Positions that tended to be more critical, like those adopted by Marcel Odenbach, Klaus vom Bruch, or Dara Birnbaum, did benefit from the wave of popularity but were not able to strike out in any specifically new directions. Video had changed from a conceptual into a sensual medium, playing impressively in quotations with elements of television and of art history. In contrast with the ephemeral quality of «Les Immatériaux,» as the famous 1985 exhibition in Paris by the postmodern theoretician Jean-François Lyotard was called[37], video sculpture remained on the material plane of sculpture, so that in the context of video art as well a traditional concept of the auratic original moved in and triggered commercial success. The dominance of the concept of sculpture in the context of media art now persisted for a few years. This was a populist backward step whether for reasons of marketing or, as Vito Acconci surmised at an early stage, because of a bad conscience[38] that had to yield as quickly to the change of perceptions about art as it had previously to the neo-Expressionist painters, who burned out so quickly. Installations started to liberate themselves from all references to the real

object character of a work and ring in an era of pure image installation, linear or interactive.

At the same time it became increasingly clear that a work could be presented contextually in all kinds of new configurations: Nam June Paik's «Global Groove» transformed itself in the 1970s from a television work into a linear videotape and finally into the multiplied pictorial material for his video installation «TV Garden»–Bill Seaman presented «The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers» in the (1991­1994) first as a videotape and then as a projected installation, finally as an interactive new configuration on CD-ROM and as a room installation. New formatting, it seems, is an essential aspect of media art. This raises new questions for ‹valid› museum presentation.

White cube–Black cube

Do media artists just use the existing tools, or do they create and explore new presentation forms and spaces, and their own working materials as well? In the early 1980s, newly developed synthesizers and technological experiments by Nam June Paik, for example, or Steina and Woody Vasulka seem to be only