0B_IN_maquinas&almas:Maquetación 1
26/6/08
16:18
Página 18
no meaning. Other more objectual lines of work, such as interactive installations or robotics projects, pose another set of problems. Accustomed to having a relatively stable and predictable relationship with technology, it doesn’t usually occur to us that the projects created by artists who work with this medium are actually more like prototypes than products. The creators do not represent an industry, and they do not have industrial standardisation and intensive testing procedures. Thus, in many cases these pieces are fragile and very hard to maintain. Yet despite all this, and regardless of the inherent difficulties, it is undeniable that an increasing number of artists are looking to find a space for their work in galleries, collections and museums, attracted by the possibility of additional funding and the legitimacy they confer. The desire for history On the other side of the fence, in recent years the new media have undertaken the task of retracing their origins in order to assert their identity with their own genealogy. Defying the statement formulated by Lev Manovich—“contemporary art is too historical […] digital art has the opposite illness: it has no memory of its own history”—the last five years have witnessed the emergence of a historical awareness in the new media, which claim the existence of an independent tradition beyond their usual discourse, based on the criticism of the continuous present or the utopian projection toward tomorrow. This search has materialised in the birth of academic disciplines such as media archaeology, practised by individuals such as Erkki Huhtamo or Siegfried Zielinksi, the celebration of events such as the symposia series Refresh! and Replace, on the origins of media art, and exhibitions such as Feedback (one of the inaugural shows at the LABoral centre in Gijón), Automatic Update at the MoMA or the exhibits held at recent editions of the Berlin festival Transmediale. All of these developments represent attempts to draw an unbroken and logical line connecting 20th-century art movements and schools with the creative forms that emerged from the shock wave of information and communication technologies. Thus, academics and scholars interested in this discipline began to define a consensual genealogy for the first time that included past milestones such as the collaboration between artists of the New York avant-garde with Bell Laboratories engineers that took place under the name 9 Evenings in 1966, the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) at the London ICA or, in Spain, the work of the Computing Centre at the Complutense University of Madrid, also in 1966. Numerous theoretical bridges have also been built between contemporary art and digital art in its multiple forms through paternity claims that link the strategies and modes of action of the new media to the work of artists as diverse as Oskar Fischlinger, Sol Lewitt, Moholy-Nagy and Muybridge, to name but a few. The second generation Based on these coordinates, Souls & Machines is not a historical exhibition that aims to create a linear, all-encompassing genealogy—something that would not only be impossible but also absurd in such a hybrid and interdisciplinary space of production. Yet, at the same time, the museum tempo requires a narration of the history of the transformations that underlie the practices of these artists, of the radical impulses that have motivated their work.
18