New Media Art and The Gallery in The Digital Age: Charlie Gere
New Media Art and The Gallery in The Digital Age: Charlie Gere
New Media Art and The Gallery in The Digital Age: Charlie Gere
CHARLIE GERE
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New Media Art and the Gallery
in the Digital Age
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are produced and even distributed digitally; these media are beginning
to converge with digital forms, such as the Internet, the World Wide
Web, and video games, to produce something like a seamless digital
mediascape. At work, we are surrounded by technology, whether in
offices or in supermarkets and factories, where almost every aspect of
planning, design, marketing, production, and distribution is monitored
or controlled digitally.
Galleries and museums are far from exempt from the effects of these
technological transformations. Indeed, it might be suggested that such
institutions are profoundly affected and that the increasing ubiquity of
systems of information manipulation and communication presents par-
ticular challenges to the art gallery or museum as an institution. At one
level, these challenges are practical: how to take advantage of the new
means of dissemination and communication these technologies make
possible; how to compete as a medium for cultural practice in an increas-
ingly media-saturated world; how to engage with new artistic practices
made possible by such technologies, many of which present their own
particular challenges in terms of acquisition, curation, and interpreta-
tion. Other challenges are arguably far more profound and concern the
status of institutions such as art galleries in a world where such technolo-
gies radically bring into question not just the way in which art galleries
and museums operate, but the very notions of history, heritage, and even
time itself upon which they are predicated.
It would be hard to overstate the extent to which the reality of our
lives is governed by technologically advanced processes and systems,
from ubiquitous and increasingly invisible computer networks to
mobile telephony to genetic manipulation, nanotechnology, artificial
intelligence, and artificial life, or what Donna Haraway calls the “inte-
grated circuit” of high-tech capital. These technologies, though inti-
mately bound up with such issues as globalization, surveillance,
terrorism, and pornography, barely seem to impinge on the spaces of
contemporary art—and then only obliquely, or marginally. For exam-
ple, although Tate Britain in London held a show of net art in 2001 (Art
and Money Online, curated by Julian Stallabrass), and Tate Online
(“the fifth site,” after the four galleries and the store) has hosted
“net.art commissions” since 2002, neither initiative gave the work in
question the same status as other contemporary work. Art and Money
Online was in Tate Britain’s Art Now space, which exhibits new and
experimental work that might not otherwise get a showing in the
gallery; net art commissions allow the work to be sequestered safely
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In the United States, during the 1950s, artists like Ben Laposky and
John Whitney Sr., and Max Mathews at Bell Labs made some of the first
electronic artworks and experimented with computer-generated music.
Meanwhile, in Europe, composers such as Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse,
and Karlheinz Stockhausen were also experimenting with electronics,
while artists such as Jean Tinguely, Pol Bury, Nicolas Schöffer, Takis,
Otto Piene, Julio le Parc, Tsai Wen-Ying, and Len Lye (also known as an
experimental animator), and groups such as Le Mouvement, The “New
Tendency,” ZERO, and the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV)
started to explore the possibilities of kineticism and cybernetics for art.
These explorations were accompanied and encouraged by the work of
theorists such as Abraham Moles in France and Max Bense in Germany,
both of whom wrote works applying information theory and cybernetics
to art. Bense was able to put his ideas into practice at the Stuttgart Uni-
versity Art Gallery, which he founded. During his two decades as head of
the gallery, it held some of the very first exhibitions of computer art.
In Britain, a generally pastoral and antitechnological attitude had pre-
vailed in the arts since the nineteenth century, with exceptions such as
the Vorticist movement in the early twentieth century. But the primary
force for promoting technological and systems ideas in this country was
the short-lived but influential Independent Group (IG), a loose collection
of young artists, designers, theorists, and architects connected with the
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Through shows and discussions
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and elsewhere, advanced ideas
about technology, media, information and communications theories,
and cybernetics were presented and debated. The IG was connected with
the famous exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
in 1956, which explored many of these ideas with great panache.
Equally important were the IG’s effects on art education in the United
Kingdom, especially through Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore’s
groundbreaking Basic Design course at King’s College, Durham, part of
the University of Newcastle. This greatly influenced artists such as Roy
Ascott, who studied and worked with Hamilton and Pasmore and who
has continued to develop radical pedagogical strategies for the teaching
of art, often involving both new technologies and new, technologically
oriented discourses and ideas. The Basic Design course anticipated
the wholesale restructuring of art education in the United Kingdom in
the early 1960s, which came about as a result of the 1960 report of the
National Advisory Council on Art Education (otherwise known as the
Coldstream report).
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duced his monumental work Science and Technology in the Arts: A Tour
through the Realm of Science/Art.
