Dear List,
The Digital Aesthetic 2 conference and exhibition in Preston,
Lancashire: http://www.digitalaesthetic.org.uk/
The exhibition was the second one to occur at Harris Museum and Art
Gallery, and shows an interesting development of a commitment to
including new media within the contemporary art program of a mixed
regional historical museum and art gallery (I was reminded there of
curating the exhibition Serious Games for the Laing Art Gallery in
Newcastle). The second exhibition is more ambitious in scale than the
first, and shows a broader inclusion of the work. The choices of
display are divided into two rooms: the larger included the more
cinematic and wall-based images including Gary Hill and Thompson and
Craighead's Short Films about Flying, and used a conventional white box
format with black boxes for the larger video projections. The smaller
room contained the more participative works including a tree-growing
piece by boredomresearch where users get to design their own tree for a
forest online. With dark-red walls, this space had references to more
of a media lounge where interaction was a little less intimidating.
The exhibition also has smaller iterations around the town, and the
linked conference brought experts and specialists to town. As a
partnership between University practice and research, and a
publicly-funded mixed artform gallery, could this be a sustainable
model for a gradual development curve of exhibiting new media art in a
regional context?
Beryl
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Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art
School of Arts, Design, Media and Culture, University of Sunderland
Ashburne House,
Ryhope Road
Sunderland
SR2 7EE
Tel: +44 191 515 2896 [log in to unmask]
CRUMB web resource for new media art curators
http://www.crumbweb.org
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