[csaa-forum] Anna Munster on New Media Arts, UNSW April 20

[Melissa Gregg]

University of New South Wales Media, Film & Theatre Seminars
5 p.m. Wednesday 20 April 2005
Webster Building 327


Anna Munster 

The 'Undoing' of New Media Arts 



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.


Anna Munster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory,
College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Her areas of speciality include new media art
and theory, networked cultures and philosophies of technology. She has just
completed a book, Materializing New Media: Embodiment and Information
Aesthetics, which will be out in 2006 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England). She is currently working on editing a special issue of the online
journal fibreculture on distributed aesthetics. 

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