<The following was written for the iDC list. You can follow the discussion here or sign up for the list here.>

Who organizes? In the context of event organizing it is worth noting that it is not exclusively curators who conceptualize and organize. Recently I was in conversation with one of my graduate students. We mapped his work for the semester. We looked at readings that may be appropriate for him. Then I asked what he planned in the line of cultural production. "I want to organize an event. A conference perhaps." He also intends to explore blogs as artistic medium, investigating and making strange the characteristics of that format. A writing and sound practice. Conference and blog go hand in hand. This approach is not at all exclusive to "new media." It is just as common in filmmaking, for example. But it is still hard for traditional narratives to wrap their head around ideas of an expanded practice (not aimed at the museum)! Should we, along the mid-90s theme of the death of everything, claim the death of the artist?      

How do encyclopedias tackle the "a"-term? Wikipedia talks of the artist as "a person who engages in an activity deemed to be an art. It is also used in a qualitative sense of a person creative in, innovative in, or adept at, an artistic practice. Most often, the term describes those who create within a context of 'high culture', activities such as drawing, sculpture, acting, dancing, writing, filmmaking and music — people who use imagination, and talent or skill, to create works that can be judged to have an aesthetic value. Art historians and critics will define as artists those who produce art within a recognized or recognizable discipline." High Culture? Art as merely visual, aesthetic pursuit? Wikipedia, you are not alone! The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is as out of sync with today's living culture. For the cigar-smoking OED editors an artist is a: "follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice - the opposite of a theorist." Wake up, you editors of this world. Leave your downtown cubicle or university capsule, go out, have some air! See what really happens in the world. We should edit that Wikipedia entry! Let's look at what Francis brought up.

Example:

ReadMe (From Frequently Asked Questions)
<http://runme.org/>

What is it? "Runme.org is a software art repository, launched in January 2003. It is an open, moderated database to which people are welcome to submit projects they consider to be interesting examples of software art." Who initiated it? "Runme.org is a collaborative and open project that was developed by Amy Alexander, Florian Cramer, Matthew Fuller, Olga Goriunova, Thomax Kaulmann, Alex McLean, Pit Schultz, Alexei Shulgin, and The Yes Men. In summer 2003 Hans Bernhard and Alessandro Ludovico have joined the expert team." The Runme initiators are artists who write. Writers who produce art projects. Software artists who
organize. Media theorists who produce artwork. Artists who run magazines. Some of them teach wearing all these hats in rotating order. What is happening here? Whatever it is-- it surely transcends the field of new media. I could immediately extend the list of people who work in this manner by about half the subscribers to this list, myself included. Then there is Bruno Latour who is a French sociologist of science. He frequently organizes event. Most recently "Making Things Public" (With Peter Weibel). Geert Lovink, grand seigneur of new media, media theorist and activist. Geert organized countless initiatives and wrote alongside
them. Most recently there is "Incommunicado." Matthew Fuller writes "Media Ecologies" and part of "Mongrel." He also puts on conferences through Piet Zwart. Do we really need to provide more examples? Should we be worried?
 
"Praise ye Van Gogh!" That's the immediate association with the term artist! Take that thing from the hook in the gallery and put it on the hook over the couch of the collector. In the 1990s we witnessed the emerging paradigm of the artist as cultural producer. This was meant to disappoint the beforementioned expectations of the art world. The artist as suffering, socially isolated entertainer and oddball. There is an entire aspect of this practice of the cultural producer/cultural context provider that I will not address here. It concerns  the setting up of contexts (for others to participate) rather than providing content themselves. The cultural context provider blurs the lines between the artist, theorist, and curator! She may alternate between a writing practice, curatorial work, and production of artwork. Ten years ago there were few theorists who could speak to the technical backend of computer-reliant work. There were only a handful of organizers who were invested in showing such work. This vacuum demanded multi-functional personas. That has changed to an extent and cultural production has specialized a bit more. But a significant shift has taken place. The role of the curator has changed along with that of the artist. The media art curator is not exclusively the ‘middle person’ between artists and museums or galleries anymore. Curators do not merely organize exhibitions and edit, filter, and arrange museum collections. Now, her practice includes facilitating events, screenings, temporary discursive situations, writing/publishing, symposia, conferences, talks, research, the creation of open archives, and mailing lists.

However, the once clear line between curator, artist and theorist is now also blurred. Jon Ippolito, artist, theorist and professor at the University of Maine, looks at this phenomenon within academia. The widespread, harsh misperceptions of contemporary cultural production in the field of computer-reliant work lead to tragic misjudgment in the academic tenure process. In this context Ippolito writes: ‘While art professors typically divide clearly into critical (Art History) and creative (Studio Art) faculties, new media’s brief history often requires its practitioners to develop a critical context for their own creative work. This is why so many pre-eminent new media artists are also critics or curators’. <http://cordova.asap.um.maine.edu/wiki/index.php/
Standards_of_Recognition#Differences_of_content>. I hear it all the time. People like us who follow such an expanded practice often struggle with stubborn "art disciplinarians" within academia. (I know many of you on this list could not care less! Who cares about academic afflictions? Well, OK, but they are a model for cultural phenomena outside the university and worth acknowledging for that reason). Many colleagues across the US tell me that they have difficulties because their culture practice, as multi-faceted as described previously, is not easily attached to an "area." Some academics perceive such expanded practice as indecisiveness. Is that person a critic or an artist, a curator or a software engineer? The lack of insight behind such questions is part of the tragedy of academia right now.  

Artists can generate platforms such as mailing lists, websites, and independently organized exhibitions to circulate their ideas and set up stages from which they can interact with an audience. The power of the media art curator is somewhat decentralized but she is still important as expert and cultural legitimizer. She can contextualize projects as part of culturally discursive currents or historical processes.

I see graduate "media art" students who are not too concerned to be part of the traditional art world. They know that they can create their own venues. They realize that they can have a dialogue, a platform, an audience, and influence without being in the Biennial "x." And to be among the 2% mark of art students who can make a living with their work is a rather unrealistic objective perhaps. It is one that many don't even aspire to. They have seen and acknowledge the potential of self-organized cultural production.  

"Real" artists have galleries that represent them! (Or at least traditional narratives make us believe that that is the case.) But the museum is not the most suitable venue for new media. Many emerging practices can be experienced at media art festivals like Transmediale, Ars Electronica, Dutch Electronic Art Festival, or ArtBot but when it comes to more traditional art institutions the validity of much of this work as art is questioned. Venues for new media practitioners are not predominantly festivals or museums but virtually distributed communities such as the one that we inhabit right here.

The division of camps, of areas equally makes little sense. Why divide artists/cultural producers into filmmakers, video makers, software artist, electronic geeks and media theorists when in fact these practices are blurred? The cultural practices of people in front of us show that such specialization is not always the case. I see an expanded cultural practice that includes event-based cultural practice, production of texts, production of artworks, and production of software. The "cultural producer" or "cultural context provider" is at odds with the definitions of the gallery artist. To define cultural production based on its behavior rather than its medium is a more useful idea that was discussed on other lists extensively.

I introduced this excursion about the "death of the artist" into the context of the social event machine because it matters who is behind such initiatives. I am curious if my brief rant here resonates with some of you, if you analyze the situation along similar lines or maybe not at all.

But when I look into the eye of the event organizer I see writers, artists, engineers, and ... What do you see?

Trebor Scholz