Posted: December 12, 2016
The project The work of art in the age of technological remediation resulted as an international exhibition which was showing in the Gallery Cultural center Pozega november/december 2015, on the topic of technological remediation within artworks characterized as "new media", inspired by Benjamin's differentiation of artistic aproaches between painter and photographer in his famous essay The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Artists:
GOJKO DUTINA
Performances during the opening on the 13th:
AMY SUO WU
One of the key points of differentiating new media practices is the usage of the word “new” within new media. For some, the word “new” is precisely used in its literal meaning- art that uses the state of the art tech, the current new media. This meaning of new is identified as what is trending in technology-social practices, often synchronized with the marketplace defined fashion. For others, new relates to a separation from a 19th century conception of art as the artist's personal impression of the world and represents rather an approach to art as a reflective consciousness of a medium and how it's used and perceived. The question of new and old gets intertwined with the development of consumer technologies and becomes an elusive race with following the “state of the art” newest, most optimal tools, which on the one hand constantly keep changing towards market requests, optimizing into new forms, and on the other hand not rarely recycle technological concepts from the past.
As a reaction to the quotidian consuming of fast technological changes and technology itself, which keeps becoming more complex, unclear and ephemeral (cloud servers), new media or digital art often nostalgically turns back to former consumer technologies that have been in use long enough to form a clear user mental picture of them (post digital, post Internet art). Contrary to that, a constant flux of new smooth, fast, attractive interfaces, holding increasingly more powerful tools creates a certain fetishism of the “new”. New media therefore become a place where the “new” and the “old” interact, a place of remediation and instantaneousness, media-archeological documents of moments. This show questions the conscious positioning towards past, present and timeless technologies through the works of the artists, crossing the questions of contemporaneity, obsolescence, fetishism of new media practices.