What is the most urgent need that you have?
Time to think differently and people who are able to be both pragmatic and visionary.
What is the best/ interesting case or project on new media arts that you have just recently experienced?
A collaborative interdisciplinary project that brought together performing artists, programmers and interface designers, bioengineers and distributed computing specialists, to create an intuitive sketch-based retrieval device for exploring a motion capture database. The prototype we built is a quirky interface that is more valuable as a trace of our joint effort and a sounding board for discussing innovative kinds of collaboration, than as a media breakthrough. The project is not so much a “new media arts” undertaking per se, as an exploration into creative interdisciplinary media practice. It is interesting because it polarizes and epitomizes many questions that are key to media art’s relevance in wider interdisciplinary research: the project obliged us to develop a completely new set of working relations from scratch to create a shareable vocabulary, collectively define aims and methods, and reconcile our notions of outputs and evaluation criteria.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice change?
There would be a potential for change through policy if policy were less conservative. Yet there is also a potential for change through policy if, as in most places, policy remains conservative. In the latter case though, change takes the form of underground, alternative, backlash energies which are harder to accommodate in policy frameworks. Realistically this may nevertheless be how real change occurs: if we accept that policy is permanently outdated (the institutional visions it embodies inevitably imply a degree of inertia), the challenge in trying to make it an accelerator or meaningful factor for change consists of using it to tighten the gap between conservative and innovative forces. This requires open minds, courage and a taste for risk – qualities often lacking in institutions – and processes which are more demanding than the normative processes of conservative policy, but offers high returns on investment as a lessened gap can allow significantly deeper changes.
