New Media in the Museum
One increasingly controversial issue in New Media Art is its relationship with the museum/gallery space, as these works resist traditional institutional practices. I will briefly discuss here some of the emerging tensions in this relationship, and draw attention to potential philosophical implications with respect to authorship. I will conclude with remarks on how to mold this relationship for new media artworks in a way that does not compromise the artist’s/museum’s role, or the audience’s comprehension of these works.
Media consultant Susan Morris has carved five main challenges in the new media art-museum relationship. They are control; referring to the lack of standard licensing policies to manage artworks, conservation; pointing to issues of preservation posed by the rapid development of these works [Click here to see conservation efforts for Nam June Paik’s Fin de Siècle II] , selection; dealing with issues of curation in the face of little critical criteria of new media artwork and a seemingly infinite pool to choose from, display; addressing how these works should be presented in the museum space and/or if they should just go online, and lastly, form; which deals with the artwork’s capacity to be presented in a museum given its sometimes complicated technological mechanisms. (Morris, 11) While all these categories are interrelated, the focus for this piece is primarily on display, which most explicitly mediates the artwork-audience relationship in an institutional setting itself.
The issues arise with the museum’s traditional role as filter between art world and public: they select certain pieces, contextualize them critically, display them in a consumable form, and in turn educate viewers. (Morris, 36) New media artworks disrupt this process: their technological components present, in some cases, massive difficulties for museum curators themselves, which some studies have shown are untrained in the technologies. (Hoffmann, 14)
This phenomenon happens in tandem with a growing responsibility of museums to provide more informational accompaniments to these works as they feature increasing levels of technological obscurity for the public. The museum seems to have emergent tasks in terms of communicating increasingly unknown mechanisms — such as coding languages, software, VR/AR technologies, etc. — to a vast audience, if they are to keep their audience broad, that is.
Take, for instance, Lillian Schwartz’s Enigma (1972), featured in the exhibition ‘Programmed Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018’ at the Whitney Museum. Schwartz used EXPLOR, a programming language written in Fortran, to generate a computer-animated film consisting of rapidly moving forms and patterns (pictured below). Beneath it is an image of what Fortran actually looks like. This is not to suggest museums must decode and/or present these underlying mechanisms, but rather it shows just how foreign the materials involved in new media art works truly are to those outside the technological field, and how much explanatory labor potentially resides at the museum’s hands as a result. As a viewer, the labels accompanying the work take on a new level of importance in new media art than for traditional art forms: rather than reading them for illuminating context, I read them because I rely on them to literally tell me what I am looking at on a procedural level.
In another work of this exhibit, Tamiko Thiel’s commissioned AR piece, Unexpected Growth, the artist uses the L-system (or Lindenmayer system: click for an explanation provided by a mathematics website) developed in 1968 to mimic plant growth (work shown below). The Whitney accompanies the work with this information, as well as the mere definition of AR; but nothing else frames the iPad-presented work, which invites the question first of is that enough? and secondly is that qualitatively sound?, pointing to the issue of spectacle vs. education: with works procedurally obscure, is a work’s communicated message vulnerable to extreme manipulation or frivolity at the quest for a viewer’s finite attention.(Griffiths, 12) This, again, rests in a museum’s evermore responsible hands.
With such a larger, crucial, and thus high-stakes role to play, the argument that many of these new media artworks are not real works of “art” is fueled, given this position’s sympathy to the idea that artistry emerges from a single source of creative control. Such a view was promoted by Rogert Ebert during his involvement in the famous “games-as-art” debate. (Parker, 88)
A way forward, in my view, consists in a two-pronged effort: Firstly, in light of the collaborative nature underlying displaying new media artworks, it seems that we must root out the traditional assumed connection between autonomous creativity and authorship with these works; after all, speaking to the Whitney’s “Programming” exhibit, many new media artworks prove just how much little control an artist needs to make a work. A telling quote by featured artist Ian Cheng speaks to this point: “The hope was for me as an artist to lose control, and to have my control exist at the level of setting up the experiment.”
However, (and secondly), as these works involve heightened levels of collaboration and museum responsibility, museums (and artists) must proceed with caution, so as not to overstep an artist’s message or disadvantage audience members that lack technological knowledge. Of course, it is not for the museum to teach the public how to code, however, until this kind of information is a more democratically distributed and accessible within the public sphere (perhaps due to schools taking it upon themselves to teach these skills), the museum does have a responsibility to be an inclusive frame for new media artworks. Drawing inspiration from Sarah Cook’s modular model of curating and displaying new media artworks — in which artist, curator, and technologist explicitly work together to present works, distributing responsibility accordingly — I hold this model to be most promising, provided each variable is trained and open about their participation in a project. What I suggest here is that we take Cook’s principle question with this model: “Who leads the research, and who is a partner in it: the artist, the curator; the technologist?” with great sensitivity, as new media art challenges our traditional paradigms of all these figures. (Cook, 42)
Bibliography:
Cook, Sarah. “Immateriality and Its Discontents An Overview of Main Models and Issues for Curating New Media.” Rethinking Curating, MIT Press, 2003
Griffiths, Allison. Media Technology and Museum Display:
A Century of Accommodation and Conflict. http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/index_griffiths.html. Baruch College, 1999
Hoffmann, Allison. Software-based Art: Challenges and Strategies for Museum Collections. University of Washington, 2013
Morris, Susan. Museums and New Media Art. The Rockefeller Foundation, 2001
Parker, Felan. “Roger Ebert and the Games-as-Art Debate.” Cinema Journal, vol. 57, no. 3, 2018, pp. 77–100., doi:10.1353/cj.2018.0032.
Thiel, Tamiko. Unexpected Growth. AR. Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. 2018
Schwartz, Lillian. Enigma. EXPLOR. Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. 1972
Fortran Syntax. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21884925/fortran-syntax-declaration-of-subroutine, 2018
