Negotiating Realities -- New Media Art and the Post-Object

Sunday, October 10: Tishman Auditorium, New School University, 66 West 12th Street, NY, NY

Synthesizing Realities (11 AM - 1 PM): Participants to be announced

Reception / Lunch Break (1-3 PM)

From Image to Digital "Image World" (3-5 PM): Ron Burnett, Timothy Druckrey, Ken Perlin

The symposium will focus on new media art as "post-object" and the issues this art raises about the representation of realities. While art projects using digital technologies as a medium may still possess material properties -- referencing art forms such as sculpture, painting and film -- their underlying mechanism is code and a data structure. The programmability and instruction-based nature of new media art invites indexing and filtering and constitutes a shift to data representation and the image as tool for visualization. The principle of random access as a basis for processing and assembling information connects to notions of controlled randomness and the dematerialization of the art object that has been extensively explored by John Cage, the Fluxus artists, or Chance performances.

The process-oriented nature of new media art and its responsiveness to audience intervention enables a different experience, meditatively as well as haptically. The "post-object" suggests a new reality that obscures the boundaries between the material and the ephemeral, introducing a perceptual twist: the virtual as tangible and the real as "illusory." How do the language and aesthetics of new media art as a dynamic and fluctuating entity affect what we know as representation and what are the cultural and social changes brought about by this shift?

The symposium will address issues surrounding the post-object in two separate panels.

Synthesizing Realities (Sunday, October 10, 11 AM - 1 PM)

While the virtual and the real are frequently understood as antithetical, they are closely connected states of human perception. Any intersection between the virtual and real (as in the phenomenon of virtual reality) relies on a process of mediation. This mediation is made possible by various kinds of "interfaces" ranging from the human-machine interface to the audio-visual layers that translate one form of data, information, or sensory input into another. The panel will explore the ways in which our realities are interfaced and the effects this mediation has on relationships between the subject and object.

From Image to Digital "Image World" (Sunday, October 10, 3-5 PM): A panel discussion featuring Ron Burnett, Timothy Druckrey, Ken Perlin

The digital image has a profound effect on the way in which our culture communicates and perceives itself. Instant documentation, manipulation, and distribution are just a few of the characteristics of digital technologies that have changed how we "visualize" ourselves. Conventional approaches to exploring a work of art are challenged by the tension between "materiality / immateriality" inherent to digital technologies. In the digital world, the image seems to have changed from an object for viewing to a temporal, evolving and interaction-oriented space. The panel will address questions about today's "image world" and how it is reflected in art, news media, and a science context.

Coordinated by:

Christiane Paul (Director, Intelligent Agent; Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art)

Zhang Ga (Director, Netart Initiative; Professor, MFA Design and Technology Program, Parsons School of Design)

This symposium is made possible through funding from the ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

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