[ISEA2011] Panel: Nina Wen­hart – <3break(s)core: an in­ap­pro­pri­a­tion

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.