Where There Are Flies, Media Art You'll Find: Digital (Im)materiality, Artistic Medium, and Media Art Decay

The digital revolution has already left its footprint in the cultural industry by not only introducing new aesthetics and art forms, but also by crucially transforming the practices of museums, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions in general. However, although most museums rely on the use of digital technologies in one way or another, few actively collect and preserve media and digital art. This apparent contradiction has not only endangered the future availability of specific artworks but it has also impeded the proper contextualization and historicization of media art.

In this paper, I start from the premise that a significant factor preventing media art from being fully assimilated by museums and the art market is its fluctuating condition between materiality and immateriality, as well as other issues associated with the identification of its artistic medium. In order to approach these problems, I emphasize both the material and immaterial, as well as medial dimensions of media art by drawing from discussions around the concept of medium in art, Rosalind Krauss’s postmedium condition, and Christiane Paul’s notion of neomateriality.

As a case study, I use Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s project Portrait on the Fly (2015), which addresses the issue of media art preservation in three different levels: an iconographic level through the symbolism of the fly as an image of decay and loss, a pragmatic level as an artwork existing in multiple materialities, and a narrative level in the creation of a growing archive of portraits of the figures that have shaped the field of media art.