What is New Media Art? In the age of the Internet, we can no longer fall back upon common sense and indisputable definitions of the term. Media is atmospheric. Like air, we live in it -- sometimes noticing that it smells perfumed and at other times complaining about its weird stench. “Media” however persists as a category by which we classify and define art. The debate about new media art has persisted since at least the 1960s, when the philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Indeed, we live in a world where the air is thick with messages. There’s Just Do It and there’s A Diamond is Forever.
New Media Art is sticky and amorphous. What is New? What is Media? What is Art? Even the most studied surveys of the genre have to cheat a little by pairing its long descriptions with pictures that immediately make evident that something indeed new and artistic is emerging. Taking note of these admittedly circular discussions, I would venture to suggest that New Media Art asserts itself through the negation of atmospheric pressure. Like the eye of a storm, New Media Art creates a space that is simultaneously part of a larger media system but also shockingly separate; it is art that breaks us from the swirling chaos of our media pregnant lives allowing us the pause to imagine an elsewhere.
Similar to other works of art, these glowing spectacles are activated by the viewer. At the edges of the sound and lights are the silences and moments of darkness where we become aware of the truths of our own interior world. In this sense, New Media Art is not very new at all. In the 1800s, the art critic Walter Pater observed that “all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music.” The idea of art being the nexus between light, sound and truth is even more ancient. Apollo, the Olympian of light and companion to the Muses, was frequently portrayed with a lyre in hand. As the patron deity of oracles, his power was the ability to give form to chaos and articulate the truth. For this reason, Apollo was the mythic god of art, for art acts to suspend a viewer from the chatter and hubbub of daily life, making space for the profound.
It should be obvious that “presenting” artwork is something more than staging objects in a room and collecting admission. At a minimum, the curatorial decision to show this body of work excludes other subjects that could have been presented instead of this one. Along with What is New Media Art is also the question of Why New Media Art. Amid our city’s world class art institutions, musical and performing art groups, and entertainment acts, there has not been the opportunity to blur boundaries between artistic disciplines and fuse them together. Our focus on new media art aspires to bring art, sound and performance together. Season One’s exhibition showcases the works of artists and designers who normally exhibit at sound and light festivals around the world. They draw with lasers, paint with video, and sculpt with sound.
Art Club is a transformer; in museum mode, viewers witness the rapid evolution of entertainment technology and its aesthetic possibilities. In night club mode, which occurs only periodically, Art Club invites emerging talent to operate our exhibits like an extension of their music. Together – Art and Club – a Houston home-grown institution brings cosmopolitan talent to Downtown, forging a new way to experience emergent audio and visual art. Join us and have fun.
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