Simultaneous exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York – 'Bitstreams' and 'Data Dynamics' - highlight some of the problems of institutionalizing media in an art context largely unfamiliar with its histories or complexities.
The brutally naïve 'Bitstreams' exhibition is a hodge-podge of works hanging comfortably in the museum and seems a retrograde homage to a modernity inebriated by formalisms and consumables and whose surfaces sustain their depthlessness.
Curator Lawrence Rinder's essay in the impoverished unbound brochure/checklist that accompanies the exhibition highlights an approach a technological imperative that stings in its superficiality with insights like: 'Widely available computer software such as Photoshop allows for an unprecedented ease in manipulating images and forms' (emphasis added), or 'a fantastic surfeit of information can transform instantaneously into a suspicion that digital technologies are limiting our access to objective reality.' This well trodden, and essentially banal, approach is so limiting and trivial that it provides necessary insight into a generation of American curators wandering into electronic media as they would wander through trade-shows.
Data Dynamics, a five person show crammed into a single small gallery aims at the inclusion of web media in the narrowly defined arena of 'mapping.' Surely an interesting possibility, the flows of data in the works, Maciej Wisniewski's Netomat™, Mark Napier's Point to Point, Adrienne Wortzel's Camouflage Town, Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg's Apartment, and Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker's Disseminet, seems strained to fit into projections filling the space. Scaling the works to conform to the galley hardly does them any good as floating files (one can hardly call this dynamic data) flit in overblown forms that range from fancy wall-sized search engines to do-it-yourself (should one say preference based) apartment design.
'Bitstreams' is destined to set media art back a decade (as if the Americans needed another excuse!), 'Data Dynamics' reminds us that net.art is essentially banal and best left at home.
Zwei parallel im Whitney Museum in New York stattfindende Ausstellungen – 'Bitstreams' und 'Data Dynamics' – zeigen, welche Probleme sich ergeben, wenn Medienkunst in Institutionen präsentiert werden soll, die mit deren Geschichte und komplexen Erscheinungsformen nicht vertraut sind.
