New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art (review)

New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art is a scholarly compendium of 12 essays focusing on the challenging nature of presenting new media art to and for the public. It is compiled and contributed to by Christiane Paul, herself an experienced curator of new media art for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The essays are collaborative works by 13 of Paul’s peers who are, in turn, involved in new media curating internationally. They include Charlie Gere, Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz, Joasia Krysa, Jon Ippolito, Sara Diamond, Patrick Lichty, Beryl Graham, Caitlin Jones, Carol Stringari, Tilman Baumgartel, Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler. The book’s audience is the curator in the broadest sense.

The central thesis of the book is that the art world is in dire need of curatorial models to correctly understand and present an art form that is unprecedented and therefore does not fit the prevailing models of curatorial, exhibition, documentation and archivability of the traditional art “object,” to which museums have so long been accustomed. According to Paul, because, for example, of the often interactive and process-based orientation of the artwork, “the public and audience often participate in the artwork—[and that] role runs counter to our idea of the museum as a shrine for contemplating sacred objects.” Moreover, Paul explains, new media itself “evades definitions.” The various forms and definitions keep growing—“time based,” “digital art,” “net art (real-time),” “generative,” “customizable,” “software art”—all defining aspects that pertain to the varied oeuvres as they develop in new media’s relatively recent history of about 40 years. Thus, since new media is still defining itself and is often nonmaterial, it needs to be understood in new contexts. One suggested by Paul is the placing of the museum in the context of a “node” within a network, wherein the curator might operate as a producer, interpreter or facilitator for the public in its participation in new media works.

Germane to human interface with new media is understanding its autonomy and unpredictability. Dietz cites on-line curating of new media on the Runme.org web site as an example. Turbulence programs are another example of collaboration in music with graphic art, a real-time net art experience. Gere points out how museums have yet to fully engage media art and faults the Tate for a prior program around 2002, in which most of the media art was presented as static, despite the works’ original design to be interactive. Gere’s essay, “New Media Art and the Gallery,” gives a historical context to media art and its prior nomenclatures of “cybernetics,” “computer art” and “art and technology” exhibitions of the early 1990s, in both the U.S.A. and Europe, until the advent of the Ars Electronica Festivals in Linz, Austria. These annual festivals have brought international media arts into public consciousness since they began in 1997. Yet, as Gere, Baumgartel, Christ and Dressler all point out in their essays, there are still few galleries that present actual media art. Why current venues like Bitforms and the non-profit I-Beam in New York were not mentioned in the book is puzzling, lending to the notion that Paul’s book is not fully up to date.