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New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age

This is the opening chapter in a publication edited by a leading curator and scholar of new media art, containing contributions by experts from Europe and the United States. The paper reflects on some of the issues arising out of the three months Gere spent at Tate on an Arts and Humanities Research Board ‘Changing Places’ Fellowship in 2002, looking at ‘the role of the gallery in the digital age’. This produced a number of outcomes, including a series of talks and seminars at Tate Modern, entitled ‘When New Media was New’, in which curators of new media and digital art talked about their experiences, going back in some cases to the 1960s, and an educational course, also held at Tate Modern, called ‘The Role of the Gallery in the Digital Age’, in which Tate employees discussed how their practice had been changed by new technologies. The paper brought together the two themes developed in the AHRB fellowship to suggest some of the ways that art made with new technologies, such as net.art, can play an important role in enabling the art gallery to understand how it is being affected more generally by the same technologies. Thus the chapter builds on a close understanding of how new media art is curated and presented in museums and galleries. At another level it contributes to the more general discussion and critique of the role of the gallery in a digital culture, and in helping determine the future shape of curation in a digital age.