Re:place 2007: The Second International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science, and Technology
Our field has usually been too busy surviving in the present to take the time to write and read about our past, so we’ve had little chance to learn from those who came before us. As someone who discovered the media arts field in my late twenties and ran two regional media arts centers in the 1980s and ’90s, I was privileged to hear many of the founding stories, meet and work with some of the first-generation media artists and activists, and become part of our ever-expanding past. My recent transition into academia to pursue a Ph.D. has given me the rare opportunity to continue the journey I started as a media arts administrator who was also curious about the origins of the field. I’m now discovering how deeply commingled and connected the media arts field is with other, larger histories of technology, art, communications media, science, and other diverse disciplines, and how many lessons our field has to offer the rest of the world.
I’m researching the historical “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” event, one of the root media arts histories that connects such diverse subjects as cybernetics, video, dance and performance art, acoustics, feminism, Greenwich Village bohemia, and World War II radar research. It involved a group of avant-garde New York City artists that included Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage, who in 1966 collaborated with Bell Telephone Labs engineers to create large multimedia performances using the “new” technologies of the day. Invited to present a paper about my research, I traveled to Berlin in November to attend Re:place, the second international conference about the histories of media, art, science, and technology. It was organized by Andreas Broeckmann and Gunalan Nadarajan, and was funded mostly with German support, along with Leonardo, a 40-year-old publications network focused on artists working with science and technology-based media, and other international media arts organizations and universities.
The first conference, held at the Banff Centre in Canada in the fall of 2005, was called Refresh, and it brought together for the first time many of the key scholars, curators, and artists working in the diverse arenas of media art, studies of technology and science, media preservation, and film theory. I also attended that conference, where I met scholars from an emerging international community laying the groundwork for uncovering and preserving all these histories that reveal the interconnections and relevance of artists’ early creative explorations and applications of media and other advanced technologies.
Re:place’s thematic focus was on place—cultural, geographical, and technological—and the migration of knowledge and knowledge production in the interdisciplinary contexts of art, historiography, science, and technology. It brought together several hundred participants from a wide range of fields including art history and theory, literary and cinema studies, performance and dance studies, musicology, acoustics, science, anthropology, and the history of technology, to name a few. There were over 50 presentations about topics such as the role of biology in new media arts practices, media art in the post-Soviet space, technology and performance on the North American West Coast in the 1970s, and early software art. In addition, there were evening events at an alternative arts space called Tesla that included an exhibit called “9 Evenings Reconsidered” from the MIT List Center museum, and lunchtime talks with veteran video artist Woody Vasulka and 1960’s USCO multimedia collective founder Gerd Stern.
The conference was held at the House of World Cultures, a dramatically designed building in a beautiful park setting that looks like a landed spaceship on the banks of the Spree River, with several large halls and meeting rooms outfitted with state-of-the-art media systems. Berlin is an amazing amalgam of old and new, historical and contemporary, where you can find bombed-out churches preserved next to postmodern high-rises and museums containing all varieties of arts, histories, and cultures. It was an appropriate backdrop for the coming together of Western and Eastern European artists and scholars, as well as others who are researching histories from Australia, Central and South America, Africa, and the Far East. The U.S. and Canada were well represented, with the Canadian Consulate in Berlin providing lunch the first day of the conference.
Among the U.S. presenters, long-time NAMAC members Kathy High (artist and RPI professor) and Carolyn Tennant (Hallwalls Media Arts Director) presented their research about the development and use of tools by artists at the venerable Experimental Television Center in New York State. Video artist and Kitchen co-founder Woody Vasulka’s lunchtime presentation with Don Foresta, a media arts curator based in Europe, was about a recently launched, permanent broadband interactive network and website called MARCEL. They hope to make historical artists’ videos available to the research community and were looking for partners at the conference. Woody also presented a DVD of his guided tour of a recent exhibition about the legendary Media Studies Buffalo, an early media arts center that spawned several generations of now-famous media artists such as Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits.
The conference was organized as a series of presentations happening simultaneously in several halls, with little time for mingling at lunch, where poster sessions and talks competed with time for eating. Too much was happening to take it all in, and little time was given for socializing informally, even in the evenings. There were General Discussions scheduled near the end of each day where participants could bring up any topic or concern, and those were interesting for their attempt to wrestle with larger questions of how to improve the conference, asking who was there and who wasn’t, and searching for some sort of common ground in all the diversity. These are timeless questions that the media arts field has grappled with since its beginnings, only now there are many more players and more areas of interest represented.
