Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art

Though some find solace in making pretty pictures, structures and interactive spaces, we must surely ask: If now is not the time to consider a political “new media art,” as well as a politics of it, well... then when? I’m not talking about propaganda and mere sloganizing, nor about empty identification with the oppressed. As Art & Language, I think, said long ago, to paint a picture of a miner is not to be working class. But deliberately to avert one’s eyes from a world in which political and social decisions by malign narcissists and poltroons are daily mediated by every possible means except art, or to accept that art should only be a refuge from it, is surely untenable today. As it was 50 years ago, when Jonathan Benthall, in his still useful book Science and Technology in Art Today, writing of GRAV (Croupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel) in...