Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media

As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art--butdifferent. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often aboutprocess rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditionalart museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology, present the curator withnovel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views thesechallenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media artdevelop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessonsfrom curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive andparticipatory systems. Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new mediaart, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to suchcontemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art. Theauthors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks andexhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of newmedia art's characteristics. They discuss modes of curating, from the familiar default mode of themuseum, through parallels with publishing, broadcasting, festivals, and labs, to more recent hybridways of working online and off, including collaboration and social networking. Rethinking Curatingoffers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the leadof current artists' practice.

Sarah Cook, a research fellow and cofounder of CRUMB, has curated exhibitions of new media art internationally.