HyperStudio Project Manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. Lives in Brussels

“Though the new media art community, in all its aspects, goes beyond the institutional walls of the contemporary art museum and world, investigating their relation seems necessary if we wish to prospect new media art’s future as a widely accepted contemporary art form. The system of values that art museum institutions present are still prevalent to a public at large, and its core functions on the level of public outreach, culture filtering, art form authorization and care-taking (in terms of documentation and preservation) are crucial for the establishment of any art form in the art world and in art history.

In looking at the history of engagement between the new media art world and the contemporary art world institutions, a number of barriers and hurdles surface. Obscure aesthetics and inapt vocabularies, the perception of low economic value and perceived impossibility of collecting, the lack of exhibition methodologies and infrastructure, and questions in terms of documentation, archiving, and preservation are just the tip of the iceberg. Yet, in addressing rather than avoiding these challenges, new media art supporters (curators, critics, and artists) pave the way for new media art’s inclusion in the contemporary art institutions and its acceptance as a contemporary art form for the public at large.

This vote for recognition of new media art as a contemporary art form, and its integration in the contemporary art world and its institutions is of course not an integration without conditions, nor must it entail the death of the involvement of alternative venues that have allowed new media art to grow. The trade-offs faced by past art forms upon inclusion in the museum and the rhetoric of the museum as a mausoleum, might not be as permanent as museum critics wish to believe. If we believe in the ability of the institution to respond to the challenges new art forms place upon its practices and customs, starting with the incorporation of some components of networked culture (decentralization of authority, strong and committed relations to a network of supportive institutions, etc), the inclusion of new media art might present the art world with true change.”