Facing Obsolescence

Camus saw creativity as an intense form of rebellion, acknowledging the very struggle to create in this world as sufficient rebellion. A creative person who fights the inevitable with all their power, taking responsibility for their own life, through their own subjective choices is able to make life meaningful and therefore one worth living. It is always refreshing in our world of cultural hegemony, to see more artists putting value back into creation and sacrifice, shifting the paradigm of commodification.

In acknowledging our fleeting existence how do we then justify making art without the ‘other’ in mind? Camus would argue that with the freedom to create comes the responsibility to consider both the art and the artifice. The idea of acknowledging of our inevitable obsolescence is imperative to new media; even the term suggests an ‘old’ media, a cycle of life and death. It can be said that every art medium has had its ‘new media’ stage, by labelling it as such are we investing hope in some kind of existence beyond ourselves? This seems absurd when considering the significant challenge of obsolescence to the new media world, not only in terms of the technical, but also in social, cultural and political respects.

There is a certain seduction in ‘new’ technology and since the rise of capitalism and mass production we have been consuming and discarding at an ever increasing rate. In Sampling Tradition: The Old in New Media, an essay published in last years Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, Janine Randerson describes this consideration, “The commercial history of new media should be recognised; built in obsolescence and entanglement in an endless cycle of up-grades helps sustain the capitalist economy.”[1]

Taking responsibility for our on consumption is a significant step toward creative rebellion, what is equally important however is considering the wider systems and structures which shape the life cycles of our technologies and indeed humanity. Artworks employing non-traditional materials and technology complicate the issue of obsolescence. Preservation is a key issue, particularly significant for the media art scene in New Zealand. Lissa Mitchell discusses the challenges facing New Zealand galleries in her essay New Data. She asks “how do we ensure long term access to digital information?” Mitchell suggests “Galleries now have to try and adapt to video and sound works, policies for documenting and preserving this works need to be developed to go beyond the existing systems for ‘physical artworks’.”[2]

However these new standards seem far from being employed. Despite New Zealand’s significant contribution to the history of new media art, there is still no government allocated funding for its preservation and many early film and video works are already damaged beyond recognition. The New Zealand Film Archive (Est. 1982) is a charitable trust, and our only major body with policies in place for preserving and maintaining our moving image heritage.

It is this inherent obsolescence in much new media work which denotes conjecture underlying the practice of cultural preservation. In this sense we should question the true permanence of any object, not just those which are media based. The supposed ‘newness’ of media art pushes the public to examine how they participate in the care, storage, display, and interpretation of works, making it a valuable vehicle and voice for change.

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[1] Randerson, Janine. 2008. Sampling Tradition: The Old in New Media. In The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, ed Su Ballard/ Stella Brennan, Auckland, Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds.

[2] Mitchell, Lissa. 2008. New Data. In The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, ed Su Ballard/ Stella Brennan, Auckland, Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds.