Above: Lot/ek's design for the New Museum's Media Z Lounge (2000; top) mixes
flat-screen monitors with old marine buoys. At Jeffrey Shaw's EVE dome (1993--95;
bottom) at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, visitors--wearing
helmets and carrying joysticks--see 3-D images on the interior of an inflated
sphere.
What exactly is a Media Z Lounge, a Sky Media Loft, or a Login Gateway?
And could someone please explain what happens when you take a Chariot to
the Heavens? Though you'd expect something along the lines of a Star Trek
holodeck, you might settle for a slick EPCOT attraction where you'd at least
get to wear a pair of 3-D glasses. But despite their names, these aren't
realizations of sci-fi technology or creations of Disney Imagineers.
Instead follow a curator to a place where fantastical monikers describe
humbler realities: respectively, a gallery, a café, a reception area,
and an elevator. Welcome to the art museum of the twenty-first century.
It's the museum of the digital age, an era that--despite a few recent sobering
experiences--still gets giddy over the binary code. And in the realm of
art, a generation of artists continues to ponder the ramifications
of digital media on politics, the limitations of space and time, perceptions
of the body--even the tyranny of materiality itself. "The Internet
is a reflection of and facilitator for a reality that's liquefying,
where gender and other issues of identity relating to the body are blurred,"
says painter and new-media artist Fabian Marcaccio. "It leads us almost
to a brain-to-brain type of communication." Perhaps not since the beginning
of the Machine Age has the cultural vanguard so heartily embraced manifestos
that link social, artistic, technological, and aesthetic goals. And perhaps
never before have cultural institutions invoked such retro-futurist vocabularies
with their Jetsonian visions of Cities of the Future and Worlds of Tomorrow.
"You think about the merging of the body with the media, and the possibilities
of art become a lot richer," says Dan Cameron, senior curator at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York.
Offsite:
Explore the Media Z Lounge of the New Museum for Contemporary Art at
www.newmuseum.org as well as the
Sky Media Loft and the Login Gateway at Ars Electronica Center's
www.aec.at.
A curious result of all this talk of spatial transcendence is that an awful
lot is being spent on bricks and mortar to help bring it about. Along with
gallery spaces in existing institutions, new museums devoted to new-media
art have been appearing on the cultural landscape during the past decade,
showing everything from the more established video projects of Bill Viola
and Bruce Nauman to interactive Web displays, sound installations, and the
goggles-dependent experiments of emerging practitioners. The coming years
promise a virtual flood as more and more institutions chase after the
new-media bandwagon, eager to find and nurture the next avant-garde--if
such a thing exists--and fearful of being left behind. But art and architecture
have yet to convincingly define, much less master, this brave new world,
and so what happens at their high-profile intersection--the new-media
art space--is invariably experimental and often problematic.
The New Museum made an interesting move when it chose New York firm
Lot/ek to design its Media Z Lounge (that's Z as in Zenith, its sponsor),
which opened last November. On the museum's lower level, the gallery for
video and digital projects is outfitted with clunky metal fixtures
supporting flat-screen monitors and recycled marine buoys where visitors
sit fixated on 42-inch plasma displays. The juxtaposition of state-of-the-art
technology and rusted, reused hardware within the museum's nineteenth-century
building, as in other Lot/ek work, links high technology with the detritus
of industrial disintegration, evoking images from Tank Girl, Mad
Max, and any number of cyberpunk tomes. "We're very interested
in exploring our current location," says Giuseppe Lignano, coprincipal
of Lot/ek with Ada Tolla, "where on the one hand we have high technology,
but on the other, we still--luckily--have the material world."
Above: Visitors to the Ars Electronica Center are admitted through
the evocative Login Gateway (left). Greg Lynn's proposal
for Eyebeam Atelier (center and right) includes
twisting corridors that puncture the building facade and
contain display screens.
With Lot/ek's transitional aesthetic, the New Museum appears to be forging
ahead with one hand clinging to emblems of the past--including, literally,
a flotation device--to remind us of the uncharted nature of the fleld
we're navigating. "Rather than establishing curatorial standards that
we were just going to have to reposition twelve months down the line, we
decided to establish it while we go along," Cameron says of the museum's
relatively cautious approach. "We were addressing the question of how
media is used, if not critically, then at least with a degree of self-consciousness."
The University of California, Irvine, took a similar stance when its Beall
Center for Art and Technology opened last fall. "It was basically designed
as a box," explains director Jeanie Weiffenbach of the 3,300-square-foot
space. "I think what you really need is flexibility, which would
have been compromised if the architect had made a major statement."
However, aside from granting adaptability for the artwork, the spareness
of the space also allows perhaps its most noticeable feature--a grid of
data and electrical ports embedded in the floor--to make an important
point. That is, the most certain thing we can say about the direction of
new-media art is that it's going to need a lot of cables. But this statement
may have been an unconscious one, as Weiffenbach reveals: "We were
nearly breaking new ground in the U.S. and were operating with architects
who hadn't really seen the other spaces in Japan or Europe and who didn't
have the opportunity to engage that."
