Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

Intervention in Media Art

Bernhard Serexhe

The exhibition INTER[IN]VENTION presents media artworks created in the last five
decades; that is, works, which possibly elude being quickly classified according to well-
known genre concepts. Apart from the use of new materials in art, which began early in the
twentieth century in parallel with advances in artistic techniques, the rise of digital art
especially since the 1960s has led to new concepts of artistic authorship and to new ways in
which visitors/users engage with artworks and intervene in how they are perceived.1

Public space has now been extended outward from the enclosed rooms of public buildings to
encompass outdoor urban areas and, via the media channels of radio and television, also the
global information space, where today all information can potentially be in all places at all
times. Along with the high expectations fueled by a society increasingly shaped by the cult of
the event, the continual evolution of the methods of artistic production confronts museums
and collections, curators and conservators, with hitherto unimagined possibilities, coupled
with unanticipated curatorial challenges.

Some decades ago the seemingly auspicious term new media was connected with far-
reaching technological and social visions aimed at both the individualization as well as the
globalization of information and communication.2 It was envisaged that it would be possible
for individuals to connect in real time from any location on the globe to any other individual
on the planet. The totality of global information would be freely accessible for everyone at
any place in the world. Yet alongside the expectation that globally networked
communications and understanding would have uniquely positive outcomes, later reduced and
summarized in the marketing buzzword the information super highway, even in the 1960s
the potential danger of an inherent totalitarian tendency was recognized and clear-sightedly
described.3

1
He [meaning the interpreter] participates freely in the reinvention of the work. Umberto Eco, The Open
Artwork (Frankfurt am Main, 1977, p. 32); originally published as Opera Aperta (Milan, 1962). This statement
can be applied to the consumer or user of media art as well.

2
The term global village was coined in 1962 by Marshall McLuhan in his famous book The Gutenberg
Galaxy.
3
Already in his important book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 3). Marshall McLuhan recognized the totalitarian character of the
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

By becoming the ultimate resource of global prosperity, surpassing even the most optimistic
expectations, the rapid and irresistible development of the presaged information super
highway over the last two decades has relegated the former trend-setting term new media to
a superseded and outdated media theory. The irreversible transition from analog to digital
culture has also brought forth absolute dependence on a technology which is marketed and
controlled by only a few global players; a dependency or addiction even, of which today the
negative consequences are increasingly being discovered, including by the broader public.4
However, faced with the superiority of these consequences, we can already discern a tendency
toward fatalist resignation where such consequences are considered as normal, because in a
totally connected society they are accepted as factual, and therefore legitimately exploitable
for any purpose.

In the wake of this all-embracing rise of digital media and electronic networking, art and the
reception of art have also undergone a rapid change: from pure admiration or contemplation
of the work to creative intervention and playful intervention in the work. All in all, the
creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with
the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his
contribution to the creative act.5 With these words Marcel Duchamp heralded the future
importance of participation already in 1957. During the 1960s, the vision of direct user
intervention in art was sourced by the pervasive expansion of televison as a mass medium and
the introduction of the more individualized, lightweight, and flexible technology of video. At
the same time this vision was deeply inspired by upcoming digital technology alongside the
rapid implementation of ARPANET, the U.S. militarys precursor of the Internet. Long before
the first portable video system, Sonys famous Portapack, came on the market in 1967, the
Korean visionary artist Nam June Paik had drawn attention to the manipulative as well as

upcoming global network: Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our
central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.

4
Thanks to the disclosures of the courageous whistle-blower Edward Snowden and others the top-secret mass
surveillance programs particularly of U.S. intelligence agencies are now known about world-wide. Above all
that they have the capability of using electronic networks to spy on individuals and commercial companies
extensively. When all media are connected permanently to the Net this enables intelligence agencies to penetrate
all appliances used by individuals, every computer, every smartphone, anywhere and everywhere in the world.

5
Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957, The
Creative Act, by Marcel Duchamp. Published in: Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Paragraphic
Books, 1959, pp. 7778.
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

participatory potential of new media technologies. As early as 1963, he presented twelve

manipulated television sets at the Gallery Parnass in Dsseldorf (Germany), thus intervening
in the very concept of public broadcasting from one active source to many passive reveivers.
This seminal exhibition can be considered one of the initiation rites of media art.

