Panel Statement
Panel: (he)artbreaking to the core: zombie data and the arts of re/de/transcoding
Obsolescence and brokenness are the beasts roaring in digital media’s black magic boxes. Artists who hack systems and corrupt the data therein materialize the medium’s crisis and its cries of torment. Down Alice’s rabbit hole “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, meaning is not yet negotiated and alienation abounds. Media Art is declared imperfect, i.e. forever unfinished, a process. Curious about the hidden potentials and unknown qualities of failure, artists break with aesthetic stereotypes of futurity and progress. This is digital punk; it’s a hacker ethics and aesthetics.
- Nina Wenhart is a Media Art historian and independent researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Interface Cultures Lab at the Art University, Linz, writing on Experimental Archiving of Media Arts, and graduated from Prof. Oliver Grau’s Media Art Histories program with a Master Thesis on Descriptive Metadata for Media Arts. She was teaching the Prehystories of New Media class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and in the Media Art Histories program at the Danube University Krems.