<nettime> Re:*anti art*

[Rachel Greene <rachel@rhizome.com>]

At 12:21 PM +0100 4/22/97, Robert Adrian wrote:
>David Garcia wrote:
>
>>Although they deal in a language as symbolic as art; "code", the hacker
>>ethic revives the situationist proposal of an alternative type of
>>creativity. A creativity which starts where art leaves off.
>>It is normal everyday life that should be made passionate and rational
>>and dramatic, not its reflection in the seperated world of art.
>
>In a recent email Armin Medosch described his ideas for a forthcoming
>edition of *Telepolis* concerning (among other things) "... how artists
>are, in various ways, leaving the art system and connecting to other
>areas of activity - but, while they no longer explicitly define their
>work as art, they retain their identity as artists." (my translation)
>
>I think Armin has got it just about right ... but I would decribe it as
>"The Crisis of Professionalism" which the new digital technology is
>creating in the traditional media. The "professional" artist (like
>many other "media-professionals") finds her/himself in ever deeper
>trouble as the mystique of production dissolves under pressure from
>(for example) increasingly sophisticated desktop editing/production
>systems.
>
This discussion goes material in the work of the Bureau of Inverse
Technology. Recent projects, under the ur-Project Database Politics,
explore how "neutral" information is produced and represented, how the
world becomes understood as data, and in turn, how database fields create
and impose categories.  Sperm banks, voicemail, and despondency indexes
(part of a piece on the data of suicide) are mobilized to show how human
life choices and experiences become defined by a limited, and problematic,
set of categories.
The Bureau's "engineer," Natalie Jeremijenko, recently gave a lecture at
the Museum of Modern Art. It bordered on performance art (transcript at
http://www.tech90s.net) -- don't miss it. The Bureau's work does, as per
David's comment,take place in areas where art leaves off. It still belongs
to the world of Art though... its very conceptual, and compared to hacking,
the production scale is huge.














Rachel Greene
Editor
RHIZOME INTERNET
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