Media Art and Politics: The Question of Tomorrow

Abstract

The author addresses the relevance of the question of tomorrow for the new media art and reconsiders similar functions of art and visualizations from the past cultures – anticipation, vision and the claim for a change. The request for art to make an intervention in a total life program is to be found in the historical artistic avant-gardes. The author will study the case of Slovenia, where critical theory of society has had a particularly relevant role for the comprehension of art. With some globally very relevant venues for media art, such as Kapelica Gallery and Aksioma, the production of media art is here still signified by this intellectual tradition. Contemporary production could be understood as the heir of the artistic revolutions of the 1980s, when art challenged the vigilance of the organs of state security. Another relevant reference for today’s comprehension of media art in this context is tactical media, which “do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate” (Geert Lovink and David Garcia). Tactical media present a revival of art as politics, this time with the use of new media in a do-it-yourself fashion. The author will rethink the activist dimension of media art in reference to romanticism, but also to some ancient functions of visual media to perform a change, e.g. the cave paintings where picturing animals served the hunting magic, to increase the number of animals.