Panel Statement

Despite Claire Bishop’s claims of a continuing ‘disavowal’ of digital media within contemporary art (2012), it is apparent that the various lines of cultural resistance are becoming more permeable and uncertain. It is not simply that all kinds of shared lineages have been traced (in the history of the avant-garde and in traditions of conceptualism particularly), or that all manner of forms of digital media have become pervasive in contemporary art, but more significantly that artists themselves, in their practices, have begun to move fluidly between paradigms. Since at least the 1990s, contemporary art has explicitly thematised issues of communication and social interaction, while media artists have shifted away from a relentless focus on dimensions of technology per se. The question of mediation has been posed in a much broader context – a context that intersects with the contemporary interest in socially engaged art. In this manner, media art is becoming a less strictly determinable genre; its lingering sense of difference and cultural isolation is beginning to appear quaint and untenable.

This panel is concerned with the creative implications of this shift beyond the technological paradigm, and explores a reversal of the standard pattern of influence; rather than media art struggling to establish its proper place within contemporary art, the focus is upon considering contemporary art through the lens of media art. More specifically, it considers the implications for artistic practice. What does it mean for artists who have had a primary interest in species of electronic and computational practice to produce work that does not employ these means? How does the experience of digital processes inflect work produced in the broader social field? How are issues of concept, process, event, participation and interaction remediated through intimate experience of digital media?

• Chris Salter, Hexagram, Concordia Institute for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology, Canada