[new media art discourse VS new media art(ists)]

I feel a bit like I'm cheating...I posted this earlier on WDL but think I'll blog about it here to and this way I can add a little bit extra.

One of art's functions is to recall that which is absent - whether it is history, or the unconscious or form, or social justice. (Lucy Lippard, Overlay (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) 4).

Just as artists working within (or against?) modernism's circumscribed etiquette struggled to find spaces in which they might exhibit their works, so too do new media artists and facilitators endeavor to locate public, physical, or web (re)presentation of their labors. But, representation is always mediated, constructed, and controlled. Even academic texts, compendiums, and anthologies (as has been argued especially in literary studies), promote their (author's) subjective language and experience. Questions like who is reading/interacting and who is creating/presenting are still pertinent, especially in relation to the flourishing new media art field. For an interesting debate on the constructed nature of new media art representation read Marc Garrett's response to the publication of Mark Tribe's New Media Art which begins like this:

A few days ago on the Rhizome.org (raw) list I was involved in an interesting debate regarding Mark Tribe's recent publication 'New Media Art'. I thought it worthy of posting onto this blog so others share their own ideas/opinions about the subject and comment themselves if they wish to on here. Or just read...

Start of the disucssion...

I would like to ask Mark Tribe why www.furtherfield.org is not included in his recent book 'New Media Art'?

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/books/
art/all/facts/03684.htm

I would also like to open this question up for others on this list to explore, it would be interesting to know why groups such as ourselves have been and are ignored by such individuals, when we have also contributed much to the culture and history of media art for quite while now.

One could suddenly start thinking that there is a 'gate-keeping' scenario going on, put in place by certain academics, who are consciously creating a deliberate historical divide for an elite - by repeatedly representing and proposing the same names, over and over and over and over and over.........................again.

confused/disturbed but sadly, not actually that surprised.

marc garrett.