This conference, with its emphasis on place, had a hard time finding common themes or connecting ideas that linked the presentations. Some of the themes, such as Comparative Histories of Art Institutions and Place Studies: Media Art Histories, were too general, and the presentations had little to do with each other, so there was not much opportunity for meaningful dialogue during or after the presentations. I presented my paper the first day of the conference on a panel called “Place Studies: Art/Science/Engineering.” I shared the stage with people relating histories from Canada, Australia, and Madrid that were linked thematically to the complex relationships between the arts and the worlds of technology development, including institutions like IBM, Bell Laboratories, and MIT. I was lucky to have Gerd Stern, an eyewitness to the original “9 Evenings,” in the audience. He was able to generate an interesting discussion around the politics of the artists and their ambivalent relationship to the growing military-industrial complex of the mid-’60s.
The most interesting and entertaining part of the conference for me was a session called “Cybernetic Histories of Artistic Practices.” There were three presenters who proved to be more like performance artists than dry academics reading papers. David Link (Cologne) presented “Memory for Love Letters. Computer Archaeology of a Very Early Program” and demonstrated how U.K. academic computer programmers in the early 1950s learned to program a huge mainframe computer to compose love letters. He read some of the letters, which sounded like poetry. Kristoffer Gansing (Sweden) presented his paper called “Humans Thinking like Machines—Incidental Media Art in the Swedish Welfare State,” showing a 1966 series of black-and-white photos that looked staged but documented visiting black Tanzanian exchange students being given a tour of room-sized IBM computers. With the timing of a droll standup comic, he recounted, amid growing laughter, how the programmers taught the computer to play the Tanzanian national anthem, and he then reproduced the sounds as he explained in academic jargon how “incidental” media art was created. The last presentation, by Brian Reffin Smith (U.K.), called “Hijack! How the Computer was Wasted for Art,” quickly turned into a self-reflexive performance mocking boring academic presentations. He wrapped toilet paper around his head to transform himself into a zombie, and threw pieces of technology into a blender that made a horrific sound. (The next NAMAC Conference might consider inviting him to present.)
What I came away with from this conference is the vastness of the field in terms of how many parts of the world have places where media artists—or artists working with computers and other advanced technologies—have sprung up and created organizations that have survived, or not. In just 40 years, media technologies have become almost ubiquitous, and the “field” of media arts as we know it in the U.S. is only a tiny sector of a much larger phenomenon that can’t be summarized or easily defined, much less well-represented in one conference.
It was announced that the conference organizers are trying to find a publisher for all the papers, which would be an important document that the NAMAC membership would find of interest. You can go to the conference website to see the conference schedule and read all the abstracts of the presentations.
One of the key mandates of these first two conferences was to focus on the histories of contemporary arts practices that have been ignored by the mainstream worlds of art and science. This is also a major issue for the media arts field in the U.S., where small organizations have served as seedbeds for emerging artists experimenting with new forms of art involving expensive technologies that are often not objects but processes. These struggling centers and the artists they support have historically been ignored by museums and art collectors. Now that electronic art is more commonplace and collectible, there is a vacuum of historical knowledge that could help inform museum curators and collectors when they make their selection of electronic artists, some of whom are producing “new” art that is more derivative than innovative. It is ironic that the established art world now needs to look to the relatively youthful media arts field to learn the histories of contemporary art that have happened in the past 50 years.
So it is important for the media arts field to recognize and embrace the need to preserve and present its vital histories and to connect to the growing international community of scholars, archivists, and curators who are just now discovering the riches of the media arts as a site for research and new knowledge. This conference gave me a greater appreciation of the depth and breadth of new insights that can be uncovered from retrieving and reviving our histories. My own research is helping me discover how artists and engineers in the early ’60s had similar beliefs about the importance of technology as a creative tool as opposed to a means of destruction. Those common values enabled them to communicate and collaborate across two very different cultures, using technology as objects of translation. The media arts field is full of amazing stories about creativity, innovative ideas, collaboration, and communication using technology. We have much to offer the rest of the world when those stories are preserved and reframed by scholars, historians, and new generations of artists and curators eager to learn more about the recent past in order to better understand the present and prepare for the future.
ROBIN OPPENHEIMER is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her research is focused on the emerging role of technology in creative collaboration.