It is hard to recapture the utopian energy and belief these exhibitions
and publications embodied. As far as Reichardt, Burnham, Davis, and
others were concerned, the future of art was as a means of engaging
with the concepts, technologies, and systems through which society was
increasingly organized. Yet the apogee of this thoroughly utopian proj-
ect also represented the beginning of its demise, and the replacement of
its idealism and techno-futurism with the irony and critique of concep-
tual art. To begin with, at least, it was hard to distinguish between con-
ceptual art and systems art. Indeed, they were often interchangeable
and indistinguishable. But by 1970 the difference was beginning to
come clear. That year, which was also the year of Burnham’s Software
show, Kynaston McShine curated an exhibition at MoMA whose title,
Information, linked it to work in art and technology. Though it may
have suggested a technological orientation and showed some of the
same people as Software, it did not include the technologists and engi-
neers of that earlier show. Furthermore, the artists evinced an increas-
ingly distanced and critical attitude toward technology.
Thus in the early 1970s art involving new technologies seemed to be
superseded by other approaches. Such failure, if it was failure, can be
ascribed to the quality of much of the work; the failure of the exhibitions
to work as intended; the artists’ refusal to collaborate with industry to
realize projects and exhibitions; a suspicion of Systems Art, cybernetics,
and computers because of their roots in the military-industrial-academic
complex and their use in the Vietnam War; and, finally, difficulties in col-
lecting, conserving, and commodifying such work. The growing disap-
pointment with the counterculture in the early 1970s and the economic
crises of the same period did little to encourage technologically based
utopianism. Nevertheless, the years from 1965 to the early 1970s were a
high point for the exhibition and public visibility of art made using new
technologies. Early exhibitions in New York and Stuttgart, and major
shows and events such as 9 Evenings, Cybernetic Serendipity, and Soft-
ware must have made it seem that such work was a future for art, if not
the future. Yet by the mid-1970s, such work had more or less disap-
peared as far as the mainstream art world was concerned.
In the 1970s and 1980s, video art was gradually subsumed by the
mainstream art world, but new media, electronic, computer, and cyber-
netic art was largely ignored. Such art continued to be made and taught,
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but it was shown mostly in specialist and trade shows such as SIG-
GRAPH in the United States, the annual conference organized by the
Association for Computing Machinery for those with an interest in
graphics. Many of the artists working with technology ended up in the
burgeoning computer graphics industry. Douglas Davis, Harold Cohen
(Aaron), Woody and Steina Vasulka, Stelarc, Jeffrey Shaw (Legible City),
Lillian Schwartz, Paul Brown, and Robert Adrian X still made art using
new technologies, but it was largely invisible in the mainstream art
world and regarded by some as having failed. Such art did succeed—but
not as art. Economic crises led to a restructuring of capitalist economies
and global finance that was aided by the increasing ubiquity of net-
worked computing. In what became known as the postindustrial econ-
omy, information, rather than material goods, became the focus of
production in the West, as predicted by pundits such as Alvin Toffler and
Daniel Bell. The techno-utopianism of the 1960s art world reemerged in
the 1970s with the personal computer and the Internet, through which
technologies developed by the military-industrial-academic complex
were repurposed by the neoliberal end of the counterculture, in particu-
lar Steward Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog. In the late 1970s,
moreover, computer special effects, video games, and user-friendly sys-
tems and such cultural responses as cyberpunk fiction, techno music, and
deconstructive graphic design all developed.
At the end of the decade, two French academics, Simon Nora and
Alain Minc, wrote a report for President Giscard d’Estaing that heralded
the “computerization of society” and the advent of “telematics,” mean-
ing the coming together of computers and telecommunications. At
about the same time, discourses such as poststructuralism and postmod-
ernism began to emerge, partly as a critical response to the ubiquity and
power of information technologies and communications networks.
Despite differences in approach and ostensible subject matter, the writ-
ings of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard always imply a
critique of systems and communications theories. The space opened up
by this critical approach may have begun to make systems art interest-
ing to the mainstream art world again. In 1979 the first Ars Electronica
festival, which looked at the application of computers and electronic
technologies, was held in Linz, Austria. In 1985 Lyotard curated a mas-
sive exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Les Immatériaux—also dis-
cussed in Sarah Cook’s essay in this volume—which was intended to
show the cultural effects of new technologies and communication and
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CHARLIE GERE 21
information. Also about this time Tate put on its first show of computer-
generated art, the 1983 exhibition of work produced by Harold Cohen’s
Aaron, an artificial-intelligence program that drives a drawing machine.
But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, technologically based art really
began to reemerge. In 1988 Moviola, an agency for commissioning, pro-
moting, presenting, and distributing electronic media art, was founded in
Liverpool, and Videopositive, an annual festival of such art, was held
under its aegis. (Moviola later transmogrified into the Foundation for Art
and Creative Technology [FACT].) In the same year, the first International
Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA) was held. A year later, the Zen-
trum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), a major center for media
and technology arts, was founded in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1990 the
NTT InterCommunication Center was opened in Tokyo, while the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art held its first show of new media art.
