media art

“History in the Present Progressive” . Surfing with Satoshi review on Outland

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Brian Droitcour, one of my favorite art writers ever, honored me with a review of my book Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs (a few copies are still available here). It’s criticism, so don’t expect only kind words, but some of them really make me proud as they confirm the value and durability of all the work I put in this book (with the priceless support of my publishers, Postmedia Books and Aksioma). A few quotes:

“Quaranta’s account, which addresses the rise of NFTs and the connections between artists’ recent use of blockchains and historical interventions into art markets, sets a high bar for others that will follow.

So far Surfing with Satoshi is the only book of its kind: an attempt by a single author to weave a motley array of histories—of art movements, markets, technologies, and critiques—into a coherent narrative.”

“His book’s greatest strength is the persuasiveness of his links between blockchain-based art and twentieth-century conceptualism. The historical orientation of Surfing with Satoshi is what makes it durable, despite being written in response to—and during—a specific moment.”

Of course, I publicly apologize with artist and theorist Rhea Myers if I inadvertedly misgendered her. Her work, ethos and life embody so much of what this book is taking stance for. A new run of print will come out soon, and these and other mistakes that readers helped me to detect will be amended.

Brian Droitcour, “History in the Present Progressive”, in Outland, July 19, 2022,
https://outland.art/domenico-quaranta-surfing-with-satoshi/

Human in the Loop. Visualizzare la massa invisibile

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L’effimero tangibile. Dal reale al virtuale: arti, spettacolo e prospettive di comunicazione digitale (GBE, Roma 2021) è una raccolta di saggi che offre un campione della produzione scientifica del Dottorato di Ricerca Digital Humanities. Comunicazione e nuovi media organizzato dall’Università di Genova, a cui ho avuto l’onore di prendere parte dal 2006 al 2009. La raccolta include un mio contributo, in italiano, sui temi che hanno nutrito la mostra e il progetto editoriale Hyperemployment: lavoro invisibile, intelligenza artificiale, postcapitalismo, automazione… Tra gli artisti discussi, Sebastian Schmieg, UBERMORGEN, Andrew Norman Wilson, Guido Segni, Eva e Franco Mattes, Michael Mandiberg, Elisa Giardina Papa.

Domenico Quaranta, “«Human in the Loop». Visualizzare la massa invisibile”, in Maurizia Migliorini, Sergio Poli (a cura di), L’effimero tangibile. Dal reale al virtuale: arti, spettacolo e prospettive, di comunicazione digitale, GBE / Ginevra Bentivoglio EditoriA, Roma 2021, pp. 201 – 212. PDF DOWNLOAD

“A ten years old optimistic take on the internet may look childish in a post Snowden society.” Interview by Pina Gabrijan

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Some days ago, Slovenian writer Pina Gabrijan sent me a few questions for an article about Aksioma‘s series of conferences and seminars Tactics & Practice, that have been taking place for ten years. It was a good chance to discuss about time and technologies, the recent history of digital culture and media art, automation and hyperemployment, and of course NFTs. The article is now online in Slovenian, and the English Q & A is available below.

Automate all the Things! at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana and Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, January 14–15, 2020. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma
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Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT

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(Italian below) I’m happy to announce that my latest book, Surfing con Satoshi. Arte, blockchain e NFT (Postmedia Books, 2021) is now available in Italian on Amazon with a pre-sale discount, and will be soon available in bookstores. Non-Italian readers may have to wait a bit for an English version, but hopefully they may enjoy a few materials I made available on this website: a short English abstract, a translated index of the book, and a complete bibliography with hyperlinks. Now, let’s switch to Italian…

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Intervista con la New Media Art

