Vortrag: Rethinking Curating - Art After New Media

Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media

Datum | 23.11.2010, 17.00 h
Ort | Atelierhaus der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Lehárgasse 8, 1060 Wien, M1

Vortrag von Sarah Cook mit anschließender Diskussion organisiert vom Institut für bildende Kunst, Konzeptuelle Kunst, Prof. Marina Gzinic.
Vortrag in englischer Sprache.
Since 2000, the research centre CRUMB http://www.crumbweb.org at the University of Sunderland in the UK, has aimed to help curators rethink their practices in the light of new media art’s ‘behaviours’. This talk will suggest how the immaterial, time-based and participatory qualities of media art challenge traditional curatorial ways of working, drawing from Sarah Cook’s book co-authored with Beryl Graham, “Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media” (MIT Press, 2010).

In 2005 Sarah Cook co-curated an exhibition called “The Art Formerly Known As New Media” at the Banff Centre; five years later new media artworks are increasingly considered a part of the contemporary art world, but those which involve interactivity and technological networks are still difficult to classify according to the established art-world categories based on medium, geography, and chronology. Systems-based artworks invite a rethinking of the work’s production, interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination, as well as the role of the curator and audience. While artists have led the way in using the connected, interactive and generative characteristics of new media including social media tools, networks and software art, we are now seeing the rise of projects where ‘the audience’ might become not only a participant, but also to an extent a curator. As such, in today’s mediated landscape, what distinguishes a curatorial practice from the growing roster of online activities ‘read as’ curating which anyone can engage in, such as filtering, blogging, and commenting?