In countless public performances and artworks Nam June Paikand with him an entire
generation of early media artists and activistsdemanded the direct participation of the
audience in television as a mass medium, which recalls the profoundly democratic proposition
expressed, already in 1927, by German playwright Bertolt Brecht in his radio theory.6 The
initial steps in the direction of participatory art forms can be found in the Dadaism of the
1920s. These were taken up again by strong movements like Fluxus, and reappeared as
decisive elements, inter alia, in Op art, Kinetic art, and the New Tendencies movement of the
1960s and early 1970s.

Much has been written about the boundless opportunities and pleasures promised by art that
utilizes new media, about the expansion of artistic creativity, about infinite presence and
distribution, and about new forms of grassroots democratic participation in the global
information space by a Web-oriented public. The artist as an ingenious arranger of a never-
ending work in progress, the artwork as a ubiquitous platform in the online universe, the user
as inspired coauthor of the work, the curator as omnipresent project manager mediating
between real polycentric and virtual worlds: although these visions have not yet come to pass,
they have not been convincingly refuted either. Rather, viewed from a slight distance, the
participants in this big game of chance seem like players in a gigantic multiuser dungeon,
where every fantasy has ample room to unfold, but the paths leading there are still obscured in
darkness. In order to shed some light on this situation, in the following I shall examine the
concrete conditions under which media works are created and communicated today.

6
radio is one-sided when it should be two It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So
here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be
the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of channels. That is to say, it would be
if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him
into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and
organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is
a step in the right direction. Bertolt Brecht, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, 1932, p. 129, online:
http://telematic.walkerart.org/telereal/bit_brecht.html.
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

The Old Categories No Longer Apply

With the rapid technological and social transformation of our world in the course of
globalization, the very core of theories and practices in the arts is being reassessed, and
traditional standards are being called into question.7 This interrogation from the ground up has
become necessary because of the rise of digital tools and transmission media that have
fundamentally altered production and distribution conditions in the arts.8 The conventional,
familiar concepts that we have hitherto used to describe art, along with those used to describe
and critique social and economic upheavals, are now becoming problematic when we attempt
to pinpoint precisely their meaning and significance and distinguish one from the other. The
categories and genres applied in older forms of art history analysis no longer apply; they are
incapable of reliably capturing all the changes that have occurred.9

In recent decades, the traditional, time-tested tasks of museums and collectionscollecting,

preserving, researching, and communicatinghave been confronted by art whose intervening,
performative, process-oriented, indeed ephemeral and simultaneously global character
virtually precludes its safe preservation or passing down as cultural heritage.10 This

7
The self-image of our societies has, for example, been marked for thousands of years by stable systems for
passing down customs and traditions, systems that are geared toward longevity. In his studies of ancient
Egyptian culture, the Egyptologist and scholar of religion and culture Jan Assmann demonstrated convincingly
that the tradition within us, [] which has solidified over generations, through centuries, even millennia of
repeated texts, images and rites, [] shapes our consciousness of time and history, our image of ourselves and
of the world. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedchtnis, in Thomas Mann und gypten: Mythos und
Monotheismus in den Josephsromanen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006, p. 70). Crucial to this conclusion is the
argument that cultural memory (a term coined by Assmann) has in all civilizations thus far been oriented to
longevity and reliability, in particular in response to the constant threat of outside influence, wars, targeted
destruction, natural disasters, and natural processes of decay.

8
At all times, and in all societies, cultural developments are closely intertwined with economic, political, and
social conditions, which both determine and result from them. Hence, we must allow for a consideration that
goes beyond the accustomed horizons of political, conservatorial, or stylistic valuations of a collection. It is only
before this broader horizon, which questions in very general terms to what extent culture is dependent on
economics, that phenomena can be understood which, upon closer inspection, can all too easily be ascribed to
the imperfection of individual technologies or the failure of individual institutions.

9
As early as 1983, Hans Belting proposed that contemporary art indeed manifests an awareness of a history of
art but no longer carries it forward; and that the academic discipline of art history no longer disposes of a
compelling model of historical treatment. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher S.
Wood (Chicago, 1987, p.3); first published as Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte (Munich, 1983). See also Belting,
Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich, 1995); not available in English
translation.

10
In his 1928 essay La conquete de lubiquit, Paul Valry heralded the coming transformation of art through
new technologies: We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby
affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

development applies not only to so-called media artworks; in historical terms it in fact
emerged at the latest when the Dada movement launched its protest following the first world
war against the hypocritical bourgeois cultural ideals of quality, truth, and beauty, and it
continued on through all of the avant-garde art currents of the twentieth century that opposed
the constant trivializing monopolization of art by bourgeois society.