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Curato da Marco Mancuso ed edito da Mimesis, Intervista con la New Media Art. L’osservatorio Digicult tra arte, design e cultura digitale è uno straordinario strumento di navigazione e di comprensione della pratica artistica contemporanea nel rapporto con la tecnologia e la ricerca scientifica a partire dall’esperienza dell’osservatorio Digicult. 486 pagine, il libro raccoglie testi critici e interviste di una quarantina di autori internazionali, e segue gli sviluppi della media art dal 2005 ad oggi. Ho avuto il piacere di contribuirvi con una vecchia ma ancora fresca intervista a UBERMORGEN (online qui) e l’onore di introdurre la sezione finale del volume, Culture e mercati. Qui di seguito trovate il mio contributo:

Domenico Quaranta, “Capitolo 10: Culture e mercati – Introduzione”, in Marco Mancuso (a cura di), Intervista con la New Media Art. L’osservatorio Digicult tra arte, design e cultura digitale, Mimesis, Milano 2020, ISBN 9788857569444, pp. 413 – 418

In un testo del 20161, il teorico dei media Jeoff Cox e il filosofo Jacob Lund affrontano la caleidoscopica nozione di “contemporaneo” e di “condizione contemporanea” mescolando vari punti di vista e approcci disciplinari. Il contemporaneo, secondo Cox e Lund, non è solo una categoria temporale (il tempo in cui viviamo), ma anche una categoria esperienziale, che identifica la nostra attuale relazione con il tempo, la storia e il futuro. Frutto di una globalizzazione accelerata, della diffusione del neoliberalismo e dell’influenza delle tecnologie dell’informazione, l’attuale versione del contemporaneo si differenzia da quella dei decenni precedenti. Il contemporaneo attuale vede una coesistenza e un intreccio di temporalità distinte, un “presente espanso” caratterizzato dall’estrema compressione spazio-temporale e dal costante senso di dislocazione prodotti da internet, e dall’esperienza del “near real-time” prodotta dall’interferenza tra il nostro modo di percepire il tempo e il modo in cui lo computano le tecnologie informatiche.

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Sopravvivenza programmata

Book, Texts
Valentino Catricalà e Domenico Quaranta (a cura di), SOPRAVVIVENZA PROGRAMMATA. Etiche e pratiche di conservazione, dall’arte cinetica alla Net Art, Edizioni Kappabit, Roma 2020. Brossura cucita, 350 pagine, ISBN 9788894361803

SOPRAVVIVENZA PROGRAMMATA. Etiche e pratiche di conservazione, dall’arte cinetica alla Net Art è un volume che ho curato con Valentino Catricalà, raccogliendo contributi di Laura Barreca, Laura Calvi, Valentino Catricalà, Alice Devecchi, Roberto Dipasquale, Ben Fino-Radin, Marialaura Ghidini, Oliver Grau, Jon Ippolito, Laura Leuzzi, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Alessandro Ludovico, Dorcas Müller, Stephen Partridge, Domenico Quaranta, Iolanda Ratti, Cosetta G. Saba, Domenico Scudero, Azalea Seratoni, Elaine Shemilt, Gaby Wijers. Già disponibile sul sito dell’editore, lo potrete trovare presto nelle migliori e peggiori librerie.

Sopravvivenza programmata è il tentativo, unico nella sua completezza nell’editoria italiana, di affrontare il nodo cruciale del rapporto “arte e tecnologia” dal punto di vista della conservazione, nella complessità delle sue articolazioni e nel suo sviluppo diacronico. Attraverso contributi ormai classici o redatti per l’occasione, il volume articola le teorie, le etiche e le pratiche della conservazione delle opere d’arte quando applicata a media effimeri, time-based, vincolati a tecnologie soggette a obsolescenza programmata e a infrastrutture dal ritmo evolutivo incessante.

Dall’arte cinetica al video, dall’installazione interattiva alla Net Art, dalle collezioni agli archivi, si sollevano quesiti quali: cosa significa conservare? Chi ne è responsabile? Quali sfide devono affrontare i musei di arte contemporanea? Come si può programmare la durata?

Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock

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Alterazioni Video, The New Circus Event, 2019. Venezia, VAC Foundation. Image courtesy Valentina Campari

The full version of my long essay (or short book) “Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock” is now available on NERO, in a beautifully designed webpage. You can read it online or download it as a 40 pages, ready to print pdf. Enjoy!

Abstract:

This text is an attempt to understand if, and how, art can exist in the present time. We know we are living an age that is profoundly different from that in which contemporary art was born: an age of acceleration, present shock, distracted gaze and end of the future. And yet, when it comes to art, we still confront it as if nothing had actually changed: as if it were the sacred result of moments of deep focus and concentration; as if it could still be experienced without distraction; as if it were the expression of a constant fight against the old, and of an endless rush towards the new; as if it could speak a universal language, and last forever. But it doesn’t.

Rather than providing answers, this text raises questions such as: is it still possible to make art under these conditions, and to experience art as it should? What’s the price we have to pay for engaging today’s media and the crucial issues of our time, in terms of duration and long term appreciation?

Although these considerations apply to all contemporary art, I use contemporary media art as the main area of reference, as I think most of the problems I’m outlining are more visible there, and more radically affecting the art that uses the tools and addresses the key issues of the post digital age. The essay addresses sub-topics such as primary and mediated experience, the end of the future, Futurism vs Presentism, art’s relation with art market dynamics and technological hypes, art’s incorporation in the art system and in mainstream culture, obsolescence and media art preservation, the difficult relationship between artistic practices and media hypes (with a focus on Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence).

Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock

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Soon available as part of the Macro Asilo Diario series, Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock is an excerpt from a longer, unpublished essay born out of a conference I had in Rome in March 2019, wondering if, and how, art can exist in the present time. The longer version includes chapters about net.art’s futurism, post internet’s presentism, precorporation, media obsolescence, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. If you want to read the draft or suggest a publisher, please drop me a line. This shorter version suffers a bit in the last part, but it features one of my favorite chapters, about the end of the future. Hoping it could be a good companion in these days of anxiety and loneliness, I shared it on Academia. Enjoy!

“We know we are living an age that is profoundly different from that in which contemporary art was born: an age of acceleration, present shock, distracted gaze and end of the future. And yet, when it comes to art, we still confront it as if nothing had actually changed.
Rather than providing answers, this essay raises questions such as: is it still possible to make art under these conditions, and to experience art as it should? What’s the price we have to pay for engaging today’s media and the crucial issues of our time, in terms of duration and long term appreciation?”

Beyond New Media Art

Book

Link Editions is proud to announce the release of “Beyond New Media Art”, by Domenico Quaranta.“Beyond New Media Art” is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title “Media, New Media, Postmedia” (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation.

“Beyond New Media Art” is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age.

From the book’s preface: “So what is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? And what has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what accounts for the limited presence in critical debate of an artistic practice that appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organization of the world we live in?”

Link Editions is a publishing initiative of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age. Link Editions uses print on demand and digital formats to create an accessible, dynamic series of essays and pamphlets, but also artist books, catalogues and conference proceedings. A keen advocate of the idea that information wants to be free, Link Editions releases its contents free of charge in .pdf format, and on paper at a price accessible to all. Link Editions is a not-for-profit initiative and all its contents are circulated under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.

Reaction: Art Fag City

Book

Paddy Johnson, “Is New Media Accepted in the Art World? Domenico Quaranta’s Media, New Media, PostMedia”, in Art Fag City, August 30, 2011.

Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new media the spot light. Not everyone sees new media the same way though. Domenico Quaranta, an Italian writer and curator previously best known to this blog for “Holy Fire“, a dubiously themed new media exhibition in Brussels that included only “collectible” work, being one such example. Quaranta’s followed up the 2008 exhibition by writing a whole book on the subject of New Media — “Media, New Media, PostMedia” — one core theme being that the field isn’t accepted in the contemporary art world. ”New Media Art is more or less absent in the contemporary art market, as well as in mainstream art magazines,” he writes in his abstract, ”and recent accounts on contemporary art history completely forgot it.” Go on reading…