Throughout the 1990s, the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis showed
digital and new media works. About this time the National Gallery in
London undertook the first use of computers for the public display of
information. In 1993 the Guggenheim in New York held an exhibition
titled Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium, followed three years later by
Mediascape. In 1994 the first Lovebytes festival of electronic art was held
in Sheffield, and in 1997 the Barbican Art Gallery in London put on the
exhibition Serious Games: Art, Technology and Interaction, curated by
Beryl Graham (discussed in the case studies section of this book). In Hull,
the Time-Based Arts center was established to concentrate on new media
arts. In 2001 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented its dig-
ital art exhibition 010101, and the Whitney Museum of American Art
organized Bitstreams and Data Dynamics. In 2003 FACT opened a new
media arts center in Liverpool, while the BALTIC in Gateshead has com-
mitted itself to increasing its involvement in new media arts, as has
Bromwich’s new arts space, the Public (formerly c/Plex). (However, it is
notable that the only institution in London regularly putting on gallery
displays of such work is the Science Museum.)
Perhaps the most important event in digital art practice during the
1990s was the first user-friendly Web browser released in 1994. The
World Wide Web developed in the late 1980s stemmed from the ideas of
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at the European Center for Nuclear
Research (CERN) in Switzerland, to use the Internet to allow access to
digital documents. To this end he developed a version of the standard
generalized markup language (SGML) used in publishing, which he
called hypertext markup language, or HTML. It allowed users to make
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texts and, later on, pictures available to viewers with appropriate soft-
ware, and to embed links from one document to another. The emer-
gence of the Web coincided almost exactly with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and the newfound sense of freedom, the possibilities of
cross-border exchange, and funding from the European Union and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Soros Foundation all
helped foster net art in Eastern Europe, where much of the early work
was done.
When “user-friendly” browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape came out
in the early to middle 1990s, a number of artists seized upon the possibil-
ities of the Web as a medium producing work under the banner “net.art.”
Such work was made at least partly on and for the Web and could be
viewed only online. Vuk CAosica is said to have coined the term “net.art” in
the mid-1990s, to refer to artistic practices involving the World Wide
Web, after receiving an e-mail composed of ASCII gibberish, in which the
only readable elements were the words “net” and “art” separated by a full
stop. Since then the original European “net.art” group—including Vuk
CAosica, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin, Rachel Baker, Heath Bunting, and
JODI—as well as artists such as Paul Sermon, 0100101110101101.org,
Natalie Bookchin, Lisa Jevbratt, Paul Sermon, Radioqualia, ®™ark
(www.rtmark.com), Matt Fuller, Thomson and Craighead, and many oth-
ers have been extraordinarily productive. At the same time, discussions
and commentary about technology and art have proliferated through
mailing lists and sites such as Rhizome, Nettime, the Whitney Museum’s
artport, and CRUMB (Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook’s digital curating
list based at Sunderland University), as well as publications such as Mute.
As in the late 1960s and early 1970s, important work has been published
in this area by, among others, Lev Manovich, Christiane Paul, Oliver
Grau, Stephen Wilson, Edward Shanken, and Michael Rush. Art history
departments in Europe and the United States are now starting to look seri-
ously at net art and new media art.
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CHARLIE GERE 25
museums and galleries to think actively about engaging with such work,
whose long and important history intersects, at crucial points, with other
better-known forms of art practice. Indeed, those practices would be
very different without new media work. Renewed interest in it will
enhance and deepen our understanding of artistic developments in the
postwar era. Indeed the art of that period cannot be understood without
taking new media art into account.
Furthermore, such practice, in both its historical and its current man-
ifestations, is important for its capacity to reflect our current technolog-
ical condition. This is one reason why so many artists work in the field
of new media. It is also why any move to collect and display work made
in this area is likely to prove very popular, especially among younger
people. For many of them a world without video games, computer spe-
cial effects, the Internet, the World Wide Web, mobile phones, and so
on, is almost unimaginable. These are also the technologies that under-
pin and make possible globalization, genetic manipulation, bioterror-
ism, and other such phenomena. Art made by using and reflecting upon
new media and new technologies helps us understand how our lives are
being transformed by these very media and technologies. The gallery
has an important role to play in making this art visible, not just now but
also in the future, when such work will be part of art history. How our
culture archives our past is not a question of our relationship just with
that past, but with the future as well. What we choose to archive and
thus to preserve for future generations will help determine the future.
NOTES
This essay reflects on some of the issues arising out of the three months I spent
at Tate on an Arts and Humanities Research Board “Changing Places” Fellow-
ship in 2002, looking at the role of the gallery in the digital age. A different ver-
sion appears on the Tate Papers part of the Tate Web site, http://www.tate.org
.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04autumn/gere.htm.
1. Richard Beardsworth, “Thinking Technicity,” in Deconstruction: A
Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000),
235.
2. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of
Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1994), 7.
3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1995), 18.
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