Passion Pays. Culturing art in new media

New media art, fashioned out of graphics, animation and other new technologies is challenging old notions of how art can be presented and owned.

Despite the frequency with which the term ‘new media’ is thrown around in the contemporary art world, there is little consensus on what is understood by it.

Typically, the tag is reserved for artworks that dabble in upcoming media technology and is used to refer to computer graphics, animation, internet, video games, robotics-based art forms.

But then, artists of every generation have experimented with new mediums, depending on their historical context. It is in this sense that the term ‘new media’ puts off a number of art practitioners.

‘‘I am not personally comfortable with the new media label as an artist’’, says the Delhi-based Rohini Devasher, who regularly works in a variety of mediums, including video, digital prints and sound. ‘‘Although I do work with various forms of media, including video and computer programmes, which can perhaps be classified as new, I tend to combine them with other mediums, such as printing and etching, which are not new.’’ Others think that the emphasis on the novelty of the technologies used fails to highlight the conceptual reasons for use of the technology.

A large majority of artists who have come to be identified as ‘new media’ practitioners in India, as elsewhere, belong to a generation which coincides with the global telecommunications and information technology boom between the mid 90s and early 2000s.

In India, this period also overlaps with a series of economic policy reforms which led to the liberalisation of the market, the onslaught of privatisation and globalisation.

These upheavals have impacted new media works produced in the country. A large number of new media works tend to utilise technology such as computer games, surveillance cameras and global positioning systems.

This felt-need to question and realign our relationship with technology, showed the way to the artistic re-imagining of how art can be created and presented. That’s why new media works now incorporate active audience participation in terms of what is now called ‘interactive art’.

New media art also lays great emphasis on evaluation and review of the technologies employed in creating the art work. There is a growing tradition of ‘sharing’ in new media art, which is aided by social media and various forms of online file-sharing networks.

The ubiquitous copy-paste features made available by computer software have made appropriation not only easy but also an essential means of expressing oneself in new media art.

Such experiments with ‘appropriation’ in new media often try to challenge established notions of ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’ with regard to art. This and the genre’s continued defiance of long-held ideas about what ought to be called art and whether it can really be owned, often makes it difficult to conceive a collection of new media works.

What further complicates the genre is the complex set up that such art requires. How is one to live with new media works?

Unlike paintings, sculptures or even photographs which remain physically contained within the spaces they are assigned to, a lot of new media works (such as video projections or kinetic sculptures, for instance) are ‘active’. They demand more space, both physically and in terms of their distracting presence.

Delhi-based collector Swapan Seth who, along with wife Sreya, houses one of the biggest private art collections in the country, however, brushes all such anxiety aside.

‘‘I exhibit all I have’’, he says simply. ‘‘If you can live with technology, why can’t you live with art born out of it? I have drop-down screens for the videos we have, my iPad houses the interactive works that I possess. I live with the work I buy’, he adds.

Set up is not that much of a problem says Devasher. ‘‘All my works, like most media art, come with instruction manuals explaining how to put them together’’, she points out.

‘‘Sure there are configurational stipulations and it isn’t quite as easy as hanging a picture up on a peg. The more complicated set ups might require more work than others. But on the other hand, collectors have the freedom to put up their works in any which way they want in their home. Given the fluidity of the medium I use (videos are a good example), they may be exhibited in multiple ways, and that is absolutely fine by me.’’

But acquiring such art may require maintenance and upgrades. Conversions, for instance, from film to video cassette, video cassette to CD and CD to the memory stick, are always on.

To try and preserve new media art is essentially a struggle to keep up with changing technology. ‘But why worry about that?’ asks Seth ‘‘Art like technology can also be obsolete or limitedly relevant. I find a lot of canvas work obsolete, but what may be obsolete to me may still be relevant to another’.

As more and more artists fiddle within and around the slightly wobbly perimeters of new media art, galleries across the country are warming up to it.

The writer is a Delhi-based art critic