While these artists were systematically appropriating ephemeral materials, using new
techniques and modes of presentation, and deliberately dramatizing the transience of their
works to the frustration of the art market and collectors, the acceleration of technological
change was leading to a technical obsolescence that might be regarded as a system-inherent
threat to art for as long as wein the fine old traditionremain devoted to the categories of
enduring value and longevity. Long before the rampant digitization of every expression of
human life, including that in the arts, set in (i.e., during the last decades of the analog era),
artists began knowingly and systematically to use materials and organisms (biological and
chemical substances), electronic tools (cameras, microphones, interfaces), technical storage
media (record albums, magnetic tapes, LaserDiscs), and presentation and transmission
techniques (performance, radio, video, television) whose durability is fundamentally
questionable due to unstoppable biological, chemical, physical, and/or technical processes, as
well as the (potential) lack of availability of the requisite recording and playback devices on
the market. The precarious conservation requirements of analog photography have been
researched exhaustively, and awareness has been growing over the past few years of the risk
of losing data stored on analog audio and video tapes as well, although, even today,
collections are often not prepared to deal with the fact that many of their works are in acute
danger of decay.

Another kind of acceleration, which in this case can be considered absolute, has been
experienced in the deterioration of artworks due to the all-encompassing, nonreversible
system changeover to digital technologies. This development applies no matter whether these
works have been digitized in order to save their originally analog data (graphic documents,
photographs, films, video), whether they were created through the direct use of digital
apparatus (audio/visual recording devices), or whether they are entirely the result of the
programming of their source code. In the preservation of such works and cultural goods,

Paul Valry, The Conquest of Ubiquity, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series,
1964, p.225); first published as La conqute de lubiquit, 1928.
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

advances in storage capacities and shortened storage times have in general induced people to
take ever greater risks. The problem is that the storage and retrieval of digitized content are
always subject to new technical systems that follow on each others heels at ever shorter
intervals, and to constant changes in software. So far, the central promise of long-term digital
data security has by no means been fulfilled by the computer and software industry.

We can therefore conclude that it is not the digital works that age more rapidly than their
analog counterparts, as is often asserted, because their actual substance, their idea, is set down
in the digital code, something that cannot age. What is happening instead is that the hardware
and software needed for collecting, preserving, and presenting these worksthe devices
and their operating systems; the interfaces, sensors, and other specific applications; the
authoring systems, plug-ins, players, and browsers; the requisite programming skills for their
adaptation, as well as, often enough, the financial means for their revival and renewed
presentationcease to be available after just a few years. We have realized only of late what
this problematic means for media art anchored in digital code: the faster technological
development proceeds, the shorter the half-life of the artworks. With the experience gathered
over the last two decades, we must assume today that digital hardware and software, with its
rapid innovation cycles, have a shelf life of less than ten years. The resulting functional
obsolescence of digital artworks pushes the collection criteria of durability, authenticity, and
enduring value, which have applied thus far, to absurd extremes, and calls for a general
rethink. Collections and museums can by no means keep up with the accelerated pace of
technological development if they maintain their present structures and financing.

Although it is beyond dispute that the substance of art lies in the idea, this idea can only be
expressed, passed on, and grasped by others through sensory experience of the artwork.
Material media are usually required for this purpose, whether they be cave walls, stone
sculptures, paintings on canvas, photographs on paper, or indeed the devices on which the
storage and reproduction of digital art dependnamely, computers, hard disks, interfaces,
sensors, monitors, projectors, and all the other apparatus that, although functioning in the
digital process, are anything but immaterial. Over the millennia we have come to realize that
information stored in analog media can be called up only for as long as those media continue
to exist in their material form.11 The extremely brief history of digital media has, within just
three decades, proved exactly the opposite with every cycle of improvements.12

11
A frequently cited example is the Rosetta Stone housed at the British Museum in London (196 BCE).
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

With respect to the preservation of digital and digitized art, we are therefore obliged to
ascertain that, in general, the use of digital processing, communication, and storage media has
led to an irreversible dependency on hardware and software, as well as on digital
communication systemsthe development, control, and provision of which rely solely on the
commercial motives of private industry. The value-adding strategies of publicly traded
companies in the age of consumerism no longer coincide with the traditional ideals of
durability in cultural communication, and are instead geared to a continuous quick succession
of increasingly efficient technologies.13 This circumstance has promoted a technical and
cultural paradigm that, while to a great extent shaped by art as a catalyst for new technologies,
has not yet been accepted by the majority of museums and collections.14 Regardless of
whether we deem the substance of digital art as residing in the idea and its capture in
immaterial digital code, or whether we cling to the notion of the historical materiality of its
generation, storage, and presentation media, the question remains as to how museums and
collections can meet their responsibility to preserve and pass on cultural heritage.15

