CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

From Crisis to Bliss: The Cost of Supporting New Media Art
Sarah Cook

This paper charts the unspoken 'crises' in the curating of new media art and how they map onto similar crises in art criticism and museum practice in mainstream visual arts. Incorporating the question of the challenges of collecting media art and the lack of a strong critical history of the ‘trend’ of practice, the paper draws on CRUMB’s first-hand experience of hosting a ‘crisis centre’ at the ISEA and ZeroOne Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose (August 2006), as well as Sarah Cook’s experience of co-curating ‘The Art Formerly Known As New Media’ (The Banff Centre, September 2005) – an anti-retrospective exhibition commemorating ten years of high level new media art research at Banff.

Sarah will present documentation of the Crisis to Bliss Centre – a place of therapeutic refuge within an international exhibition and symposium context designed to host artist-led workshops for troubled curators. It is anticipated that the Centre will link to and highlight some of the many research projects that artists have undertaken in an attempt to determine the personal and economic toll of working in this ever-changing and emerging field, such as Constant’s ‘Cuisine Interne’ and the projects on consensus and collective working by the UK-based artist group ‘The People Speak’. While it takes a playful approach to knowledge sharing, the centre is a site of professional development for curators and addresses some of the recurring challenges of working with new media – from trying to exist in two time frames at once (the avant-garde of art practice and the timelessness of publication and documentation), to technical constraints of sustaining long-run exhibitions of interactive art.

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