The  'Undoing" of New Media Art: Towards a Distributed Aesthetics

On December 8, 2004 the Australia Council for the Arts issued a press release detailing its plans for reorganization of its various funding boards. To the complete surprise of the Australian arts sector the release revealed the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board. This paper takes that event as the catalyst for an investigation into the current state of new media arts. The ‘undoing’ of funding infrastructure and identity branding for new media arts in an Australian context echoes the cuts to organizations and artists internationally with recent problems in Vienna, the UK and so on. It is clear that this undoing of new media arts concurs with a political climate, which seeks to defend the propriety of aesthetic form and practice. Yet to what extent is this ‘undoing’ also immanent to new media itself?  Is new media a mode of art making which undoes form, actively prising open the political economy of private property upon which art forms rest?

Examining the debates over nomenclature and identity running concurrent to the growth of new media arts, new media art strategies for intervention into increasingly corporatized public and private space and government backlash against new media artists and organizations, I will argue for the radical undoing of propriety and property that new media arts undertakes in culture.  In the wake of new media arts’ undoing through the reassertion of the issues of  art form, I will focus upon the move to a ‘distributed aesthetics’ that is now emerging as artists conjoin new media technologies with social movements and explore the aesthetic dimensions of social software.

Anna Munster, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, UNSW