12
Just two decades ago, for example, floppy disks were used for storing and transferring digital data. In the
storage depots of many collections, early digital works are slumbering today on floppy disks and other digital
storage media:the devices required to revive them are no longer available. After only five years, data stored on
CDs and DVDs can begin to fade or even become completely unreadable. Hard disks can fail at any time for a
number of reasons. Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that the outdated software needed to activate
these works is likewise often no longer available or can no longer be installed on todays computers.

13
The decisive upheaval that most clearly distinguishes the cultural syndrome of consumerism from its
productivist forerunners, [...] seems to be the reversal of the values attributed to permanence versus transience.
Zygmunt Bauman, Leben als Konsum, (Hamburg: Institut fr Sozialforschung, 2009, p.112). Bauman continues :
The most urgent need that all this haste seems to call for, however, is the necessity to throw away [...] In
todays culture, wishing that time would stand still is a sign of stupidity, sluggishness, or ineptitude. And it is a
crime that must be punished. (Ibid, p. 51)

14
This is due not least to constant funding problems as well as to the traditionally slow pace of staff
development in most public cultural institutions, which often stands in the way of an interdisciplinary approach.

15
The symposium The Digital Oblivion: Substance and Ethics in the Conservation of Computer-Based Art,
which took place in 2010 at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, was part of a three-year research project
called Digital Art Conservation (funded by the European Union as part of the INTERREG IV Oberrhein
program), which aims to contribute to the international debate on the conservation, and thus preservation, of
digital art. The primary task of this research project is to understand the conditions under which digital art in
todays collections can be conserved, as well as the conditions which make conservation nonfeasible (see
http://www.digitalartconservation.org).
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

Artistic practice has changed fundamentally

Artists in all ages have been at the forefront when it comes to conceptualizing, developing,
testing, and deploying new media and tools. This was most definitely the case in the past,
because artists,16 as craftsmen creating new kinds of works, were always involved in
developing new tools and techniques with which to do so.17 Already in antiquity, most of the
analog workmanship techniques still in use today were developed primarily by artists. After
the Middle Ages, it was the artists who were busy developing analog reproduction and
distribution media. An outstanding example is the development of printing,18 which set off
not just a media revolution in Europe and became a crucial catalyst for the Renaissance.
Moreover, just as the invention, application, and further development of analog photography
in the nineteenth century was mainly driven by artists, it was also ultimately artists interested
in algorithmic processes who began in the 1960s and 1970s, in parallel with the artistic
appropriation of analog electronic image production and transmission (television, video, etc.),
to work with digital computer and communications technologies initially used for engineering
and military purposes and to develop out of them the multisensory and creative digital
applications and new creative instruments that form the basis of todays communications
society.

Even though art always needs media to be experienced by the human senses, and in this sense
all art can be considered media art,19 in todays usage the terms media art and media
artworks are not understood as referring to prints, painting, or photography, but rather to
works based on the creative use of electronic and digital technlogies. New tools have always

16
The term artist is not reduced here to the traditional forms of art, but rather is understood in its broadest
sense. Innovations in craftsmanship and engineering cannot be separated in their development from those in the
arts. Art and techne are inseparably interconnected.

17
The first cave painter, although he or she did not view him or herself as an artist in the modern sense,
captured hunting animals with charcoal and earth pigments on stone walls in a fundamentally creative act,
expressing perhaps for the first time in human history a decisively new human understanding of nature and
thus sending out powerful incentives for the evolution of society.

18
From the use of simple wooden stamps by the Babylonians and the Egyptians, as well as the first wood
printing techniques on paper developed by the Chinese in the first century, there followed in the fifteenth century
the development of single-page printing, leading to the flyers of the Reformation and to book production (block
books), all the way to the most highly advanced artistic woodcuts made with a multicolor printing process
(Albrecht Altdorfer). Finally, following the religious and philosophical deliria of the Middle Ages, it was
Johannes Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg (14001468), who, as a learned, multitalented craftsman (i.e., an
artist), revolutionized book production with the invention of movable type.

