Fields - Manifesting the Transformative Potential of Arts in the Age of Post-Media

Abstract

Accordingly to several voices, we have entered the post-media age (Krauss 1999, Guattari 1996, Manovich 2000, Weibel 2005, Quaranta 2010). Today, there is no anymore single media dominating in contemporary digital art practices. Yet, it does not mean either the convergence between the Manovich's described “Duchamp-land” (of contemporary conceptual art) and “Turing-land” (that deals with aesthetics of new media). We will be tracing back to the early stage of new media art in the 90s, which in particular manifested itself over the Internet through the unique qualities such as immateriality, process-based, collaborative creation, real-time presence, feedback mechanism; whereas, the art today in post-digital era deals with rather different properties – i.e. neomateriality, objecthood, data visualization, “imagery” of social networks. The paradigm shift from new media to post-media, we would like to reveal here by analyzing two large-scale exhibition projects curated by us together with artist, writer and curator Armin Medosch (1962-2017). The first, Waves (Riga 2006, Dortmund 2008) explored invisible properties of technologies aiming to build bottom-up “material” theory, claiming that electromagnetic waves is the principle material in media art. The second, Fields (Riga 2014) manifested the post-media situation through art works containing highly visionary, investigative and transformative potential. Accordingly to Medosch, the Fields is “contextual seedbed for social changes”. Hence, we claim that "post-media art" shouldn't be seen in a narrow sense, but instead it should refer to all the huge variety of creative practices that are capable to reflect upon current realities, the complexity of our society, and the challenges of our time we face.