Page 241 - The Black Box Book

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