Curatorial in-securities: new media art and rhizomatic instability

Abstract

Global developments enhanced by digital technology and the accompanying transfer from analogue to digital media and communication systems have enhanced the dialogue between activists for world peace and new media artists. At stake is an extensive transfer of media information from playful self-representations on the home video camera to widely circulating communications data stores being matched against both realistic and imagined terror databases. In all sectors of private and public life we are experiencing a troubling transfer of human rights into digital databanks as the unchecked technological response to global terror. Under suspicion and in-secure, we find ourselves suspended in-between the conditions of ‘digital terror’ itself. This essay focuses attention on the paradox of digital terror as it is situated in the in-betweenness of the network and its artistic interventions. By introducing a number of recent digital installations from across the digital divide, it makes evident the multiple levels of transfer at stake in the parodic artistic translation of the inbetween, the artistic blending of digital divide and digital delirium. Moreover, the relation beween divide and delirium constitutes less of a dialectic and more of a transference, one always positioned between the social and the personal.