Chinese new media art, digitality, Archive Rose Goldsen, Archive of New Media Art Cornell University

Cornell University's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and its specialized collection, The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant Garde Art, include an extensive array of new media art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. As the Founding Curator, I have been struck by how these collections and the socio-cultural conditions of their production have expanded my sense of the mission of the Goldsen Archive as well as the cultural conditions and promises of digitality itself.

Abstract

Cornell University's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and its specialized collection, The Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant Garde Art, include an extensive array of new media art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In addition to artworks on CD-Rom, internet, and digital video, The Wen Pulin Archive includes 360 hours of digitized video documenting contemporary Chinese art events and installations since 1984. As the Founding Curator, I have been struck by how these collections and the socio-cultural conditions of their production have expanded my sense of the mission of the Goldsen Archive, as well as the cultural conditions and promises of digitality itself.

In addition to providing a preview of materials in the Wen and Goldsen Archives, this paper follows the lead of the Archive's documentation of twenty years of contemporary Chinese art by reflecting on the cultural significance of the Archive's cross-generational gathering of artists from the broad Chinese network (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan) who work in the emergent fields of electronic arts, new media, and mixed media performance. Their aim is to situate their past and current projects in terms of the theoretical, social, and political problems posed by new archival challenges of digital culture and historical transformation. Similarly the endeavor of archiving so-called ephemeral artistic works may require a reconsideration of the aims and imperative of the archive itself and related art historical research vis-a-vis greater China. To position contemporary Chinese art in the Future Perfect will require that the participants reflect on their former work in relation to future concerns: to consider "what they will have done."

The inspiration for this conceptual paradox derives from Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. This book, penned in the same time period as marked by the beginning of the Wen Archive, reflects on the condition of knowledge in a computerized age. In Lyotard's concluding chapter, "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" he poses a question central to the task of thinking contemporary Chinese art in the age of digitality:

"A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the preestablished rules: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules. . . Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done."

  In the context of Wen Archive, which is an ongoing project whose cultural and political implications will be comprehended only as its inauguration will have been done, the coda of the Future Perfect leads to ponder the relation of Contemporary Chinese Art to the Question of the Digital Archive.

URLS:
Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art

Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant Garde Art