CHArt Eighteenth Annual Conference

Dunja Kukovic, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
New Media: its Aesthetic and Representation

The digital image is a part of visual culture in the contemporary world which is influenced by as well as dependent on technology. Technology gave new forms of expression not only in its ideas and ideology but also in pure form. By using new media tools we can follow the many processes known in painting, sculpture and architecture in a single project. Many online projects combine all three media in just one art-piece. We can find the complexity of principles as used in painting, sculpture and architecture at the same time. If we go further we see all the projects are the result of analogue evolution deriving from modernism and conceptualism of the 20th century. Thus the general aesthetic of new media is considered as projective rather than reflective, complex and dynamic rather than totalizing and static and resembling a verb more than a noun.

One of my main interests as an art historian and a curator is how to curate and represent on-line projects. This problem has led to a great range of different approaches and tactics. The debate about proper representation has been going on since the beginning of art on the Internet.(1) The only logical way is considered to represent net.art on the Internet and acknowledge the inability to do it in live space.

The question of authorship is another crucial point in the terminology of new media art history. It is not that the author is disappearing but he/she is placed in another role. The role of the new media activist/creator is still not defined. As well as this, the role of the viewer must be reconsidered.

So is the live space just a tunnel for the free and uncensored world of the web? How can we make the live space more tolerant and less hierarchical? How may some approaches used in online communities affect real life communities? How may it be organized to react to mentioned questions in a museum or gallery? And is the final answer Virtual Reality?(2)

Project webpage: www.skylined.org/melon/wrkdb

1. Also called net.art. the term was invented cca. 1996 by/or around/ first net.artists : Heath Bunting, Vuk Cosic, Josephine Bosma. Although in the year 1999 the same artists proclaimed the death of net.art the term is generally still used to describe online art projects.

2. Compare with recent notations of Jaron Lanier about how we shouldn't substitute meat space with virtual space.

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