This post on Tom Moody’s blog (found via Rhizome, drawing a distinction between “New Media Artists” and “Artists with Computers” struck me as interesting, especially as it echoes a distinction made in Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts which I am currently working my way through. Moody defines the distinction like this:
New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don’t care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. New media artists tend to germinate in design or media arts programs whereas artists with computers incline to studio arts backgrounds or autodidacticism.”
By comparison, Wilson outlines four main ways in which [technological / scientific] research functions in various artists works:
- Exploration of new possibilities
- Explorations of the cultural implications of a new line of research
- Use of the new unique capabilities to explore themes not directly related to the research
- Incidental use of the technology
These four categories of work broadly follow a scale from work whose purpose is to examine the nature of the medium in which it was made, to work in which the medium is incidental to the ‘meaning’ of the work, mapping nicely to Moody’s “New Media Artists” and “Artists with Computers” respectively.
Moody also draws a comparison between “Art Photography” and “Artists with Cameras” that struck me as interesting, particularly when compared with this quote from Wilson:
It is a challenge to work with a medium before anyone defines it as a medium. Yet several years later, when the technology has matured and a body of artistic work and commentary has appeared, the choice does not have the same meaning. At the early stages of an emerging technology, the power of artistic work derives in part from the cultural act of claiming it for creative production and cultural commentary.
Given that we can look at the evolution of a critical framework to talk about photography as art right from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (and probably before) up to the present day at which point there’s nothing particularly novel about art that makes use of photography as a medium (leaving aside Moody’s distinctions for a minute), it struck me that perhaps the distinction between incidental use of a ‘new’ medium and the recursive self-examination of the medium itself that defines Moody’s “New Media Art” is perhaps more to do with differing critical strategies than some sort of innate property of the work itself (Indeed, the assertion that a work itself can have these sorts of innate and canonical properties is problematic to my mind, and probably deserves it’s own post, but to be honest, there’s been plenty written about that already.)
Therefore I was thinking vaguely about there being a sort of hegemonic ’set of all media acceptable to the artworld’, which new media (not necessarily big-N big-M New Media) are absorbed into by a sort of dialectic in which a new medium is utilised specifically as a challenge to this hegemony (as Wilson describes), and is therefore ‘claimed’ as a medium for an art, and consequently absorbed into the hegemonic ’set of acceptable media’, and how Moody’s two distinct categories are really just critical attitudes that tend to be prevalent at the beginning and end of this process of absorbtion, respectively. This is probably a little vague, but struck me as an interesting idea - I’d be really keen to know if there’s any literature about concerned specifically with critical and theoretical attitudes to different media. Anyone in particular I should be looking up?
