Thesis paper
note: images at the bottom of page
The Blissomatic Surreal is a two-part mixed media installation. Private space signifies the idealism and optimism of the sixties, and seventies, while public space represents the technologically centric pace invading the twenty first century.
Socially sanctioned casualties accrue while we feed the insatiable lust for more materials goods with the product of our labor. In the age of intrusive technology, our labor is increasingly expected to be endlessly available with little additional compensation. The invasion of weekend and evening emails and calls from work convey the new pace, and the impact is far reaching. The two parts of the Blissomatic Surreal juxtapose the humanistic qualities of conflicting eras.
The private space of the Blissomatic Surreal is a secure seating area equipped with headphones piping in a peaceful soundscape. The occupant’s gaze will fall on a montage of the silhouette of two bodies in shadow enacting the struggle to connect. The public space emphasizes technological distractions that confound our ability to separate work from leisure. A maze will be constructed of boxes containing statistics about the utilization of technology. The soundscape of clocks ticking and cell phones ringing will permeate the space.
New Media Curating and Exhibition Design and Display is the working title of the paper. This paper explores the most recent professional practices of curating new media in the museum. Included is ethnographic research on new media exhibitions during 2007 and 2008 in New York and San Francisco. This study examines what has worked, what hasn’t, and why. The theoretical component reflects the most current curatorial practices of new media installation and design in the traditional museum.
The inherent quality of New Media is its newness. Due to the rapid changes in technology and innovation, terminology reveals different meanings over relatively short periods of time. Additionally, New Media theorists and experts appear from fields outside of the arts and from the disciplines of science, cultural studies, philosophy, and others. The cross pollination of each discipline’s vernacular places a further burden on the development of a common terminology. For these reasons establishing a constant canon for New Media is difficult. Because of this lack of consensus, a paper on the history of New Media is incomprehensible without an author’s definition of critical terms. Consequently any term subject to ambiguity will be defined in a contemporary context and the conflicting origin/s stated. This short section prefaces the paper because problematic terminology, classification, and reclassification relating to new media art often obscure immediate meaning, and/or makes future reading unclear.
The paper is about the history of the writing about New Media curation and display after video emerged in the early seventies.
The third and most substantial section chronicles the most significant New Media exhibitions and technological uses since the openings at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Both museums’ departmental terrain will be mapped according to how and when it has been reclassified for the addition of new departments or branches. The technological advents of curatorial practices will complete the historiography. This section concludes with ethnographic research on New Media exhibitions during 2007 and 2008 in New York and San Francisco.
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