19
See also Hans Ulrich Reck, Mythos Medien Kunst (Cologne, 2002).
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

led to changes in artistic practice and hence to a rethinking of traditional concepts of what
constitutes an artwork. Ever since industry began to apply the technologies of mass
reproductionincluding photographyart history and criticism have had to gradually move
away from an increasingly unfitting concept of the artwork that focuses on the genius of the
artist working on his own, and on the originality of his or her work.

In connection with electronic and digital art, this departure from the notion of uniqueness
reflects primarily new conditions of production and distribution under which the artist can no
longer own the means of production. In contrast to artists of the last thousands of years, artists
today cannot manufacture their new, digital tools themselves, but instead have to choose from
the existing and constantly changing offerings on the market. The actual decision in favor of a
particular tool and its functions has thus been taken out of their hands and replaced by the
selection of devices that hardware and software makers offer for a limited period in a
flourishing marketplace. Artists are able to rely on the given functionalities of their computers
or other digital devices only for as long as the manufacturers of these tools are able to market
them extremely profitably and hence on a mass global scale. Long before the material wears
out or the possibilities of these tools are exhausted, the artist will no longer be able to replace
them and will be forced to acquire an upgraded configuration, or improved version, which,
however, will usually be only partially compatible with the production and presentation
environment for previous artworks. In order to keep pace with the rapid development of the
market, the artists manner of working will have to be adapted to the quick succession of
available upgrades and updates, and to their constant changes, over which the artist has not
the least bit of influence.

This market and technology dependency is exacerbated by a highly complex production

process, which as a rule artists can no longer master and control all by themselves. Media
works are usually made, just like cinema films or stage shows, through the collaborative
efforts of highly specialized teams, in which camera people, programmers, media technicians,
and the like take charge of operations that the artist is unable to perform due to lack of skills
or experience. Like the production of the tools, the artist is freed here from the concrete
technical execution of his or her work, meaning that, like the director of a film, all of the
artists energy can be dedicated to realizing ideas, which is after all the actual substance of the
work. With the digitization of the data, however, the production, presentation, and legibility
of an artists work have become dependent on devices and programs that will in many cases
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

soon cease to be available. For the artist as well as the viewer, who ever since the
proclamation of the Web 2.0 era is euphemistically referred to as the user, digital media
expand the creative possibilities and the horizon and then immediately narrow them again.
The price we pay for the beguiling possibilities of virtual and expanded realities is
frequently a loss of immediate sensory contact with reality.

Curatorial Practice is Intervention

It is obvious that this paradigm change in the production and distribution of art ushers in
changed curatorial practice which will entail a reevaluation of the four main tasks of
collections and museums: collecting, preserving, research, and communication.
Contemporary art, in particular in the form of electronic and digital media art, is less and less
bound to the traditional arenas of collecting, preserving, and mediation. This development is
demonstrated not least by the inflationary increase in art fairs, festivals, and biennials since
1989,20 where contemporary art caught up in the wave of globalization finds its preferred
presentation and distribution platforms. Incidentally, like every other product competing on
the world market, art has become so globalized that the traditional national attributions no
longer have any basis in reality. We can no longer speak of genuinely German, Italian, or
even Chinese contemporary art. However, fifteen years after Samuel Huntingtons asserted
Clash of Civilisations,21 we still dont know what the recharted cartography of art will look
like.22

Collecting: To the same extent that the localization and presentation of contemporary art at
festivals, biennials, off-spaces, art fairs, galleries, and temporary exhibitions have become
both ephemeral and ubiquitous, the collecting of this art has likewise undergone a
transformation. Much contemporary art taking the form of performances, installations, photo

20
Currently (2012) there are some 250 biennials and triennials worldwide, while thousands of cities are raising
their profile by hosting art fairs.

21
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996).

22
If globalization is understood to mean a new world map of art, this raises the question of how to draw such a
map and what it should show. The result is hectic competition for the mapping, whereby the new regions of art
must first struggle for their own definition. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, in The Global
Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989, (p. 4), catalog for the exhibition at ZKM | Zentrum fr Kunst und
Medientechnologie (Center for Art and Media) Karlsruhe, September 17, 2011 to February 5, 2012. The
exhibition is part of the research project GAM Global Art and the Museum, initiated and directed by Belting
and Buddensieg. See also http://www.global-contemporary.de and http://globalartmuseum.de/site/home.
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

