Page 240 - The Black Box Book

the transition from the old consciousness to the new consciousness
through open information tools. He suggests to replace corporate broad-
cast TV influence on American mind at the time by using low-cost vid-
eo-tape cameras, video cassettes, and cable television and designing
alternative television networks that favor portability and decentralization.
There were key Raindance Corporation members among the con-
tributors of the magazine – Frank Gillette and Paul Ryan, as well as
Gene Youngblood, Nam June Paik and Buckminster Fuller. The Radical
Software as a communication platform developed the idea of media
ecology as the study of communication media and their effect on other
media and society. It played a crucial conceptual role in this regard. In
conjunction with the then new cheap video technology, artists and activist
groups formed local loops of community media. In opposition to the central
control of one-way broadcasting of mainstream media, collectives such
as Ant Farm, Videofreex, The Kitchen and dozens of others experimented
with possibilities of the social integration of video and cybernetic systems
and in doing so they have built grassroot systems of self-representation.
The same pattern applies to the feminist video movement, of which we
may mention Martha Rosler and her Vital Statistics of a Citizen, simply
obtained (1977), marking the era when feminist and women collectives
were using the video camera to interrogate the politics of representation
in maintaining hegemonic power structures. Martha Rosler poses as
an object to be ‘objectively’ measured and represented by data from
the outside, by male-dominated science. Feminist video art practices from
the 1970s and 1980s play an important role in reconfiguring norms and
social conventions in cultural systems. (Long, 2016, p. 19)
In addition to the explicitly political urban New Left of the 1970’s,
there was also the New Communality movement, which tended to return
to the countryside and to a model of transformative revolution focused
on interpersonal relationships and consciousness. On the remark of me-
dia and ecology, Gyorgy Kepes, the founder of the Center for Advanced
Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston,
USA, in the Arts of the Environment (1972), wrote:
“Environmental homeostasis at the global level is now necessary for
survival. Creative imagination and artistic sensitivity can be seen as
one of our basic, collective, self-regulating devices that help us all
register and reject what is toxic and find what is useful and mean-
ingful.” (Kepes, 1972, p. 6)
Regarding examples, the Ant Farm collective, in addition to their
media performances, researched alternative architecture practices and
environmental design. Pulsa Group, an interdisciplinary collective, dealing
with the differences between sociotechnological and biopolitical systems,
also contributed to emergence of systems art. Its members, who referred
to themselves as ‘Researchers in programmed environments’, proposed to
correct systemic breakdowns by imaginatively expanding the interactive
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awareness of local media populations, which include feedback principles:
environments, program events, cable television, tapes, and movies. In one
of their projects – Harmony Ranch (1966–1973) – they experimented
with self-organized collective organic farming to find out about long-term
growth rhythms and regenerative changes. Agriculture and the dynamics
of group life were part of their ecology of cybernetic systems, whether
focused on soil quality and vegetable production, or cooperative social
forms and music production with acoustic and computerized instruments.
(O’Brien, 2016) Their connection with the media art scene of the time
was maintained by visits of Nam June Paik, Karlheinz Stockhausen or
Steve Reich.
We can draw the conclusion that since the emergence of media
art, media ecology is both a condition and accompanying phenomenon
of the natural ecology. Electronic media arts as socio-cybernetic systems
were created with intrinsic sensitivity to environmental sustainability in
their very heart. We have also seen that software was at the center of
attention. It was not only the computer software as we know it today, but
software understood as a discourse and the whole body of social practice.
C UR ATI N G E C O S Y S TE M S
In 1990’s, new media as emerging ‘digital utopia’ fit well into the narra-
tive of innovation, where specialized knowledge is generated through
experimentation, which can be applied in the industrial society. The cu-
ratorial policy of the new media was suitable for art centers, subsidized
by technology companies. The specialization in recognizable industrial
domains went well along with the government’s policies of funding art
laboratories under the roof of centers of excellence. However, nowadays
we see a growing shift towards critical approaches.
In a significant text on the curation of new media, Steve Dietz iden-
tified more than twenty labels being used as equivalents to new media,
including computer art, electronic art, multimedia, digital art, software art,
cybernetic art, next media, or variable media. (Dietz, 2000) He noted that
new media after 2000 lost the charge of novelty and curators, instead
of exhibiting the most technologically advanced media, began to work
also with artists using obsolete media, low-tech and DIY tactics. The term
new media was replaced with the term media art, that subtly marks the
shift from high-tech art, with a starting point in technological progress, to
contextually aware and critical exploration of digital and networked media.
Many of the media art projects articulating the systemic and ecological
ways of thinking and aesthetic preferences that Jack Burnham elaborated
in his essay or which subsequently emerged, are of renewed interest to art
critics and curators today while media art seems to be able to embrace
a theory of systems along with ecosystem research. Ecologically charged
and systemic aesthetics embodying art provide arguments as to why it
is necessary to consider the wider context when discussing media art
conservation. It shifts our thinking from artworks as visual artefacts, like
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