and that the field suffers from that in various ways. As the field is not well defined, there is a lack of understanding on behalf of audiences, funders and the art world at large. The lacking of a suitable theory also results in a lack of orientation for artists and other practitioners (critics, curators, writers, juries). This situation has manifested itself in a perceived 'crisis of media art', the notion of which has become a common place in discussions but has very real consequences (closing down of funding programs, institutions, general confusion). My analysis will try to find deeper reasons for that crisis and then move on to an attempt to address those issues through my own practice based research which aims at gleaning constituitive elements of a theory of media art from that practice and accompanying research.

In a first step I will try to define media art -- to map out the subject of my enquiry. This basic step will demand more attention than usual as media art is an emerging practice and a contested space. As I will show, there are voices who claim that there is no such thing as media art, while others say that media art has been so successful that the term as a descriptor of a specific field is no longer needed. Those two views can be considered quite extreme and empirical facts show the term, despite being contestes in various ways, widely in use, which discounts the extremists viewpoints.

I will use a number of methods to map out the field, including summaries and overviews as provided by other authors as well as a mapping in sociological terms by describing key institutions and the 'infrastructure' of media art.

I will also try a theoretic mapping of media art. It has proven extremely difficult to define an essence or core of media art in theoretic terms.The difficulties start with the term consisting of two words, media, and art, whereby each of those in itself provides difficulties for any theoretical definition. I will devote a short chapter to theoretical positions which define media, art, and media art. This quite naturally leads to the realisation that any understanding of media art needs to be informed by both media theory and art theory. As a discussion of all media theories and all art theories would become much too voluminous I will try to select those media theories and art theories that had a strong bearing on the field of media art.

This will lead to one core section of my literature review, part 1, histories and theories of media art. I will review a number of genealogies of media art and their relationships with leading theoretical frameworks. I will not attempt to provide a genealogy of media art as a whole myself, but rather make a short comparison of existing ones. In this context I will need to critically interrogate the methodologies applied by the authors and thematize the act of media art history writing itself. Writers of media art histories speak from a historically specific position. The field is so young that there is not sufficient breadth and width in terms of competing histories of media art which could be compared in my survey. Therefore I need to look as much at what they are not saying or not doing rather than at what they are explicitely stating. My hunch feeling, which I will try to confirm through my literature review, is that most authors do not sufficiently consider the context in which media art is situated. With context I mean things such as the general political and historical situation, the state of technology, the state of development of media technology. Most authors focus on formal and abstract analysis of supposedly general and timeless principles. I will provide evidence for the need to discuss media art through its relationships with the art of the time, as well as the concurrent history of media and the history of ideas and the historic context as such. Methodologically, I will selectively use the toolset of critical theory and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural production as a relational field, as well as classic and emerging materialist theories of cultural production.

The discussion of media arts contextual relationships has as at its theoretic core the rather large issue of the relationship between science and technology and social change. My position in this regard is based on Marx and Marx inspired historians and philosophers of science and the field of science studies. I will present some key positions which inform my thinking, such as the social shaping of technology and feminist and Marxist critiques of techno-science.

From here I proceed to a presentation of key positions and issues in media art. This ultimately will lead to the realisation that specific phases can be identified: an early or pre-history of media art, a heroic or pioneering phase of media art, and the contemporary situation which is characterised as a Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (situation of heightened complexity, lacking transparency). A core thesis will shape itself out of that investigation: the heroic phase of media art has led a certain discourse, in writing as well as in works and deeds, which strongly focused on the notion of interactivity and which constructed a historic juxtaposition between 'analog' art with according attributes (static, object, fixed meanings, ontological) and a 'new' digital art which is characterised in that discourse as interactive, processual, immaterial or dematerialized, properties which are perceived as being widely in tune with postmodern philosophies and names such as Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari.

