::fibreculture:: not-working works

[Anna Munster]

On 28/08/2005, at 2:23 PM, David Teh wrote:
>
> do you have 'relational aesthetics' in mind here, anna? has anyone 
> written
> specifically about online community from this perspective?

I wasn't thinking of Bourriard but more of *relation* as an 
under-thought term in new media generally.
Brian Massumi makes this comment in an interview 
http://www.interact.com.pt/interact8/entrev/entrev1.html
he makes this in the context of critiquing interactivity and suggests 
that we haven't really thought through the idea of interaction ie the 
relation rather than the *things* doing the relating. I'm interested in 
trying to think about what this means for networks and especially how 
this is occluded in the
manic aesthetic of mapping every node in the network that currently 
abounds. And then assuming that the relations between the nodes are 
just *connections* without interrogating them any further.

> not having read
> bourriaud's book, i must say i'm a bit wary of the cultish reception 
> this idea
> receives in the artworld. i was told by a curator recently that her 
> decision to
> project some video-art (footage of a car-park) onto the (very 
> polished) concrete
> floor of the gallery was a 'relational' strategy...

yeah, right, and everything was political a decade or so ago!
Quite frankly, I think relational aesthetics - both Bourriard's and the 
art world's appropriation - completely rip-off what has been going on 
in new media theory and much of its practices for the last decade. It 
feels like every term involves an unacknowledged borrowing from digital 
and new media discourses....

> having said that, bourriaud
> does specifically say it's an 'anthropological direction', so i guess 
> i should
> get over my scepticism. (what a young curmudgeon i've become!-)

I wonder what he means by anthropological, though....probably just 
'human-made' or something general like that. I don't find him a very 
careful thinker - he's a generalist and part of the 'star curator' 
syndrome of the globalized art market. There you go - you don't have to 
be any specific age to be a cumudgeon!!

Dr. Anna Munster
Senior Lecturer
Post-Graduate Coordinator
School of Art History and Theory,
College of Fine Arts
University of NSW
P.O Box 259
Paddington, 2021
NSW
Australia
ph: 612 9385 0741
fx: 612 9385 0615
CRICOS Provider code 00098G

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