Curating New Media Art in Italy in the 1980s: The Uneasiness of Medium Contingency

In 1986, the Venice Biennale gave much attention to a renewed interest in the relationship between art and science: a thematic umbrella under which the latest developments in the field of communication technology were featured. Nonetheless, exhibition settings and layouts resulted in difficulties in viewer’s interpretation and experience. Curatorial models for new media art were a concern for museum and gallery curators, and the experimental aspects of both the artwork and how it was proposed caused an uneasy response from both the public and critics. Artist, critic, and art historian Gillo Dorfles, warned “not to confuse the technological equipment with the artistic result.”

The approach to new media art was insecure, due in part to the early relationship between communication technology with private industries and military technology, and in part to the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of new media, which made it difficult to categorize. As noted by Maria Grazia Mattei, at the beginning of the 1980s the “official culture was totally disinterested in new artistic expressions and in the use of the computer outside of the sphere of labour.” Further, many critics, art historians and curators interpreted new available technology simply as tools that marked a continuation of the long relationship between art and science. This was indeed the approach of the Venice Biennale in 1986. At the same time, as originally suggested by the exhibition Information held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970, new media art had been included in the realm of conceptual art. However, such a definition might have prevented a committed study of new media art in relation to its medium contingency and its interdisciplinarity. In those same years, new media art curators, artists and activists, were convinced that these newly available tools marked a paradigm shift and had a greater impact on artistic practices.

Their approach found a voice in events such as the Electronic Art Festival of Camerino, a joint venture between the public university of Camerino, in the region of Marche, and tech-companies interested in the potentialities of employing new technologies in art. The annual festival ran from 1983 to 1990. Thanks to the collaboration with the private technology industry, the festival was able to fund experimental work such as that presented by artists Franco Angeli, Alighiero Boetti, and Giulio Turcato in 1984. Even though, as noted by scholar Francesca Gallo, the atmosphere around newly available technology was permeated with words such as ‘Renaissance’ or ‘Electronic Resurgence,’ due to the more prominent position of those who embraced the non-medium-contingency-approach, and a recalcitrant attitude towards working with younger artists, these experiences were at the mercy of events with a relatively short life span or that could not guarantee, or have not planned for, a proper presentation and conservation of the work on display. If exhibited in larger contexts, new media art work remained permeated by a halo of uneasiness; if exhibited in dedicated festivals and venues, artists and curators were accused of producing “initiatives […] meant for a minority of elitists.” [1] This conundrum was resolved once information technology started to permeate the artist studio to such an extent that it was no longer possible to push it back.

[1] Lettera di Lola Bonora a Mario (Convertino?) Archivio Centro Video Arte, U-TAPE ’86, 1986, Fasc. 585

View of the installation site of “Tecnologia e Informatica” at the Corderie as part of the 42. Venice Biennale, (1986)