It will become evident that this discourse has 'won' insofar as it established itself as the leading discourse on media art in the crucial phase of the early to mid 1990s and that it was foundational insofar as it served well as a fighting rhetoric to establish a number of large media art institutions, yet, tt the same time, through establishing a binary opposition between 'old' analog art and 'new' digital art, it catapulted itself out of the art system and created a niche situation for itself (sometimes falsely called the media art ghetto), also by creating its own institutions and points of gathering (festivals, conferences) This discourse is still dominant and informs the most highly powered research and book projects and provides the basic framework for many research and educational institutions. While the discourse continues and also practices associated with it, I will present evidence that there have always been parallel threads in media art which have been actively sidelined by the hegemonic discourse. In the last five years or so the writing of media art histories has intensified, yet those art histories largely ignore those parallel threads, which are, generally speaking, more political, socially engaged, participatory rather than interactive and rely much less on high-tech than the canonized forms of media art.

Through my review I will also show that the discourse which I describe as hegemonic in media art has became obsolete through the twin influence of the internet and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on one hand and the progress of science and technology and the way technological consumer products disseminated into society on the other hand. I will show that the 'crisis of media art' is mainly a crisis of that old discourse and that it has been incapable of building a foundational discourse, a discourse on which now can be built, because those theories are unable to provide a framework for the understanding of the new situation which arose through the internet and FOSS. For instance, this 'mainstream' discourse on media art still focuses on the central category of interactive art and immersive 3-D environments, yet the latter have ceased to be a place for artistic engagement -- virtual reality is now largely an area for engineering and military technology, where it also originally came from. However, media art theory and history focusing on interactive and immersive media art still receive most resources. I will present main points of critique of this discourse: firstly, that it relied on a false claim of the immateriality of the artwork and ignored the material basis of digital caulture and artwork and its contextual relationships with the base of cultural production in the late 20th and early 21st century. Secondly, I will show how this is based on a general discrimination of technological and skill based artisanal art production and on a 2500 year old Platonic split between intellectual and manual labour and how this split still continues in the shape of a perpetuation of Platonism and idealism in media art theory which often reaches far into esoteric and mysticist belief systems such as vitalism and a quasi religious belief in science. I will not be able to provide a proper study of ancient literature as this is not my subject area and my Greek is non-existent, but I will present some key pieces of literature which support my viewpoint that this is a hangover of Platonism and a class based system, in ancient Greece as now, which continues to create a situation which favours those irational yet techno-faithful positions which are unable to deal with the contemporaneity of a near ubiquituos mediality which characterises the present. I will also present examples in literature of further points of critique such as lack of political consciousness, 'gender-" and 'color-' blindness in relation to science and technology and generally a lack of awareness of issues addressed in post-colonial studies, summarized in a critique of media art as largely a white, male and north-Atlantic affair (whereby this critique has problems of its own because it runs danger, instead of remeding the situation, to perpetuate it through a fals negativity).

Thus, the work all the way so far has been to clean the rubble of disfunctional discourses. My actual interest is in the present and near future. I am interested in emerging artistic practices which have a better chance of coming out of the niche of media art and get the recognition in the art world which they deserve and ideally even affect society and the flow of techno-social evolution and help to engender desirable forms of progressive social change.

Since about 1995 a new discourse has started. One of its key terms is net critique, symbolising a coming to terms with the new situation that arose through the going public of the internet, speaking from a position from inside the net. The internet and how through it society would change, was the main focus of this discourse. However, it rarely ever dealt explicitely with art. Art was part of the mix of this 'net culture' of the nineties, whereby the artists themselves provided most of the discourse in the form of their works, their websites, manifestos and statements. A text production covering those forms existed only in fledgling form and was usually not theoretical but promotional -- interviews with the artists, for example, or supportive catalogue texts. I will present an overview of key positions and seminal texts of netcritique and netculture. Most of these texts do not focus on art in a narrow sense but on netculture at large.

From here I will proceed to present some 'positions in media art' which are exemplary for the new situation. This presentation will consist of short summaries and examples, not of a wide literature review, partly because that literature has not yet been written. This is the emerging field I am really concerned with. The places where those new practices are negotiated are mailinglists, websites, shared platforms, small, conspiratory meetings and new 'precarious' forms of self-institutions'. Here I will end my literature review of the field of media art and proceed with the literature review which relates more closely with my own original research.

Literature Review Part 2

Waves

Literature Review Part 3

Code

Literature Review Part 4

Voices