There is a moment when it becomes apparent that typologies of convenience, such as ‘new media art’, become unserviceable and, indeed, mendacious. For years, if not decades, the term ‘new media art’ has been wrangled and wrestled with in international discussion lists, publications and conferences. We witnessed quietly resisted assimilation when the Australia Council erased its program targeting new media art to focus its funding of ‘new’ and ‘emerging’ forms, tendencies and platforms on collaborative, research driven and interdisciplinary practice.
When the Queensland Government initiated the first of its biennial $75,000 acquisitive awards for New Media Art at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in 2008, it was another sign that institutions are also at a loss about how to meaningfully negotiate the terminology. In that instance, we might hopefully anticipate that the institution would assume a task of casting some light across the semantic uncertainties that riddle this field of many fields and that it might help us cast off the strangeness of this art movement where the media and/or the art somehow ceases to be ‘new’.1 As such a grand gesture towards these practices, we might feasibly expect the Award to make a grand, even brave, statement about the problematic legacy of defining art by medium or technology.
Things can get old very quickly these days. And this posits an unanswered question about whether the institution should lead or follow in these debates. Institutions have a vested interested in typology and category and, so, does GoMA evoke ‘new media art’ as something that was, is or will be? In 2006, Mark Tribe and Reena Jana mused about whether:
New Media art has run its course as... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline