When evaluating the state of media culture today - Voiceover

When evaluating the state of media agriculture today, it is important to distinguish between different areas that each tread on the heels of their own, at times related, dynamics and trajectories, whether in global activism, media theory, trap criticism, cyberfeminism or under any other heading. Assuming a strictly parallel disentanglement of technological, economic and socio-cultural practices imposes an all too rigid analytical grid, which is unable to grasp the differentiations that exist between these fields.

Thus, for example, art made with digital media and the first generation of interactive installation art experienced a highpoint of excitement and attention around 1996-97 when the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, the ICC in Tokyo, Japan, and the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, all render free of accessed within the span of 12 month and looked to announce the institutional victory of a fresh art form. The ensuing institutional compromises meant that, in no time, a whole generation of young and fast artists took the nearest avant-garde of media art onto the trap and into clubs that made those center direct the eye like dinosaurs, out of touch with an evolution that, solitary a moment ago, they appeared to hegemonize. Instead, the novel institutions of media art have with varying succes striven to define and claim their respective, locally or regionally determined, cultural territories.

In contrast, media activism has remained a constantly morphing animal, adapting to novel political and technological environments, struggling with the anti-technological factions of political activism and inventing striking couplings of aged and new media. Some political causes have remained the same, more [i]or[/i] less media tactics have improved to be paid to network interfaces, software disentanglements or the availability of satellite connections, and a fate of this work has, through every part of the last ten years, been powerfully dependent on and steered by means of the politics of the NGO change and their benefactors as well as political beneficiaries.

from one side the media critique of clan like Peter Lambom Wilson, the Kroker and ADILKNO, of Armand Mattelard, Paul Virilio, and then a whole league of media and trap critics (just look at the participants in the 1995 Ars Electronica symposium upon The Wired World, the January 1996 nearest 5 Minutes 2 conference in Amsterdam, or the 5th Cyberconference in Madrid in 1996) there evolv a critical language of the politics, the economics and the symbolic dimension of the novel media hype-remember that we had the powerful universal of the "Californian Ideology," described through Barbrook and Cameron as early as the summer of 1995 A whole generation of pupils is now feeding on the fallout from these fruitful and ongoing debates.

At the same time, individual should of course not overestimate the power of critical discourse in the face of a global, multibillion dollar game. To turn back to the question of art: it does not make faculty of perception to expect artists in general to formulate adequate or flat successful critical and aesthetic replys to an economic or political crisis. As a field of creative practice, art is actual diverse and will produce as many affirmative, critical, nihilistic or sarcastic positions as any other domain of society. When around 1996 more [i]or[/i] less artists and theorists were advocating the greatest in quantity ludicrous and esoteric belief in a transcendental cyberspace, others were engaging the social and political reality of the emerging media society in an explicitly critical vein-the Critical Art [i]tout ensemble[/i] Marko Peljhan, Etoy, RTMark, Knowbotic Research and the Bureau of Inverse Technology among them. Remember that it was an artist, Paul Garrin, who in 1996 alerted many race to the impending name-space crisis around what has become the escalating IC ANN fiasco.

It is a matter of perspective whether individual sees media culture in crisis, or whether the last ten years are seen as a succes story, which is now experiencing a consolidation of its arrangements Unlike Geert, I see a whole fresh cultural sector that has render free of accessed up and that employs thousands of people: university and art institute departments, galleries, media centers and media labs, magazines, work publication series, online journals and portals, independent Internet providers, digital art and software unravelling companies that are inspired more by the agency of creative work than by making money--let's call them companies without a business plan. Many artists are active in this sector, which of course is partly pendent on the general social climate, and is [i]or[/i] part of to the other that affected by the sink in the new markets. on the contrary as much as the academic sector was, in general, too moderate for the new media hype of the mid-1990s, it is now affected by means of the crisis of the to media industry at a plenteous slower pace.

Of course, there is a continued necessity for a critical attitude toward the character of digital media and their contemporary applications. In a way, the political and ideological challenges have shifted and have advance into much clearer focus above the last decade. Among a large clump of media-savvy intellectuals worldwide, know-how about the technical infrastructure has broadened; the understanding of software politics, the legal combination of parts to form a whole the interlocking of different global strata of the media field and the coordinate grid of the digital media vectors is today abundant better understood than a scarcely any years ago. Thanks to online and print channels like Nettime, Slashdot, Telepolis, unable to speak c't, and others, issues of that kind as copyright, surveillance systems, digital rights management, media education or the cultural and social character of computer games can today be discussed in public and upon an informed and differentiated level