book + cd-rom – Christoph Merian Verlag – ISBN 3856162380

After more than a decade of artistic practices tied to new media, the digital and media art world is still confined within its bounds and has never achieved recognition in the mainstream contemporary art culture. This heated debate challenges both the whole art system and theability of electronic media to be considered ‘art’ and to escape from their ghetto. Considering that video art needed thirty years to be recognized as a legitimate art form, how much time will have to pass for interactive and net art to reach the same status? And, more importantly, how is possible to reconcile the ‘white cubes’ of museums with the immaterial and spatially unbounded characteristics of electronic art works? The curators of this operation ponder these important subjects coordinating many voices speaking about the four works selected for the exhibition bearing the same name, whose goal is to promote swiss media art. The territorial question is used here as a lockpick to gain access to the institutions which exist to protect and promote the local fresh expressive and cultural energies, to question them about their policies and to force them to face the new cultural and technological realities. The title is emblematic: it’s dedicated to the ‘new territories’ that must be explored to update the contemporary cultural perspectives.