The second case study chapter, entitled The Art of the Overhead, revolves around the festival of the same name, and is more explic- itly situated in the field of media art. It has, like tv-tv, an interven- tion character, both in terms how it intervened into technological development through the interrogation of a medium’s institutional and material frameworks and in terms of how it interevened into the specific form of the media art festival.
The kind of double-movement present in The Art of the Over- head, of reflection on the conditions of production in a medium through a critical engagement with the medium in question, is ar- guably one of the main characteristics of media art. But what is the need for a separate category of “media art”? Does not all art take place through some kind of medium and isn’t the critical engage- ment with this medium rather a typical ingredient in much of con- temporary art in general? Such questions are increasingly discussed in and outside media art (Arns and Lillemose, 2005; Lovink 2008; Quaranta 2010; Bishop 2012). What Geert Lovink and also Inke Arns have called a “ghettoisation” of new media art has also been an increasing topic of discussion at the actual festivals and confer- ences devoted to this, supposedly specific, art form. For example, the transmediale festival in Berlin changed its name in 2005 from “international media art festival” to “festival for art and digital culture” with the following remark: “This name is supposed to demonstrate the step away from the niche of ‘media art’, yet still points to the field of tension between culture and digital technolo- gies, which continues to form the main driving force of the festi- val.“ (transmediale, 2007)
In line with the name-change, at the 2007 edition of the trans- mediale festival, the panel “Media Art Undone” discussed if it was “time to let go of the label ‘media art’ altogether, and to strive for a re-inscription of media-based art practices into broader art dis- courses?” (Broeckmann and Bührer, 20073) In response to the panel discussion, media researcher Florian Cramer called for a tac- tical solution to the dilemma of media art being positively or nega- tively discriminated as a separate field. While on the one hand, claiming the category to be epistemologically unnecessary in that all “good art” involves a reflection on its medium of expression anyway, he on the other hand observed that media art festivals and institutions have been important venues for recognizing work that falls outside of the contemporary art market and which explicitly engages issues of the politics of the net and “free culture”.
(...) the entire copyright art, if I think e.g. of Mongrel/IOD, who started at the festivals of plagiarism in the late 1980s, if I think of the Zero One’s, who started on the Luther Blissett projects - they all come from practices that weren’t media but they found the media art system a receptive platform for doing an art that is not working with the old notion of intellectual property and that seems to be an important issue for me. (Cramer in Broeck- mann and Bührer, 2007, n.pag.)
This statement highlights the strategic position of media art as a specific field that provides an outlet for practices inbetween art, hacking and activism. In this respect, a useful framework for think- ing media art as a disciplinary field might be the notion of “re- gional ontologies”. In reference to a framework originally devel- oped by Finnish philosopher Juha Varto; Hannula, Suoranta and Vadén (2005, p. 102) describe this notion as denoting how scien- tific or artistic fields of practice tend to constitute themselves as in- dependently working spheres of specific knowledge and methods. Given the transdisciplinary nature of the media art sphere, media art as a closed off regional ontology is perhaps a contradiction as it seems to be constantly pointing beyond itself, overlapping with, combining and sampling different areas of concern. If we follow
Cramer’s argument above however, media art is useful to recognise as a regional ontology for strategic reasons, although we should also recognise that it is imbued with transversality, and keep in mind that this is a field in constant flux, always struggling to keep up with the fast-changing nature of contemporary media culture.
If, as noted above, Cramer identified the anti-copyright dictums of “net culture” as being one of the main issues that has been ca- tered to in media art; today with the proliferation of bandwidth and phenomena such as filesharing, must one not ask if anti- proprietary ethics have already entered culture and art practices at large? A certain disillusionment seemed to spread across what was once called “critical internet culture” (cf. Lovink, 2002; 2008) as social media turned into big business with the advent of Web 2.0 and its embracing of user-generated content. At the same time however, a new kind of “expanded field” of media art have per- haps emerged from this disillusionment, pointing productively be- yond the analogue-digital divide. Following this reasoning, The Art of the Overhead case study unfolds as one possible idea of such an expanded field for media art that utilises both old and new media, while keeping the strength of media art’s tradition of transdiscipli- nary concerns across art, activism and everyday life.