[-empyre-] "Unstable Ground: Curating New Media".

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

Hello, Empyreans,

I want to thank Christina for the invitation to be your guest host for the
month of mardi gras in hopes that we can consider some parameters of the
topsy turvy world of curating new media.

To do so, I will begin with a separate posting (tomorrow) that will
introduce a few challenges posed by some of my recent curatorial projects,
challenges that touch on issues of materiality, archivization,
globalization, pedagogy, and curatorial responsbilities.  My hope is that
last month's discussion on open sourcing will provide a helpful threshold
for what's to come.

I'm very happy to be joined this month by two new media art activists with
whom I had the pleasure to collaborate on a regular basis.  The week of
March
10-17 we'll be joined by Priamo Lozada who is Curator of Laboratoria Arte
Alemeda in Mexico City.  Priamo and I first worked together in 1999 when he
helped me bring an exhibition I curated to Mexico City.  "Contact Zones:
The Art of CD-Rom" spent the summer in the wonderful Centro de la Imagen
and permitted the work of some 60+ international artists to be accessed in
Mexico City.  As part of that exhibition, Priamo organized the publication
of a catalogue (which we produced via e-mail in only 3 weeks!) as well as
the translation into Spanish of the exhibition's electronic catalogue which
is still accessible on-line: http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu Our paths
continue to cross and I'm grateful that Priamo has agreed to lead us in a
discussion of the "shifting ground" of new media curating as understood
from his perspective as a Latin American curator.

The following week of March 17-24, we will be joined by Norie Neumark of
the University of Technology, Sydney, for a discussion of the shift of
curatorial parameters in the context of on-line pedagogy from a global
perspective.  While many of you are no doubt familiar with Norie's
fantastic sound and visual art, produced in collaboration with Maria
Miranda, only Melinda is probably aware of her prowess with videostreamed
classrooms!  Last fall, Norie and I merged our Cornell and UTS seminars on
technology and art thanks to Polycom technology and virtual classroom
software (and a willingness of my students to meet later into the night and
her students to arrive at the classroom at an hour earlier than their
accustomed wakeup time).  We're planning to reflect on this experience in
the context of expanded notions of curating and artistic delivery.  I'm
confident that Melinda might have something to say about this since she
volunteered as a guest lecturer one morning/evening.

So tomorrow I'll follow up this overview with some precise comments about a
few challenges posed by digital art and its curating, particularly in the
context of CTHEORY Multimedia which I co-curate with Arthur and Marilouise
Kroker, and the new Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art which I am
curating for the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Cornell
University Library.

More tomorrow.

Best,

Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
Co-Curator, CTHEORY Multimedia: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York  14853

office: 607-255-4012
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu