New Media

Trauma, Performance and Documentation

Open Discussion
http://post.thing.net/taxonomy/term/223

“Disaster images become pornography almost by default, anyway there’s no “honest” way to approach the place of trauma without being implicated in it somehow. This feeling of being implicated in the disaster and its’ aftermath has to do with the appearance of the diagram. The strange thing is that the diagram rears its’ strange head in a field it’s not supposed to be in, the predictable graphic software space. In an awareness that is already assuming (consuming) everything as an apparition or phantom effect; the pictorial sensational catastrophe is overridden, overwritten by something else, or something less.” – Christina McPhee

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Split Festival Quick Report

I'm in Split, Croatia for the Split Festival of New Film. This is the eleventh season. You might call this, "the little festival that could." It's not as well known as the E.M.A.F or V.I.P.E.R or the other film and media festivals around Europe. Split does have a habit of taking chances. Branko Karabatic, the festival head states that he started the festival with three other friends. They named it the festival of "New Film" as a riff off "Expanded Cinema" ala Gene Youngblood and Exploded Cinema which is a term used in Amsterdam to talk about "Media Art."

Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood

Gene Youngblood "Expanded Cinema" (1970) [PDF, 4.6 mb].

Sol LeWitt on New Materials

categories: Conceptual Art | ecology | New Media

New materials are one of the great afflictions of contemporary art. Some artists confuse new materials with new ideas. There is nothing worse than seeing art that wallows in gaudy baubles. By and large most artists who are attracted to these materials are the ones who lack the stringency of mind that would enable them to use the materials well. It takes a good artist to use new materials and make them into a work of art. The danger is, I think, in making the physicality of the materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work (another kind of expressionism).
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”