November 02, 2006
Extra-ordinary Experiences:
A Retrospective of British Media Art
Extra-ordinary Experiences: A Retrospective of British Media Art :: Venue: Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany :: Dates: 10-19th November 2006 :: Curated by: Tom Corby.
This unique exhibition presents an overview of British media art, covering a period from the early 1990s to the present day. Work by the selected artists - Susan Collins, Rod Dickinson, Mongrel, Scanner and Thomson and Craighead - enables German audiences to explore a representative range of sound, Internet, video and interactive works, symptomatic of British media art produced during this era.
Whilst media art in the form of video, photography and other expanded time-based practices, precedes the widespread emergence of the desktop computer and Internet, the artworks seen at this exhibition places the computer as central to their form. This fact, while brute, allows us to draw a useful line between these digital "new media" practices and the older analogue media art forms. This period is significant in British art history as it describes a radical shift in creative investigation that opened up extensive new areas of practice (in the form of the Internet and human-computer interactivity) and also produced new economies of art production and distribution.
In particular a new type of artist was emerging in the UK who was quick to confront and exploit the new ways of working and communicating described by the emerging technological landscape. Characteristically informed by an iconoclastic punk "Do-It-Yourself" attitude, these "new media" practices were informed by a desire to circumnavigate mainstream art institutional contexts and an interest in re-situating new media within wider debates concerning the social, political and aesthetic implications of such technologies. Following this theme, the exhibition selects a diverse range of practitioners, who are united by a consistency of approach in which technology becomes a pliant vehicle for creative invention which is, in turn, critically motivated, poetic, playful, and formally complex.
Posted by jo at November 2, 2006 12:28 PM
