By Mike Levin

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan left the stage in a huff when part of the audience booed his performance, which for the first time included an electric guitar. Just offstage, Pete Seeger said he would have cut the wires with an axe if he’d had one because the sound distorted Dylan’s lyrics. This was one of the first mainstream-music examples of new-media art (NMA).

Sarah Cook. Photo by Mike Levin

Sarah Cook wasn’t born when that happened, although her career as an international curator of NMA has tried to understand and explain how technology is altering the way art is produced and distributed. She’s back in Ottawa for a month-long residency at Saw Video focusing on how artists can use material in the public domain (not limited by copyright).

In an interview prior to starting the residency, Cook didn’t rise to the subversive elements of NMA. Once she had given her introductory presentation at the National Gallery of Canada, there were few euphemisms left. “(NMA) started with big immersive projects that made people afraid. (Its scope) has changed, but not its effect because it is causes a disruption of traditional art distribution. In fact, it destroys (the existing) hierarchical structure,” she said.

NMA has all the hip buzzwords:  ironic, post-modern, immaterial, time-based/live-connected, but deep down it is like any other agent of change that dispenses with the rules of interaction that define traditional formats.

But the point of Cook’s talk was not about revolution, however imminent; she was more interested in leading the audience through the process of contemporary curating by which technology is trying to “jam a new system (square peg) into an old system (round hole)” and how arts curators are redefining their roles and re-evaluating their approach to exhibit making. And that “brings up more questions than it answers,” she admitted.

The biggest question revolves around the Internet. With this tool of distribution available to anyone, does that reduce the role of curator to a simple aggregator – of favourite collections, of musical clips, or anything an individual in interested in?  How does the curator move from simple selection to applying a deeper knowledge?

Not visible to the naked eye. Courtesy of NASA.

One thing NMA does very well is erase the boundary between art and life. David Cope ruffled the traditional music community with his Emmys, computer-simulated, music-composition programs that are indistinguishable, by experts, from human composers. NASA’s photos of puffy constellations from the Hubble Telescope are simple colour-enhanced computer reproductions, but they do make us gasp.

As Cook prepared to give her National Gallery talk, a screen behind her displayed a continuous stream of terms being used, apparently in real time, in online search engines, from the site of installation artists Thomson and Craighead.  It was riveting – approximately 30 percent pornography terms, 20 percent Facebook, 20 percent food recipes and, surprisingly, 10 percent roofing contractors, all at about 7 pm – and fulfilled Cook’s personal definition of art: “something that resonates, any creative endeavour that changes how you see the world.”

She cited other examples: the kinetoscope, “which was new media at the time, and is now just art. What a relief!”; an electronic plug-in for retail Websites that shows how many barrels of oil each purchase represents; and a documentary film maker in India who set up screens in a food market and had local shoppers discuss the prices of what they were buying.

Gutenburg Press, the original new-media-art format. Courtesy of Wikimedia.

This use of technology is very evocative, but seems destined for now to  remain on the fringes of art production as NMA is co-opted by those who best know how to write public-grant applications. Like Fiona Bowie’s project Surface, live underwater video in Vancouver’s False Creek, and art at its most banal. When the most exciting moment is “unidentified fish. My guess is a marine stickleback,” one has to wonder how 24-hour-a-day streaming video from a murky, virtually sterile environment can change anyone’s perception of the world.

Fortunately, Cook’s Saw Video residency doesn’t have to change the world; it only has to look at how (or if) artists get value from being able to use archived and off-copyright material. This is what she does best, casting her academic eye like an archaeologist over creative mutation and figuring whether the form matches the content. She’ll do this with the work of seven Canadian artists –  Sara Angelucci (Toronto), Maureen Bradley (Victoria), Gennaro de Pasquale (Montreal), Steve Reinke (Chicago/Toronto), Ryan Stec/Véronique Couillard (Ottawa) and Suzan Vachon (Montreal) – who were given the first-ever artist access to Library and Archives of Canada audio/visual content from the public domain. They have created six videos for Public Domain, which will be shown at the Archives’ theatre June 23 at 7 pm., before it heads out on an international tour in 2011.