This edition carries the two covers above and leads with the feature: "IN CONVERSATION: DARA BIRNBAUM AND CORY ARCANGEL" which is an interview/discussion between (Video) artist Dara Birnbaum and (New Media) artist Cory Arcangel. The cover images ARTFORUM chose are from Dara Birnbaum's 1978/1979 video "Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman" and Cory Arcangel's "Super Mario Clouds" project from 2002.
The pairing of Birnbaum and Arcangel creates a dynamic resonance for considering certain Media Art Historical connections, tensions and/or dislocations between the histories of experimental Media Art through Video Art and New Media Art. Birnbaum's Wonder Woman is well known and historically recognized Video Art, i.e. as included on the Video Data Bank's seminal anthology "Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S." Similarly, Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds has been quickly cannonized into recent New Media Art Histories as an emblematic work, i.e. in Mark Tribe and Reena Jana's "Art in the Age of Digital Distribution".
It's refreshingly intriguing to read Birnbaum and Arcangel "in conversation" and perhaps encouraging to see Artforum taking up a position that criticalartware put forward when such positions were not as always already/often recognized in (to quote Birnbaum) "the frameworks of institutional art spaces" or even New Media Art discourses...
(Film, Video and New Media department at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago; New Media Art Histories; Art Games + Independent Gaming Cultures; Open Source, Artware + early Video Art; Computer Witchcraft + Majikal Media Art)