Realtime Real Time

Abstract

Art-historical chronicles of new media art often invoke a set of conceptual underpinnings instigated in art movements that are themselves defined by lukewarm or combative relationships with art history, its cannon and establishment. Connections are most often made to Alan Kaprow, his Activities, Environments and Happenings of the 1960s, as well as to Fluxus practitioners such as Nam June Paik. At their most extreme, a number of these artists’ undertakings were clearly and actively hostile toward the serious-minded approach of art-historians, curators and institutional cultures of their time. New media, now a quite defined and delineated mainstream Western art form, does not betray its lineage in maintaining a difficult relationship to art history and scholarship.

Handling a modern touchscreen mobile phone gives us immediate an immediate feeling for the “real time” of our real world technologies. Gone are the days of hierarchical, navigable descriptions - "push 'menu’, then ‘settings’, then ‘network’”. Instead we struggle to conjure up a descriptive language that appropriately outlines to the new user the set of swipes, squiggles and pantomimed gestures required to access function on the device. These interactions clearly value individual temporal experience over transferability - and increasingly create the opportunity for time-based communion rituals linking person to technology, and technology to person.

Through a set of discussions around time, technology and time-based arts and the systems, process and performance art-historical ancestry of new media, we affirm a deep valuing of “real-time” at play in contemporary technology-art practice. Standard chronologies of art-history lose their importance as models for technology and art move from art-as-progress to art-as-experience. In this, we perform at least a partial autopsy on art-history, celebrating its time-of-death as marking the birth of a resurgent appreciation of the authentic experience of artists and non-artists, as people-in-the-world.