Thursday, September 22, 2011

[Yasmin_discussions] ISEA and Locative Media Art Futures

*A Manifesto for Locative and Pervasive media Art*

* *

*Mark Tuters at ISEA 2011 spoke of the spectrum of media art practice in the
mobile arena as ranging from the personal and local to the relational and
transposable. He acknowledged the fetishisation of the local, but held open
the medium's potential for challenging the exploitative effects of
globalisation on hidden labour by tracking all product components. Site
specific thus becomes 'tracing the elsewhere". For me this data as
power proposition
still fell within the realm radical individualism and so was still inside
the framework of the neo-liberal project.
*

*
*

*Mark Shephard on the same panel spoke of ubiquitous conditions and the new
possibilities for new media détournment 45 years after the Situationists. He
suggested artists should abandon the locative as the dominant frame and add
on the concepts of time and identity to enlarge the artistic possibilities
of the medium. Ludic Being might be the new mode for Situationist media. The
visual examples he juxtaposed were parcours runners in a Russian estate (as
modern examples of détourment) with a clip from Cliff Oakley's dystopian
film The Catalogue where consumer profiling and surveillance meet in grim
harmony.
*

*
*

*I think what we could interpret from this is rather that there are two
domains-the "digital tame" of social media, online consumer culture and even
radical digital arts and the "wild" of critical conditions in the world
where poverty and disempowerment have yet to find a political voice in
pervasive digital art.*

* *

*I believe both speakers are still working within the paradigm that existed
before the demise of the neoliberal economic project and that collective and
focused action through pervasive media art , which has some idea of where it
would like to move the dominant ideas, is an altogether more difficult and
painful proposition, but one where Mark Shephard's extension of the frame
could be the most readily applied and move beyond individual détournment to
something more coherent in terms of ideas and commitment.*


--
Martin Rieser

Professor of Digital Creativity
De Montfort University
IOCT/Art and Design
The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH
44 +116 250 6146


http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk
http://www.mobileaudience.blogspot.com
http://www.martinrieser.com
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