Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Dundee
Rethinking Curating : Art After New Media
The book is based on nine years of research, including interviews, exhibitions, and conferences and examines how new media art has changed modes of curating. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks are difficult to classify according to traditional art museum categories. These works present the curator with novel challenges over interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators develop a set of flexible tools for working in this field, and offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in other areas of art including distributive and participatory systems.
Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and the questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art. It offers numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art's characteristics. It suggests modes of curating, from the familiar default mode of the museum, through parallels with publishing, broadcasting, festivals, and labs, to more recent hybrid ways of working online and off, including collaboration and social networking. Widely cited in international books, chapters, peer reviewed journals, and art and curatorial publications, it has led to invitations for Cook to contribute to books on related topics: ‘Preserving & Exhibiting Media Art’. Ed. Julia Noordegraaf, (Amsterdam University Press 2013); ‘Companion to Digital Art’, Ed. Christiane Paul (Blackwells, 2013). The book was reprinted 9 months after publication due to demand and is on the syllabi of curating, museum studies, art history, and media courses at universities in London, Manchester, and Toronto.
