Dear list,
I'd like to try and develop our starting debate on Big Media Art:
particularly re SFMoMA's exhibition 010101:
Sarah Cook wrote:
>... And do the two parts of the exhibition further the conflicting
>stereotypes about new media art? (Char Davies' VR installations
>being of the "hands-on" game variety, and the web-based work being
>more about entertainment, commercialism, hacking)?
>An example of the lacuna within museums to market two parts of an
>exhibition -- one online, one in a gallery -- to the same degree
>was the Let's Entertain exhibition at the Walker Art Center in
>Minneapolis (www.walkerart.org/va/letsentertain). Its web component,
>Art Entertainment Network (aen.walkerart.org), was almost ignored by
>the original marketing plan [...]
>Does anyone have suggestions as to how curators in a large
>institution can work to overcome this divide in audiences and
>perceptions of new media work?
Julie Lazar quoted Marisa S. Olson's review of 010101:
>This redefinition could be a theme for the entire show. All of the above
>and those pieces not mentioned here somehow engage the principle of
>"ambient art" to which Media Arts Curator Benjamin Weil devotes his
>"010101" catalogue essay. They surround us with sounds, visions,
>textures, and scents that pervade our senses in their construction of a
>hyperreal environment, until we're no longer sure even of the role of
the museum space.
As someone who 'saw' the show only on the web site I'm left with a
highly ambivalent relationship to 'the museum space': The web site
was 'big' and complex, as fitting with the public image of a big
museum, but only revealed the web art after much teeth-gritted
determination. Finding out what artworks were in the physical museum
show proved well beyond this gentle reader, although Char Davies'
work and a couple of others were mentioned on the museum site, and
the (rather expensive) catalogue was available for purchase (again
without revealing the actual contents or artists). Taking a positive
view, this may have been an acknowledgment of the essentially
different experiences of physical presence vs. net.art, and a
determination to take new media art seriously in an archivable,
paper-based, ISBN-numbered way. If so, it probably wasn't intended
to "overcome this divide in audiences" but to treat them very
differently. Taking a negative view, it may be an example of new
technology simply failing to provide the kind of basic information
normally provided on a leaflet. I was left with a largely denied
hunger for "sounds, visions, textures, and scents", but perhaps
technology is all about unfulfilled desires.
Any more responses from those who actually visited the Museum?
Beryl
_________________________________________________________
Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss
http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/
Co-Editors: Telephone: +44 191 515 2896
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Sarah Cook: [log in to unmask]
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