*If the line between modern tech-art and a tech start-up is thin, the line between New Media and dead media is even thinner.
*And if you think THAT's something, you ought to see this treasure-trove of thirty years of Augmented Reality that I just received.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/down-the-line/
(...)
"Art has, of course, always been informed by technology, but under network culture technology has permeated art practices in new ways. During the 1990s, artists such as Vuk Cosic´, Jodi, Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin saw new media – alternatively styled as ‘net.art’ – as a fertile ground for artistic experiment. With Postmodernism becoming institutionalized and turning into self-parody, they aspired instead to a high Modernist specificity of the medium, embracing technological platforms and their limits. But if technology offered new possibilities, new-media artists were wise to how its merciless rate of change dated even the most cutting-edge work within months of its production. Thus the new-media generation frequently produced work that lampooned the graphic and programming demos of hacker culture while evoking 20th-century avant-garde strategies, merging high and low, recent past and distant past. Typically such work embraced interactivity, paralleling the hypertext experiments by writers like Shelley Jackson and Michael Joyce, continuing the Postmodern tradition of non-linear narratives by exploiting the navigational possibilities of CD-ROMs and the Internet. The art market – which had little interest in new media art per se, finding it difficult to commodify – was transformed in its own right during the late 1990s when online art databases made it more transparent and therefore more easily comprehensible to potential investors used to the availability of such data for financial investments.
"If not as lucrative, new-media art’s rise paralleled the ascent of the dot.com industry. Exhibits on new media, dedicated exhibition venues such as ZKM in Karlsruhe and curatorships proliferated, only to rapidly crash to a halt when the stock market collapsed in 2000. But the dotcom crash did not kill commerce on the Internet. Rather, it set the stage for more profitable ventures and ultimately led to the spread of new media outside of a technologically inclined subculture.
"Even as former supporters pronounced new media dead, it began to permeate the physical world, formerly derided as ‘meatspace’. Launched into a collapsing economy a month after 9/11, Apple Inc.’s iPod set the stage for a new generation of portable technological devices. With Global Positioning System (GPS) devices and mobile phones becoming more common, technologically informed artists, hackers and entrepreneurs alike envisioned that these could be used to produce digital media bound to a particular location in the real world, a system they dubbed ‘locative media’. Where new media art still generally adopted the role of high art, refusing to be commercialized, locative media practices often took the more accommodating stance familiar to the design industries. Take, for example, the influential locative media practice Proboscis, which describes itself as ‘an independent, artist-led, non-profit creative studio’ but cites endorsements from clients such as HP and Orange UK. The difference between locative art practice and a start-up in search of venture capital is often hard to discern...."
