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and presentation with which artists continue to be confronted. They provoke this aphorism from Kittler: «The typewriter writes, too.» There is certainly no doubt that hardware has a crucial influence on artistic output, but this does not have to be interpreted deterministically. Furthermore, the long series of media standards that have since become obsolete, already well documented in the literature,[4] makes another point quite clear: new industrial standards are constantly replacing old ones, but this does not necessarily mean an improvement in technical competence. Thus, art looks less anticipatory now that the quantity of new industry hardware and software is growing so fast that even media artists can scarcely keep up. Having to master whatever is the most recent programming software increasingly keeps them from concentrating on artistic form and content. They are thus forced to direct their attention at precisely those technological aspects that run counter to the industry's context of use. This means that the proposition is always current that it is necessary to appropriate available technologies for genuinely artistic purposes, but at the same time working against the

 

conditions of the hardware and software in question is always a specifically artistic practice. Putting it more pointedly: art with media is also art directed against media.

The first part of this essay is devoted to aspects of this artistic history of technological formats and platforms. In a second step, the question will be posed of in how far the technologies and media used trigger a perceptible change in art reception, as Walter Benjamin already pointed out for the influence of the mass cultural distribution of art reproductions. To what extent can this be connected with a history of the sites and institutions in which media art was produced and/or presented? «When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head»–Harald Szeemann's famous Bern exhibition on the propagation of conceptual art, minimal art, and land art in 1968[5]–reflected non-technological factors of a social or aesthetic practice and posed the question of alternative, new, different models of practicing art.

Today, a fundamental shift can be observed: from the resistance of modernist traditionalists and the museums to the fact that the most recent

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