Abstract

No other term has worse connotation than the remake of an original film, inviting an unflattering comparison to the older original, a comparison it rarely survives. We immediately suspect a flawed and lukewarm aesthetic, and a dubious revisionist interest compromising whatever dear memory we might have of what only then becomes identified as the “original”. But prompted by media and contemporary art, this pattern has fallen apart. And maybe it was never true in the first place. The urge to go back to zero and do it again might be prompted by a much more complicated affair that emerges from the narratives of contemporary and media art.

• Rudolf Frieling (DE/US) is Curator of Media Arts at the SFMOMA and Adjunct Professor at the California College of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute. He was curator of the International VideoFest Berlin (1988-1994), at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany (1994-2006) and headed the restoration and exhibition project “40yearsvideoart.de”.

Full text (PDF) p.  145