Postmedia Condition

The primary hypothesis of this paper is that recent years have seen a shift from digital advertising to post-advertising: thanks to the growing role of machine learning algorithms in communicational processes, advertising has been losing the character of explicitly persuasive addresses to assume that of friendly and open proposals and advice, or even the simple facilitation of everyday purchasing practices. The paper seeks to understand if and under what conditions the socio-semiotic and semio-pragmatic approaches developed in relation to traditional advertising can still be applied to post-advertising phenomena. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first one, the advent of the post-advertising condition is considered. In the second one, Amazon's Alexa, an example of a post-advertising dispositive, is analyzed. In the third part, the question of the use of traditional semiotic concepts and methods for the analysis of post-advertising is examined. The final answer to this question is affirmative, but on the condition that some new conceptual and methodological tools be introduced.

Media, New Media, Postmedia è stato scritto tra il 2008 e il 2010, per aiutare prima di tutto me stesso, l'autore, a venire a capo di quello strano conflitto tra mondi dell'arte di cui facevo, e faccio tutt'oggi esperienza quotidianamente, nel mio lavoro di docente, critico e curatore; per metterne a fuoco e spiegarne le dinamiche e le motivazioni profonde, per studiarne e illustrarne gli sviluppi storici, e per indicare una via d'uscita possibile. I mondi dell'arte a cui faccio riferimento sono il mondo dell'arte contemporanea "mainstream", con la sua popolazione di artisti e professionisti e il suo paesaggio di musei, gallerie, biennali, premi, fiere, riviste; e il mondo della cosiddetta New Media Art, messo a punto tra gli anni Sessanta e gli anni Novanta del Novecento per ospitare, sostenere, nutrire, discutere, valorizzare e conservare la sperimentazione artistica con le nuove tecnologie in una fase storica in cui queste ricerche erano, con poche eccezioni, ignorate dal mondo dell'arte. Il conflitto è, ovviamente, quello relativo al posizionamento di queste pratiche artistiche, in un momento - la svolta di Millennio - in cui, complice l'esplosione della rivoluzione digitale, il mondo dell'arte ha cominciato finalmente a riconoscerne la rilevanza e l'urgenza culturale.

In Domenico Quaranta, Media, New Media, Postmedia, Postmedia Books, Milano 2018. Seconda edizione

L'arte nell'era postmediale
Marcel Broodthaers, ad esempio
di Rosalind Krauss

Negli anni in cui l'arte si ritrova a fare i conti con la globalizzazione dell'immagine al servizio del capitale, Broodthaers ci insegna come la specificità mediale non serva più a caratterizzare l'opera, ma la sua reinvenzione e riarticolazione permette agli artisti di avere strumenti in grado di produrre delle differenze.
"Trascrizione della Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture del 1999, “L’arte nell’era postmediale” è uno di quei testi che sono entrati presto nella leggenda: tutti ne hanno sentito parlare, ma solo pochi fortunati finora ne hanno avuto una copia tra le mani. Il libro, nonostante la brevità, è un largo ed intricato spettro teorico fatto di osservazioni originali e provocatorie in cui Krauss, co-fondatore e co-direttore della rivista October, veterana di Artforum negli anni 60 e 70, esamina l’intersezione degli interessi artistici con la cultura visiva attuale." Segno, n.203 / 07-2005

The following excerpt comes from the final chapter of my book Media, New Media, Postmedia, recently published in Italian by Postmediabooks, who kindly gave Rhizome permission to republish it in English. The book is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called “New Media Art” in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history.

The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed - as it usually is - as a simple medium-based definition. On the contrary, a work of art - whether based on technology or not - is usually classed as New Media Art when it is produced, exhibited and discussed in a specific “art world,” the world of New Media Art. This art world came into being as a cultural niche in the Sixties and Seventies, and became a bona fide art world in the Eighties and Nineties, developing its own means of production and distribution, and cultivating an idea of “art” that is completely different from that entertained by the contemporary art world. If you are familiar with Lev Manovich's distinction between “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land” (1996), you already get the point. According to Manovich, Duchamp Land (the contemporary art world) requires art objects that are “oriented towards the 'content'”, “complicated” and that share an “ironic, self-referential, and often literally destructive attitude towards its material”; on the other hand, Turing Land (the New Media Art world) is oriented “towards new, state-of-the-art computer technology,” and produces artworks that are “simple and usually lacking irony” and that “take technology which they use always seriously.” 1 Both art worlds have changed a lot over the last decade, but the distinction is still valid to a point.

This is, however, just the start of an in-depth analysis of what happened in the following decade. From the mid Nineties, the rise of the web and consumer technologies and the new approach of artists to the medium pioneered by the net.art movement turned this linear situation into a much more complex, conflicted phenomenon that is almost impossible to summarize in a few lines. Technology-based art grew exponentially, and the New Media Art world grew accordingly, but without adapting to these new developments. The New Media Art world became inadequate to an art practice that was increasingly sharing the idea of art and the system of values of the contemporary art world. At the same time, however, most of the attempts made to bring New Media Art back to Duchamp Land failed as a consequence of an approach based on importing the system of values of Turing Land into Duchamp Land. In the contemporary art world, art is not appreciated as creative research on a given medium, but as a powerful statement on the world we are living in.

The following excerpts attempt to respond to three questions that remain unanswered at the end of the book. If the art formerly known as New Media is moving from its native world to the contemporary art world, is there a future for the New Media Art world? If the conceptual paradigm of creative research on the medium has proven to be weak, obsolete and inadequate in promoting the art formerly known as New Media on the contemporary art platform, is there another approach that can help us call attention to its specificity and topicality? And finally: is it really necessary to insist on this specificity?

