The New Media Art world in Turkey: Boundary-work in action

In an age marked by the Post-media condition, the term ‘New Media Art’ remains in use in reference to a professional territory not autonomous, but also different from the territory of Contemporary Art, and its members use various rhetorical tactics to maintain and expand their professional authority. This study aims at analyzing the professional ideology of the New Media Art territory in Turkey using Thomas F. Gieryn’s concept of the ‘boundary-work’. The data obtained via semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with a purposively sampled population of artists, curators and producers are used to assess whether a common cultural repertoire exists in this territory and whether it conforms to or contradicts its global counterpart. The study finds that since the mid-1990s, the professional ideology of the New Media Art territory in Turkey has developed in parallel with the world, but not monolithically. The curators/producers’ ideology is defined by potential for democratization, intersections of art, science and technology, interaction/interactivity and interdisciplinary collaboration. However, they exhibit two repertoire variants positively correlated with the subjects’ career orientations. The artists’ common ideology is similar to the curators’/producers’, but their cultural repertoires are more flexible thanks to the variety of their individual practices. The study concludes that this duality emerges due to the limited funding sources in Turkey.