book - NTT Publishing Co. - ISBN 4757170270
Summarizing fifteen years of (new) media art is no easy task, neither for an exhibition, nor for a writer. If we discard the ambitions to encompass everything and the pretenses of absolute objectivity, what's left is a serious work of investigation and a hard selective task. Fumihiko Sumitomo and Yukiko Shikata attempted it for the InterCommunication Center of Tokyo, elaborating a journey structured on the radical evolution of electronic art starting from 1989, a year when the omens of a drastic change in culture and society were very strong. The result is one of the many possible courses, put in a historical context by an event and a static paper publication, characterized by five keywords chosen to represent the phenomenon (Time, Space, Body, Public, Generative) and by a chronology where technology, theory, art works and art exhibitions flow side by side. These things can be different keys of interpretation of media art, which can be centered on the evolution of technical possibilities, or on the periodical birth of innovative thesis, or on the ideas embodied in sensational works, or on the transversal concepts systematized by the most important exhibitions. Any of these cultural routes highlights some characters of this phenomenon and forgets others, preferring a specific reading, sometimes even sectional, but always interconnected with other ambits. The links with the past are fundamental to dispel a self-referential nature that, even if ingrained in technology, is the last hurdle to overcome to bring electronic culture into the wider-ranging contemporaneity.