<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2627" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV align=center><FONT face=times color=#808000 size=4>University of New South
Wales Media, Film & Theatre Seminars<BR>5 p.m. Wednesday 20 April
2005<BR>Webster Building 327<BR><BR><BR></FONT><FONT face=times color=#800000
size=7>Anna Munster <BR><BR></FONT><FONT face=times color=#000080 size=7>The
'Undoing' of New Media Arts</FONT><FONT face=times color=#0000ff size=7>
<BR><BR><BR></FONT></DIV><FONT face=times color=#808000>On December 8, 2004 the
Australia Council for the Arts issued a press release detailing its plans for
reorganization of its various funding boards. To the complete surprise of the
Australian arts sector the release revealed the dissolution of the New Media
Arts Board. This paper takes that event as the catalyst for an investigation
into the current state of new media arts. The 'undoing' of funding
infrastructure and identity branding for new media arts in an Australian context
echoes the cuts to organizations and artists internationally with recent
problems in Vienna, the UK and so on. It is clear that this undoing of new media
arts concurs with a political climate, which seeks to defend the propriety of
aesthetic form and practice. Yet to what extent is this 'undoing' also immanent
to new media itself? Is new media a mode of art making which undoes form,
actively prising open the political economy of private property upon which art
forms rest? Examining the debates over nomenclature and identity running
concurrent to the growth of new media arts, new media art strategies for
intervention into increasingly corporatized public and private space and
government backlash against new media artists and organizations, I will argue
for the radical undoing of propriety and property that new media arts undertakes
in culture. <BR><BR>Anna Munster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art
History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Her areas of speciality include
new media art and theory, networked cultures and philosophies of technology. She
has just completed a book, <I>Materializing New Media: Embodiment and
Information Aesthetics, </I>which will be out in 2006 (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England). She is currently working on editing a special issue of
the online journal <I>fibreculture</I> on distributed aesthetics.
<BR></FONT></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>