and video works, or digital interactive art is already produced within the framework of artist-
in-residence programs or production fellowships, and is then exhibited at those publicly or
privately funded institutions in return for the residency, often going on to be purchased and
collected there. The performative and process-dependent character of such works frequently
demands that they be collected in the form of audiovisual electronic documentation of a
respective performance or version, so that the exclusive existence of a singular work in its
authentic form at a specific collection site is hardly the case anymore. Often, it is the
contemporary artists themselves, alongside the curators and collectors, who, in the interest of
better visibility and broader marketing of the respective art event, and frequently also of the
collecting institution, take measures to ensure the optimal publicizing of the work over the
available Internet channels (exhibition websites, video portals, apps, etc.). Here, the
documentation of a time-based work often takes on the character of a work in its own right,
being reproduced and sold and hence becoming a collectible object. The main emphasis is no
longer on the unique work in a well-tended collection, but rather on publicizing and exposing
a work as quickly and widely as possible. In this process, which has often been falsely
labelled as the democratization of art, an important role is played by the way in which
works and their artists, each hyped for only a short time, jostle for attention on the global art
markets, with unpredictable results.

The purchase, collecting, and exhibiting of technically complex works of media art, and their
varying forms of documentation, demand of private collectors and of curators of public
collections a special standard of expertise, along with the willingness to make investments
and take risks. Digital works are usually handed over by the artist in the form of data along
with instructions on how to install the work, but rarely with the source codeits actual
substance. The equipment that is indispensable for the preservation and presentation of the
work must be provided, maintained, kept on hand, and continually updated by the collection
itself.

Preserving: In view of the technical difficulties and their insufficient knowledge in the area of
conservation and restoration of electronic and digital media art, most museums and
collections today are rarely able to maintain the high standards demanded by traditional
preservation ethics. We must therefore ask whether, in a situation of growing demands and
dwindling funds, they are even obligated to do so anymore. Can the works themselves and the
presumed enduring value of collections of contemporary art be safeguarded at all anymore
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

over longer periods of time? And if the limitations imposed on conservation practicein
particular for digital artenable only few works to survive, which criteria and preferences
should dictate which works are to be passed down while the rest perish? There is reason to
fear that technical developments, and hence the deterioration of these works, are progressing
so swiftly that we will not even have time to make such an assessment.

Research: Just as the collecting of antiquities and art was shaped by emotional, didactic,
and in part economic considerations in the days of royal cabinets of wonder, and especially in
the case of classic museums, the collecting of contemporary art is not governed entirely by the
narrow set of criteria that current art scholarship chooses to assume. The job of the curator is
not only to research after the fact works that have already been created and collected, but also
to assume the role, within the given global as well as local context of contemporary art, of a
prospector and augur whose sensational or controversial universal concepts are based less on
strict scholarly criteria than on personal intuition, foresight, and media competence. In the
curatorial field, research should still be taken to mean discovery. The pressure that
museums, exhibitions, biennials, and festivals are under today to attract visitors, and the
swiftness with which todays catalogs are produced, mean that only on the rarest of occasions
do curators have the time and opportunity to really research the objects to be displayed.

Communication: Exhibition is the true and direct form for communicating art. Hence, the
didactic quality of an exhibition can be measured by the extent to which it succeeds, through
the themes it addresses and the selection and mode of display of the works on view, to
provide the viewer/user with individual and new sensory and intellectual experiences. In his
role as negotiator between work and viewer, the curator must accept being overshadowed by
the work and by his own exhibition. The frequent practice among curators in recent decades
to showcase their own role and hence appropriate the status of artist is more of a hindrance
than a boon to the communication of art.

With the rise of electronic and digital media, curators have acquired additional aids with
which to present exhibitions. The promise of a media-based, and hence easy and playful
access to the complex content of contemporary art has led in the past two decades to a
historically unprecedented didactic focus in exhibitions. In a great many exhibitions visitors
are inundated with information in order to make them believe they have understood the work,
while all that they really receive is metadata on the work and the artist. With the plethora of
 Intervention in media art Bernhard Serexhe, 2013

electronic aids being advertised in this lucrative market, it could appear that these misguided
attempts, frequently made through the use of audio guides, QR-coded information links,
overflowing websites, smartphones, and complex apps, distract viewers from their own
immediate sensory experience of and their intervention in a work of art.

Conclusion / Fin

Art precisely means invention and intervention, capability and knowledge, awareness and
practice, and it also means expansion of consciousness beyond given limits. New
developments in art have preceded technological as well as social change at all times.
Invention and intervention anticipate, initiate, and prepare the thinking, models, forms of
action, and even the technical tools that lend themselves to all of the other social domains for
and during change. Finally and definitively we understand that not war is the father of all
things, but that art is the mother of all things.