Along the last sixty years, a complex body of works has been developed along the edge between art, science and technology. An increasing number of artists came up putting their hands on the new tools that technology placed at their disposal, trying to get in touch with engineers and scientists, collaborating with them, entering university labs as well as research and development centers. After a long preparation, this research literally boomed along the Nineties, when the increasing accessibility of new technologies and the development of a “digital culture” made it possible for it to acquire a critical mass of artists. Festivals and specialized art centers sprang up like mushrooms, and many books and magazines, investigating the present and documenting the past, have been published.
A plenty of labels and critical paradigms have been forged in order to identify and describe this kind of research; then, in the late Nineties, the label “New Media Art” imposed itself upon the others.
Yet, notwithstanding this flourishing, neither the label “New Media Art” nor the artistic practices it refers to were able to conquer the official art criticism or, more generally, the contemporary art world. Just a few works of New Media Art were able to enter the permanent collection of a museum, and even less were able to escape the limbo of the museum’s warehouses. New Media Art is more or less absent in the contemporary art market, as well as in mainstream art magazines; and recent accounts on contemporary art history completely forgot it.
How can we explain this segregation? Why “official” art criticism and history have still so many difficulties in integrating the artistic research on new media technologies into their interpretation of the art history of the Twentieth century, even now that this research can be considered in all its historic relevance? Why the art market, that was able to greet video, installation and performance, is still unable to accept and distribute artworks based in software, hardware or computer networks? Why many artists are so intolerant of the very term “New Media Art”, and of any attempt to stress its diversity? Why, on the other side, other artists are so proud of this diversity? Why New Media Art pretends to be “different” from contemporary art, and yet proudly reclaims its relationship with contemporary art’s very same roots, the Avant-gardes?
Many answers have been suggested, along the last decade, for these questions. It has been said that the official art criticism suffers a generational gap, a digital divide that doesn’t let it understand the most radical choices (in terms of media); that art history never accepted the art-science-technology paradigm; that digital technologies challenge the traditional idea of an artwork as a closed, unique artifact, as a luxury item for a luxury market; and that the fast obsolescence of technology makes it impossible to collect technology-based works.
However, all these answers share a common mistake: they focus on a single problem, rather than considering these problems as part of a whole. Medium, New Media, Postmedia is the first attempt to give these questions a common, holistic answer. In order to reach the goal, this book starts discussing the current definition of New Media Art, making its weakness clear and suggesting a new definition that makes it possible to reconsider New Media Art’s historical development on a new basis and to better understand its recent developments and its positioning in contemporary culture.
But Medium, New Media, Postmedia is not just an attempt to explain the current status of the artistic research with new technologies, but also a militant endeavor to help it get the critical consideration it deserves; it’s not just a description of the present, but also an attempt to change the future, suggesting new critical and curatorial strategies.

Originally presented at the International symposium, "Gift of Nam June Paik -Reanimating NJP: Nam June Paik’s Interfaces" on September 9, 2016, Korea (https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/59754/international-symposium-gift-of-nam-june-paik-8-reanimating-njp-nam-june-paik-s-interfaces/), the following paper is my foray into Nam June Paik's rich oeuvre whose implications in the age of 'post-medium (or post-media) condition' are becoming increasingly acute. It is being heavily revised and expanded for a journal article.
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Widely hailed as the so-called “father of video art,” Nam June Paik lives on.
What begs the question, however, is the sheer diversity of his entire oeuvre beyond video. On top of his famous video works, Paik’s artworks encompass music, performance, painting, sculpture, cinema, TV, laser, and digital- let alone everything that wanders between or (re)mixes them. Is this simply a tell-tale sign which proves Paik as one of those avant-garde artists- who poked their noses into virtually everything? Is this not the proof of his (and their) reign whose time has now clearly passed?
Sidestepping such an idée fixe, this paper seeks to offer a different reading. For, despite the frenzy born of his dizzying changes of media, Paik’s works seem to betray a striking degree of consistency (if not stability)- in terms of what I call “states of media” wherein mediation soon gives way to the sense of immediacy or “immediation.” Put differently, his artworks mark and embody varying degrees or states of media as what not simply mediates but fundamentally transmutates humans and nonhuman entities.
I will show how these states are coextensive with Paik’s persistent, if at times contradictory exploration of Time, particularly in terms of its irreversibility, aka ‘entropy.’ In so doing, I will try to revise the well-worn myth of Paik’s (putatively naïve) humanism or anthropocentrism- in favor of what Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno call ‘Natural History (Naturgeschichte)’ in which Machine and Human age alike. This will help us to demonstrate how Paik’s oeuvre remain more relevant and perhaps contemporary than ever.

El video, la fotografía y el cine han tenido un papel clave en la identificación de los desafíos y perspectivas de la historia del arte del siglo XXI, y en lo relacionado a cómo cuestionar, reformular críticamente y superar nociones y modelos modernistas de la especificidad de los medios. También han ayudado a enriquecer los enfoques inter y transdisciplinarios en la historia contemporánea del arte, y su comprensión del arte producido en diferentes medios, antes y durante la modernidad. El VIII Simposio de Historia del Arte en la Universidad de los Andes invita a enviar propuestas de trabajos individuales que discutan y examinen algunos de los desafíos metodológicos, analíticos o teóricos, y algunas de las perspectivas de la historia del arte en lo concerniente a la relación entre arte y medios en obras de arte (en un sentido amplio del término) producidas en cualquier momento y lugar. Las ponencias pueden adoptar las aproximaciones descritas a continuación, pero también pueden proponer otras diferentes...