by Marina Vishmidt

The conjuncture of debates around knowledge production, mediation and distribution of cultural activity, information politics and constructions of visibility for a self-positing ‘media arts’ scene in London was never going to be easy. Generating a discursive and reflective counterpoint to the instantiations of these debates on the ground in the form of events, workshops and symposia is also a task that falls willy nilly, mutatis mutandis, into Beckett’s famed note to self: “fail. fail again. fail better”.

Conjuring up a media arts field from the nonesuch of contested definitions, values and agendas, as they are imbricated and implicated in structures of legitimation, funding, institutional credibility and critical anatomy is perhaps an endeavour fated to the same kind of dispersion as its object but this needn’t pre-emptively curtail the interest of trying. One point of reference that may catalyse the question from the outset is the one of circumscription – what is media arts, where is it, who cares to know. With this bald curiosity, or some might say question-begging, we can start to examine what discursive, social and institutional frameworks anchor presumptively discrete fields, including self-definitions, what sorts of networks produce and are produced by them. So what constitutes media arts in contradistinction to what we talk about when we talk about art in general?

Minding the heterogeneity and contradictions that traverse each field, it’s still possible to schematically argue for a contemporary art discourse thatwould call itself the ‘proper’ artworld, with established organs of criticism, reception, funding, publicity, all the cultural vectors and financial mechanisms that denote a self-, and culturally assumed, understanding of art as verified cultural specialty.^[1] It could then correspondingly project ‘media arts’ as a sort of nebulous default structure of everything that partakes of technology in a way that’s constitutive of the work but doesn’t partake in the same critical and market circuits that operate, and operate through, the proper artworld. Media arts, in its turn, would enact a hypothesis of artistic production that is not fetishistic about its adherence to constructs of ‘art’ or seeks legitimation as art but is more interested in the creative and social possibilities of new(er) technologies, and even this broad brush is too narrow, unless we give a more historical reading to media arts that embraces video art, intermedia experiments and environments, early software art and even film installation. Media art/s and contemporary art share a tendency to evaluate one another by the terms which they would most like to expunge from their own spheres: hence media arts becomes ‘techy’ and uncritical, an ornamental redoubt of media activism, as contemporary art becomes commercially led, by turns vapid and abstruse. Clearly, there are also crossovers and mutual encounters, but unless media art is canonised within a particular critical or historical inscription of contemporary art, the ‘media arts ghetto’ is always there, with a defined funding stream and a warm bowl of soup.

This is where NODE.London sees its chink for intervention. If the above is a hyperbolic account of what Saul Albert elsewhere has called the ‘many captive or reductive mechanisms and markets’ that the collaborative arts practices and media arts ‘scenes’ of London must negotiate, the NODE.London is an attempt to shift the parameters of the game and make way for certain investigations. Mediation would be one, and is one of the principal reflective paths in this reader. While the critical impasse described in the prior paragraph may result in the production of a recognisable image of media arts, but it is an image that is heavily linked to institutional imperatives and the social policy and financial objectives that shape them. The question of mediation collapses into two neat but not dissociated halves. One half addresses the distinction between art and media arts much as at the distinction of art from the rest of cultural and social production: as a mode of differentiating commodities in the market. It makes a stand for a formulation of media arts as implicated, contradictory, opaque and communicative as the art ‘field’ is characterised in general, with all the tender and toxic debates for autonomy vs relationality, uselessness vs instrumentality that are still viable when not enlisted in hidebound formalisms. The other half locates the possibilities for displacing current forms of mediation and representation in growing and linking possibilities for self-mediation, both in terms of discourse and infrastructures of collaboration and resource-sharing. As Luci Eyers pointed out in an email exchange, NODE.London’s commitment to augmenting these possibilities is building not only on historical and current experiments in self-organisation in London such as Backspace and the University of Openness, but on the structural tendencies of distributed platforms like the internet that net art and software art initially, but now any cultural work that’s propagated online, can use to circumvent existing institutional and commercial distribution channels. For NODE.London, eschewing conventional models of specialisation, professionalisation and institutional support in producing an arts event, while still being able to command vast resources from a pool of dedicated Voluntary Organisers (and the networks that they are drawing upon) projects the test principles of self-mediation in practice; although this paradigm does get complicated by how institutions, funding streams and cultural policy objectives stay in the picture, and much remains to be deduced about the relationship between self-mediation and the contemporary compulsion for/imposition of self-management/self-exploitation.

In any case, this reader is a contingent, incomplete, and, at 300 pages, some might say too comprehensive distillation of a critical context around the momentous trial that is NODE.London – as an organisation, sure, but also in the production of the month of media arts events descending on London in March 2006. The reader’s programmatic remit doesn’t stop there, however, but goes on to retrospectively encompass the intensive week of events centring on the self-provision of communication networks (communication spanning microprocessors to money), wireless technologies and art and the influence of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) methodologies on cultural production – the Open Season of 1-6 October 2005. (see http://nodel.org/october.php [1] for audio and video documentation). Open Season provided the original stimulus for this publication and its structure, inspiration and critical co-ordinates very much coalesced out of the discussions that went on over those three events, and the problematics that emerged. I would like to thank Saul Albert, Laura Oldenbourg and Tim Jones, and then: Luci Eyers, Antonio Pena, Jaya Brekkie, Simon Worthington, Raquel Eulate de Perez, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles, Alessandra Chila, Alessandra Reba, Paola Crespi and Capucine Perrot, the assistant editors and the contributors.

Media Mutandis: a NODE.London Reader is available at NODE.London events throughout March 06.

•FOOTNOTE

^[1]    For an assessment of the production of contemporary art as a hypostatisation of the circuits of ‘publicity’ especially, see Jeff Wall’s “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, MIT Press, London and Cambridge, MA, 2000. Also Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, MIT Press, London and Cambridge, MA, 2003.