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Abstract: This contribution builds on Lev Manovich's thesis that avant-garde procedures were incorporated into the very operation of software, as the computer as a meta-medium completely transcodes the reality. The text examines the foundations of computer science in mathematical formalism and considers Turing's computing machine as a starting point for the generative aspect of computer art. The generative art-making was practiced also in the neo-avant-gardes. Data processing introduces into today's world a decoupling between understanding and agency that was once thought to require active thinking. Juri Lotman's idea of periphery-centre dynamic explains the shift of mechanical and (once) avant-garde procedures to the center of the globalized culture. At the same time, the image of a human is radically changing as she finds herself in a new homogeneous environment made of information: she becomes an inforg (Luciano Floridi) together with artificial and hybrid agents. Identity as informational integrity is discussed with the examples of performances and happenings of Srečo Dragan from the conceptualist period, when he collaborated with Nuša Dragan and the extended OHO group. The discussion touches upon the latest new media works by Srečo Dragan, where a multitude of interfaces mediates between the self-awareness (memory, declaration statements) and the body of the participant, and builds an archive of connections for a society established through technology. Dragan’s idea of socialization with art foregrounds a performative educational practice that interferes with the user's identity.  
Keywords: new media art, the avant-garde, socialization, infosphere
Published in RUNG: 10.03.2025; Views: 478; Downloads: 10
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Abstract: The media archaeologist has been called an experimenter (Fickers and van den Oever), a circuit-bender (G Hertz and Jussi Parikka), a “thinkerer” (Ted Nelson, Lori Emerson, Erkki Huhtamo). With reluctance, sometimes media archaeologists self-designate as a “media/historians.” Rarely does the media archaeologist refer to themselves as “students” of media. However, several texts have appeared recently that suggest that media archaeology as a field is inherently pedagogic, in the sense that it presumes experiential, speculative, and embodied forms of knowledge acquisition (Fickers and van den Oever; Patrick Ellis and Colin Williamson, Wanda Strauven). This paper follows on the call by recent media archaeologists like Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever for a sensorially-engaged encounter with media artifacts. It suggests that, through such methods of experiment and re-enactment, media archaeology might represent a kind of un-learning of toxic subject positions embedded in media technologies themselves. Making the historical self into the field’s most important, but repressed, medium, the paper argues that media archaeology might be indispensable to historical writing because it presents historians and students of history with an opportunity to radically reimagine the self (Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Claudia Rankine). (ARIS J7-3158, Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art)
Keywords: media archaeology, experimental pedagogy, critical theory
Published in RUNG: 09.10.2024; Views: 997; Downloads: 2
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Abstract: At its core, human epistemology is based on two pillars: sense experience (consider the Humean empiricism, or phenomenology) and set-theory based logic. Quine in “Epistemology Naturalized” understands a human as a natural transformer of a meager input from senses into a torrential output of descriptions. For him also Carnap’s rational reconstruction (a logical reconstruction of the world from sense data) can be construed as creative and imaginative mechanical simulations, of the transformations from the world of experiential implications into various languages. Such a detached and rule-governed idea of games as playful alternative worlds, possibly in a reduced state as argued by Huizinga, can provide an important perspective on algorithms of new media literature, as well as its other features. Rules for particular works are summarized in genre-constructs, which will be considered for the domain where new media and literature intersect. The genres can be derived form literary traditions, and from the basic aspects of new media art that encompass the algorithmic building of communication artifacts from (more or less vast) archives of utterances in various media, and of other data. Espen Aarseth’s theory considered cybertext a perspective for the study of literature, and not a particular genre (Cybertext, 5). Finally, there is an important problem that needs to be addressed: today, several generations of work by digital media artists are firmly in the past, while media art remains synonymous with “new” and “emergent,” and the growing vastness of the loss consequently goes unacknowledged. The genre-rules based approach attempts to tackle the preservation issue by identifying the key elements of individual works that need to be recorded and preserved. The descriptions are already interpretations with an intrinsic goal of making the works re-enactable and accessible to the audiences of the future. The pilot project of preserving the Nation – Culture project by Vuk Ćosić (2000) will be outlined in the conclusion. (ARIS J7-3158, Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art) / Aleš Vaupotič is a literary comparatist, media theorist, and new-media artist. He works at the Research Centre for Humanities at the University of Nova Gorica. Between 2021 and 2023 he was the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, and in 2022 the commissioner for the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. He is currently the project leader in an interdisciplinary research project Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art. Among his research foci are the theory of discourse, semiotics, comparative art studies, new-media theory, methodology of digital humanities and realism in the arts. His monograph Vprašanje realizma (The Question of Realism, 2019) explores the continuities and shifts between traditional and new media.
Keywords: genres, new media art, cultural heritage preservation
Published in RUNG: 30.09.2024; Views: 981; Downloads: 2
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Abstract: This paper is about two pilot studies conducted in 2022 that aimed to develop a model for preserving and archiving new media art work in the context of a research project on the sustainable digital preservation of new media art that is being co-hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana. As the works of art selected for the study by Slovenian new media art pioneers Vuk Ćosić (2000) and Srečo Dragan (2005) were technically obsolete or non-functional by the time of the study, the question of how to bring the artworks back into existence and what components of each artwork to include in the collection and preservation process constituted one aspect of our research. But this process of reconstruction also raised questions about how the preservation of media art is reshaping the practice of archiving within an institution whose holdings were, until recently, largely in traditional mediums. An interdisciplinary approach addressed the problem from different points of view, involving the practitioners, experts from art-history, museology, computer science, media theory and intellectual property rights.
Keywords: digital cultural heritage, new media art preservation, new media art archives
Published in RUNG: 28.05.2024; Views: 1959; Downloads: 12
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Abstract: Eszter Polonyis Vortrag behandelt frühe Systeme automatisierter Identitätserkennung. Einen Fokus bilden Experimente zur Stimmerkennung, wie sie in der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts von US-amerikanische Telekommunikationsunternehmen unternommen wurden. Sie geht dabei auch den Verbindungen zur Arbeit mit „noise“ von Medienkünstler*innen nach, darunter Tony Conrad, John Cage und Kurt Kren.
Keywords: media studies, surveillance studies, art history, critical data studies, avant-garde and experimental art
Published in RUNG: 12.02.2024; Views: 2220; Downloads: 10
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