voi Cesbe as bad as what humans have been capable of. let us at least try it out (that was his
most important message); let’s start again one more time with the new resources we
have at our disposal. Flusser was not at all sure whether it would end well. however, he
wanted to keep the option open for the challenge of where we might go with the new
technologies of abstraction.
of course Flusser summarized best what he was aiming at with regard to the history of
civilization: ‘humankind went from images to script, which became dominant, entered
a state of crisis, broke out of it, and now we are beyond the script in a new type of
imagination which we will have to practise first’ (Flusser 1988). We shall have to learn
to imagine anew. We have to develop from being a subject to being a project, from a
state of being subjected to being something that one creates, what one introduces to
others, what lies ahead of one as the beginning of a new work.
This is an apt description of one of my principal motivations for engaging with media
over the past decades, with the scholarly study of and reflections on media, and also
with the relations of tension between the arts and media. if there were no hope that
developing from subject to project is possible, that through the new technological
resources we can change the world to its advantage, then the entire effort would be
meaningless. To project also means to devise something in the mind that did not exist
in the world beforehand and thus has utopian connotations. people entirely lacking in
notions of utopia should not practise science, technology, or art.
Media artsThe fields of action and thinking of the arts, sciences, and technology constitute a
relationship of tension which is currently summarized in a simplified way in the
coupling of art and media. internationally it has been fostered for the last twenty
years under the label MedienKunst (media art). historically, it only refers to this short
period of time. Those who are more free- handed point to the period after World War
ii and begin their short history with the Fluxus pioneers John Cage, nam June paik,
Wolf Vostell, and other early video artists. others draw a somewhat longer timeline,
taking in approximately the last 150 years – since the art of technical images became
established with photography. By describing Ritter’s experimental praxis above, i have
indicated that such short- sighted historicizations are untenable, and have discussed
this subject at length elsewhere (cf. zielinski 2006); in our present context there are
other important concerns.
media art is a curious mixtum compositum. on the one hand the term joins two
things that lie close together; the practice of any art needs media so that others may
experience it. media art, however, has been developed as a specific conception of
cultural praxis since the early 1990s. From this perspective the mixtum compositum
contains things that lie far apart. The term seeks to bind together two different worlds
in a common perspective and praxis. From its inception this coupling exhibited strategy
and tactics, above all at the beginning of the 1990s when a series of art academies
were founded in europe and asia to investigate the new technological possibilities,
such as the new institutions in Karlsruhe and Cologne in germany, les Fresnoy in
France, and ogaki- shi in Japan, and the established academies began to set up special
departments.