The Trouble With New Media History

I agree with Michael Rush that a thematic approach to a new media history would be more appropriate than a chronological one; which is why I was disappointed when the rest of the chapter on the development of film as an art form turned out to be a chronology. I don't mean to pick on Rush. As a writer and student of art history, I sympathize with him. Although, I've only read the introduction to New Media in Late Twentieth Century Art, I imagine the further chapters on the history video and digital art were a difficult undertaking. Unlike Rush, I don't believe new media's status as a developing art form is what makes recording its history so difficult. After all, if that were true, we all might as well as stop studying now and just wait forty to fifty years when we can observe new media from a more objective standpoint. I believe it's new media's ephemeral nature that makes it such a difficult subject for the art historian. From painting to photography, photography to film, and film to digital art, the incorporation of new technologies has caused art to grow increasingly immaterial. As Rush points out, art inside a computer, "resides in no place or time at all," and, "can seem to collapse the normal barriers of past, present and future." This collapse of time extends from the impossibility of touching digital art, of containing within a specific space or location, such as a museum. (Of course, certain forms of digital could be printed out and plastered on the walls of a museum, just as stills or scenes from films could be displayed on walls and screens for viewers, but neither scenario would showcase the artworks in their intended form.) It seems that with the inability to collect and contain new media artworks mirrors the difficulty in approaching them historically. Art history becomes more vast and elusive, more like ordinary history, as art forms become increasingly transitory. 

For my link today, I've included a link to my favorite website, FFFFOUND! Viewing the site in class will be a little like a Fluxus event, since the site will be different at any given time it is opened and it is created by our participation as well as the participation of the users who post on it. (Hopefully none of the really lewd images will be at the top of the feed on wednesday!) Looking at the site after reading Rush's introduction, I found myself wondering if FFFFOUND! was a new media history, if it could be considered a kind of museum, and if the works shown on the site fall into the category of avant-garde. 

http://ffffound.com/