Curatorial
Statement
Timothy
Murray Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art,
Cornell University
Partial
Web Catalogue http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/
A
wealth of opportunity for cultural exchange and conceptual reflection
has been catalyzed by recent developments in digital art.
Practices of artistic appropriation, collage, and montage have
been heightened by digital possibilities of overlapping, juxtaposing,
and morphing complex sequences from visual and aural history. What previously could be considered in only one frame
or screening can now be analyzed on simultaneous platforms and from
multiple perspectives, both locally and globally.
Indeed, the new media has been embraced by a wide variety of
activist artists, from feminists to cyberpirates, from
African-American activists in the United States to Aboriginal artists
in Australia and North America, for its capability to cross previously
sequestered intellectual and material platforms and boundaries with
welcome speed and agility.
Very
much unlike many of the initiatives undertaken earlier by the
historical avant-garde, moreover, these digital projects tend to be
shaped for presentation out in the open, in the public and mass
spheres of cinema, music video, dance clubs, and the web.
And rather than position themselves as privileged prophets of the
future like the avant-garde, many artists working within the new media
confront the reality that what once was thought to be the electronic
future is the enigmatic NOW. One
result is a refined relation to both the past as something not simply
understood and regressive, to be cut off or cast aside for the sake of
avant-garde progress, but rather as something wonderfully cryptic, if
not also deeply troubling and traumatic, to be brought into critical
dialogue with the present for the sake of shaping personal, political,
and social paradigms that might help inform the rapid expansions of
the technofuture. The new
media thus provides artists with an opportunity to incorporate old and
problematic tales and histories in the context of their contemporary
conceptualization or revisualization.
The
CD-Rom plays a particularly challenging role in these developments.
In providing artists with a broader “bandwidths” and more
extensive data bases than can yet be readily accessed on the internet,
the format of the CD-Rom challenges artists to situate their thought
and practice in an expansive array of
visual, aural, and textual interplay.
To a certain degree, it could be said that the materials and
codes of the CD-Rom place even the most isolated of artists right at
the epicenter of the reception and exchange of both old and new public
information and entertainment systems.
Yet, the CD-Rom maintains strong links to the more private,
less public, nature of the book that sequesters readers in the
solitary joys of their wonder and reflection on the measured space of
the isolated computer screen. Some digital analysts worry about a decline in the public
sphere brought about by the expansion of the home computer and its
redefinition of the domestic space as sphere of separate viewing
stations, an architectonics that could make home “television room”
look like a dream space for
social intercourse. But
it is precisely a demystification of the solitariness of computer
interaction that “Contact Zones” seeks to provoke.
Whether by bringing users in contact with each other during
their experience of the exhibition or by bringing them into contact
with other cultures, ideological perspectives, or subliminal fantasy
states while cruising the programs, “Contact Zones” presents the
art of CD-Rom as a catalyst for new collectivities, whether public in
the political sense of group interaction and identity, or private in
the sense of the collective unconscious and its identifications
through shared memories.
My
choice of the concept that shapes this exhibition, "Contact
Zones,” also aims to bring the challenging discourse of the new
media into critical dialogue with the various theoretical communities
for whom this term has particular consequence.
Cultural theorists will be quick to recognize this term as
having been emphasized by Mary Louise Pratt for exemplifying “the
space of colonial encounter, the space in which peoples geographically
and historically separated come into contact with each other and
establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion,
radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation [London: Routledge, 1992], p. 6).
Pratt adds that she borrows the term “contact” from
linguistics where it refers to linguistic improvisation among speakers
of different languages whose need to communicate, usually in the
context of trade or colonialism, results in the development of pidgins
or creoles. We also can
understand “contact” to have particular valence not only in social
and linguistic contexts but also in the kinds of material and electric
ones that have resulted in the digital revolution.
Contact zones, in this context, are the points of energy
generation and flow in electronic and computer circuits that sustain
the digital interface across languages and geographies.
Finally, contact has been understood as the conductor of
representation between the preconscious and conscious fields of the
Freudian psyche, with their curious linkages of image and word, as
well as the temporal hinge between past and future in philosophical
discussions of time and space by philosophers of the virtual, from
Deleuze to Lyotard. This
expansive and yet precise notion, “Contact Zones,” thus
serves as the metaphor for this exhibition of artwork on CD-Rom whose
pieces catalyze reflection on the simultaneous, speedy overlap of the
many material and conceptual zones that resonate in charged contact
with each other on the same digital platform.
Contributing
to a watershed moment in the development of digital studies at Cornell
University, and one that hopefully will create energetic ripples
across the international network, the exhibition was launched as a
means of introducing Cornell researchers and students to the exciting
and innovative artistic and theoretical work now being created with
the use of digital platforms. At
the heart of this enterprise lies the artwork and its producers who
bring to the community of digital producers and theoreticians a
flexible and overlapping approach to "contact."
The works exhibited in "Contact Zones" make clear
that a collaborative critical project in artistic digitality cannot
simply mean bringing theory to art, but rather, must entail the
establishment of a critical zone in which digital art itself provokes
the discourses of its theorizations.
So it is that the artists of "Contact Zones" intermix
visual and sound fields with textual presentations as a means of
generating thought about the role of cultural and social interaction
in the digital age. The
artists here brought together also share a consistent attentiveness to
the location of the digital future in relation to a consideration of
the ongoing influence, NOW, of traditional representational platforms
of the artistic past--text, painting, photography, cinema,
architecture, performance, etc. Indeed,
these artists create new zones in which contact between the artistic
and academic disciplines can be thought anew.
Might it not also be said, in this context, that it is to the
artists of the new media to whom we turn for theorizations, not
prophecies, of the impending millennium?
The
aim of "Contact
Zones" is thus to foreground the artistic possibilities of CD-Rom
and digital technologies for exploring the realities, fantasies, and
representations of contact in its multiple forms, media, and spaces.