thinking about art after the mediain the mixtum compositum the world of the media stands for a number of paradigms
that are traditionally not associated with art. This includes the concept of what is
limitlessly – in the direct sense of the word – popular. The technical media of the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries no longer addressed the restricted circles of social
elites, which pop art, with its appetite for reproductions, also targeted. They operated
with the possibility of reaching audiences that were socially, regionally, and nation-
ally non- specific. photography, cinema, telephone, telegraph, radio, television, video
recorder, and Cds and dVds were invented as cultural techniques that would func-
tion world- wide, in techno- aesthetic esperanto. The propensity to cross boundaries
is intrinsic to these media. Those who know these media and use them – this applies
particularly to telematic media – are no longer simply viewers and listeners, but rather
participants in a global event, co- players in a complex context of actions for which
administratively the obscene term ‘communication’ is still used. at the currently most
advanced level we are dealing with technical systems that centre on computers and
networks with their nodes and servers.
Both the individual machine for processing, saving, and transferring data, as well
as the networks for worldwide distribution and dialogue, are high- grade systems for
performing calculations. Basically, they are mechanical systems, although they operate
with high performance electronics and microelectronics. mechanical systems are
distinguished by the fact that the processes that run on them can be formalized; it is
immaterial whether these processes are analogue or digital.
artistic praxis, too, has different forms of formalizable dimensions. it can be
expressed in language and in other sign systems, which operate with the highly ordering
and defining properties of sets of rules or grammars. such rules can be learnt and,
therefore, taught. They can be developed strategically. This is the reason why we can
speak of artistic experiments and this is why a studio or atelier with predominantly
technical equipment can be referred to as a laboratory.
Work in a laboratory consists of developing, investigating, testing, discarding, and
achieving results. These activities involve a particularity of artistic praxis that art shares
with science and even industry. however, this particularity is of far greater import in
art; indeed, for many people it is the distinguishing characteristic of art: intuition/
inspiration. it is closely tied to the most important energy source of artistic praxis – the
power of the imagination. intuition/imagination on the one side, and formalizability
and calculability/planning capability on the other form the two poles of the mixtum
compositum between which media art moves. To view these two poles as end points of
a scale, as in music, which can be played from both ends, is a meaningful alternative
to simple dualism, which is a lazy and disastrous thinking habit. The kind of praxis
that develops in the tension zone between the two poles we can call advanced artistic
research.
investigative praxis of this kind has need of places where the activities of taking
apart and reassembling, which we also know from structuralism, are not regarded as
sabotage but as especially creative. in pre- modern times in europe such places were
called alchemists’ laboratories. only wealthy princes, queens, or emperors could afford
them, for example, in prague, stockholm, and london. patrons invited the most
exceptional minds, irrespective of birth and background, to work in them so that they
could observe at close quarters their protégés labouring on the impossible. For the long