Thursday, June 21, 2012

Reconfiguring the museum (via hyper text)

I was asked to read an article about online art curation. By someone named  Patrick Lichty entitled Reconfiguring the Museum. To be entirely honest... I feel like most of the article goes over my head.  Reminds me of this collection of poems we recently read in my childrens lit class called I Can Say Interpellation, where the author Stephen Cain who works at York University rewrites a number of popular children's stories but alters them to contain a lot of adult political themes.  He makes a number of references in these poems, and often many of them we needed to look up in order to have any idea what was being addressed.   It the idea of having hyper links to all the references in the works came about. How useful would that be?  So as I talk about this article I will supply reference links...  for the stuff that I don't... well I guess it's just beyond me at this point in time :S


The author starts out talking about childhood gallery visits that he shared with his parents in OHIO and makes reference to the Akron Art Institute and how as time has passed the types of shows being currated are much different than they were back then.  He speaks about the traditional way that many art exhibitions are juried in an oligarchic hegemony  which I think is basically just a fancy way of saying its usually decided by the same old people all the time who choose their friends and friends nieces etc.  Which... sounds about right.


He then goes on to talk about how the internet has changed a lot of things, and how it is a bit easier for artists to present their work to potential galleries curators etc, via email and online portfolios and such, and speaks about how it is easier to connect with like minded individuals from around the globe.  As well as the rise in popularity of net.art   which basically means art that uses the internet as its medium.


He then speaks about the curation of such works in gallery settings and makes references to what i assume must be artists or curators such as Barlow, Rheingold,  and Negroponte.  He talks about something called EATlist which when i search for all i find is various local restaurant databases... and something called SOTv which comes up as a Lutheran Church called Shepard of the Valley. At this point i feel like i have no idea what is being said and that there are just words stringing things i must investigate together. Walker Art Center. AEN  which all i find is stuff about Tool's Album Aenima ... which was really great and now i will have that shit in my head all day.
Bonnie Mitchell, Ed Stastny.
The he talks about the surrealists and how they played a drawing game called exquisite corpse where you folded paper and passed around continuing a drawing from the person previous, in the end revealing the entire image... this is the first thing in the article that I actually understand.  YES!  THe talks about a site called SITO which i guess is Ed Stastny's, and talks about something called gridcosm... which i could not really imagine from the description but when i looked it up its actually pretty neat!


Blah blah blah  RTMark, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Jerry Domokur, a project involving: Natalie Bookchin, Cheang, Verostko, Rees (who i could not find anything about) and 300 other people including a textile artist named W. Logan Fry... who seems pretty cool, he makes textiles out of computer stuffs.


He then talks about Anne-Marie Schleiner some more and a project of hers called Snow Blossom house which i guess involves lots of japanese electronic gaming manga type stuff?  Sounds neat, my boyfriend Joey would probably like this,  and W. Logan Fry for that matter.  However i can't seem to locate this Snow Blossom House, and I have to leave for work in 14 minutes so i guess it will have to wait.


The rest of the article basically talks about change, and how with net.art and the world in general changing, curation of such art will become more and more important, and the author seems to believe that the curation of such work will predominantly be a collaboration between a number of artists and curators. Only the future will tell.


Then it lists a lot of references, many involving links which i really wish i had paid more attention to before i searched for them on my own.


hindsight is 20/20