The dogma of new media art in Stockholm Tanya Søndergaard Toft
Some voices claim that new media art will be the main focus of art historians in the mid-21st century. While this might seem evident to some and doubtful to others, nonetheless, new media art forms and the changes in artistic and curatorial discourse influenced by digital technologies are changing the landscape of the art world today, and have been for a long while. Art institutions play a not-insignificant role in the development of new media art culture. The MoMA’s expansion with a Department of ‘Media’ in 2006 (which changed its name in 2009 to ‘Department of Media and Performance’), with artworks defined as “time-based” that fall outside the traditional realms of photography, film, and video, together with the acquisition of video games to the collection at the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design, might reveal the direction of where the relationship between new media art and the modern art institution is heading. Stockholm’s institutional art scene was once at the forefront of the new media art paradigm. This was at a time when the phrase “new media” actually made sense, acknowledging the development of then-new technologies that could bring visual messages to the masses. “New media” as an artistic genre emerged in the 1960s and manifested with the 1966 exhibition 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, organized by Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Swedish Billy Klüver, who was associated with Bell Labs (Bell Telephone Laboratories). This was the starting point of E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology, which became a forerunner of the rapidly evolving relationship between artists and technology1. The collaborations between artists and engineers at E.A.T. somehow bridged the heritage from Dada, Fluxus and 1960s happenings up to the 1990s mediaart explorations, to the art and science movement of the 2000s and all the way up to contemporary practices with digital art forms. New media art is long a grounded – and exhausted – term, but nonetheless, in a general picture and despite the recent institutional attention, it still appears to be a somewhat discursive outsider or experimental wild child to the institutional art world. New media attention in Stockholm today This spring in Stockholm, Visions of the Now / Visioner av Nuet, Stockholm Festival for Art and Technology, was held at Fylkingen. Curated by the 1 Björn Norborg and Jonatan habib Engqvist, The Nordic pioneers of New Media Art, Ars Hypermedia, 2009.
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