Curatorial Project
ARCO'05
Madrid, Spain

Black Box is a new media art exhibition within ARCO '05 curated by Anne Ellegood, Omar López-Chahoud, Shamin M. Momin, Agustín Pérez Rubio, Jérôme Sans, Gerfried Stocker, and Mark Tribe. I selected two artists to participate in Black Box: Mary Flanagan and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.

My Curatorial Text:

New media art is a slippery term. To some, it is merely a synonym for digital art. To others, it includes video and other electronic but not necessarily digital forms. Still others use new media art to describe any artistic practice that uses an emerging technology as a medium. To my knowledge, the term first came into widespread use in the early 1990s, around the time people started using “new media” to describe and define digital publishing technologies and the industry that arose to develop and exploit them. The new media business positioned itself as old media’s revolutionary replacement: CD-ROMs, web sites, and video games would not only supplant books, magazines, and films, they would create new kinds of experiences that would break down barriers to creativity, provide universal access to knowledge, transform economies, and accelerate our evolutionary transformation into post-human beings. Magazines like Mondo 2000, Wired, and ArtByte brimmed with the utopian promise of new digital technologies.

Plan and perspective views of Black Box installation:

By this time, artists had been working with computers for more than 30 years. Known variously as art and technology, electronic art, computer art, and digital art, these practices generally took place on the margins of the art world, and were often the result of interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and engineers. In the 1970s, the term media art emerged to refer to experimental video, satellite transmissions, and other immaterial forms of art that eschewed the gallery system and sought to participate in the culture at large by adopting the tools and distribution networks of commercial media such as television and radio.

New media art thus has a double connotation. On the one hand, it refers to media art, simultaneously linking itself to that movement and distinguishing itself from it: not old media art, but new media art; not Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, or Carolee Schneeman, but Heath Bunting, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Natalie Jeremejenko. On the other hand, it invokes the new media industry, and in doing so wraps itself in the now-tarnished luster of the new media economy and its naïve optimism.

The rise of new media art as a term also coincided with a rapid expansion of computer-enabled artistic practices as artists from various backgrounds—painters, performance artists, photographers, video and filmmakers, activist artists, sculptors, and conceptual artists—started to use digital technologies in their work. By the mid-1990s, personal computers had crossed a threshold of price, power, and usability. For the first time, artists could afford to buy a computer that was a true media authoring machine—capable, for example, of manipulating photo-quality images, editing video, or modeling 3D objects—and required no special training, so they could teach themselves how to use it. Suddenly, digital art wasn’t just for geeks anymore. Some artists simply used the new tools to replace old ones while continuing to produce work that resembled more traditional forms. Others became interested in computer technologies themselves, the new forms of artistic practice they enabled, and the roles these technologies were playing in the culture at large. Mary Flanagan and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer exemplify this last group—artists whose work uses emerging technologies to explore the complex relationships between technology and culture.

Video and computer games are a relatively young cultural form. Early games, like Pong, Pac Man, and Asteroids, had simple rules and told rudimentary stories using straight-forward metaphors: hit a ball back and forth, eat up the cookies in a maze, shoot up the space rocks before they crash into you. Today, computer games are often sophisticated productions with big budgets, complex narratives, life-like graphics, and intricate interactivity. And game industry revenue, which includes sales of hardware (consoles) as well as software (the games themselves) now surpasses movie box office sales. As was the case with television in the 1960s, cultural theorists and artists have been among the first to recognize and investigate gaming’s significance as a cultural form. Mary Flanagan is one of dozens of contemporary artists who are exploring the computer game as a medium. Her 2003 project, [domestic], is a computer game based on a commercially-produced game engine called Unreal Tournament, a “first person shooter” in which players enter an immersive three-dimensional environment, blasting away enemies as they explore a maze-like warren of rooms. [domestic] could be called a detournement of Unreal Tournament, to play on a phrase from the Situationists. Instead of a narrative of violent conquest, Flanagan uses the game engine to create a home-like environment for the exploration of childhood memories through photographic images and fragments of text.

Flanagan’s [domestic] functions as an installation in the virtual environment of the game engine—Flanagan approaches the Unreal Tournament much as a conventional installation artist might appropriate the space of a gallery and transform it into a three-dimensional environment-as-artwork. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 2004 installation, Standards and Double Standards, is in some ways a more traditional work in that it inhabits the physical space of the gallery and adopts the now-familiar form of a room full of objects suspended from the ceiling. But unlike the suspended sculptures of Petah Coyne, for example, the hanging belts of Standards and Double Standards seem to be imbued with collective intelligence. Hanging in a grid formation in horizontal loops as if worn by invisible men, the belts react to the presence of visitors to the gallery by turning to face them with their fastened buckles. When multiple visitors enter the space, the belts turn in complex patterns of interference like invisible figures in a crowd. Standards and Double Standards makes use of a ceiling-mounted video camera and computer software that analyzes the video image, picks people out, and follows them as they move about the room. This technology, known as motion capture, is commonly used in surveillance systems and also in art works such as Marie Sester’s Access (2001-2004) and David Rokeby’s Very Nervous System (1986-1990).

Click here for video documentation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Standards and Double Standards (2004) as installed at Art Basel.

Like the media artists of an earlier generation, Flanagan and Lozano-Hemmer experiment with emerging technologies that are caught up in the historical transformations of our time. Much as television was both a cause and an effect of profound economic and social transformations in the second half of the 20th century, computer games and surveillance technologies are part and parcel of our new cultural environment. At its best, the work of new media artists offers inspired alternatives to the standard commercial uses of new media and critical insights into roles emerging technologies play in our lives.