On The New Art Fest '18

Gazira Babeli. Second Soup. You love Pop Art - Pop Art hates you
Scripted cans, May 2006 [artist homepage]

When art becomes an emergent property of science, technology, and digital interaction

What happens to artworks when they become emergent properties of technology and databases and frequently stay dormant inside servers as deprecated software, or drown in dead links?

Welcome to The New Art Fest ’18!

I would love to have most of the following authors, and or their works in one big opening in Lisbon. If not all in real life, at least sharing their art and thoughts through screenings and online interaction. We have scarce resources. But very good will, indeed.

As an artist playing God, I should say that I have the curatorial obligation to at least point all The New Art Fest ’18 visitors to a much greater population of generators that were and are involved in digital art creation from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

This year’s festival, by its definition, refers to at least four hundred artists, maybe much more. That’s the consequence of dealing with immaterial stuff like bits and bytes and raising the question of how to deal with a form of art that is immaterial and stored in databases, servers, and online clouds. Just think about the number of agents (artists, writers, PhDs, technologists, software writers, designers, activists) inside the twelve repositories/websites that I've chosen to illustrate the unexpected and still obscure dimension of online art developed since 1994 in the American continent.

Not before a serious effort begins to address the complexity of this post-contemporary art emergence, all selective criteria adopted to show artists and artworks seem to be inappropriate. There are no museological criteria in place so far, as there is no market to speculate about online art values. Trade incapacity to deal with most of the new media art is a consequence of Walter Benjamin’s condemnation of art in the age of reproducibility. I might say though that before some software platform like Blockchain may certify the integrity and ownership of online art, the task of classification, description, and evaluation of what has been already created and generated seems devoted to deception.

The idea of scarcity when we talk about contemporary or post-contemporary art is a mystifying one. What we really have is too much subjectivity and too much art.

Shortening the demand to some happy few, as well as castrating curatorial criteria are not intellectually acceptable decisions. Electronic immersion dispises propaganda and overcomes censorship and manipulation by its inherent properties. Beware speculators of all time!

Curating a show like America online/ the media imperative & the net generation, about online art in America, is above all a meta-language about the facts of life and art in the computer age. The following is but a sample of hundreds of so many good artists and artworks born from the age of information...

— in the curator's blog/ The New Art Fest '18
(invitational only, for now)