The digital media landscape we inhabit has been shifting for over fifty years. Cybernetics, virtuality, new media, the digital—call each grain of sand what you will. In this territory, artists and creative producers have continually sought to create not only new forms of art, but also new interdisciplinary initiatives for the presentation of their work, establishing a more stable ground for it to be experienced and appreciated. Media arts can take many forms—as the chapters in this book attest—from software to sculpture, installation to algorithmic instruction. In this chapter we focus on the challenges that the broader category of “new media art” has brought to its own presentation, including how it has been curated. Curating has usually been considered a primarily museological activity, but when it comes to new media art, we commonly understand curating as an engagement with myriad different aspects of the production, presentation, and reception of the work of art. As has been argued before,

The modes of curating engendered by working with new media art can be more widely applied to any art that may be process oriented, time-based or live, networked or connected, conceptual or participative.

(Cook and Graham 2010, 283)

This chapter briefly describes how this understanding has come about and discusses some of the ways in which the products and processes of these hybrid arts practices have been supported. By identifying some of the exhibition formats that have emerged over time, we are left with a who, when, what, where, how, and why of the curating of new media and digital arts, providing the structure for this chapter. While trying to highlight some recent examples, this chapter also gives an overview, which is inevitably patchy and subjective; after all, any method of curating adopted in response to the variety of work in the field of new media art might only be applicable to a single work of art in a single place at a single time. It is important to remember that although “new media art” is in an almost constant state of emergence because of its use of new technologies […] the challenge of curating emerging art might be addressed by the passage of time” (Cook and Graham 2010, 284).

If the new media landscape has been forming for over fifty years, then the field of study of curatorial practice is even younger, fully emerging only in the last thirty years, well after the longer traditions of art history (or even museology). The rise of curatorial practice as a field of scholarship shares the same timeframe as that of the heady emergence of new media arts, linked to a wider understanding of and access to technologies of intercommunication. A raft of books published since the early 2000s has addressed “the curatorial”—almost all of them generally based on the commercial art world and the global biennial format, places from which new media art has been largely absent.¹ Thus it would appear that an ongoing critical examination of curatorial practice as it is manifested in specific contexts is still very much needed.

One key question to consider is how curating new media arts might be different from curating any other form of art, and whether the digitality of new media art is the reason why the art might need different curatorial treatment or has not sat as comfortably in particular established curatorial frameworks. Publications such as this one, and Rethinking Curating (Cook and Graham 2010), as well as the new-media-curating discussion list run through the CRUMB² web site, have sought to advance critical reflection about the processes that curatorial practice entails. Through CRUMB and other initiatives much work has been done to bring curators and producers working in the field of contemporary art into conversation with those working in the field of practice that addresses new media and the digital.

What?

The art world has [problems] with multiple authorship, the aesthetics of activism, the exhibiting of process instead of product, and audience interaction.

(Cook and Graham 2010, 290)

As other chapters in this book describe, there has been a longstanding divide between the worlds of contemporary art and new media art: contemporary art has been defending itself against occasional claims by new media art to be different or more cutting edge, and new media art has been lamenting that it shouldn’t be ignored. One defensive assertion by contemporary art has been that many, if not all, contemporary artists use media as some part of their practice. The counter-criticism this draws from the media art side is that contemporary artists might use technology, but they do so in an unreflective way, without questioning where the technology comes from, how it functions, and what hidden discourses and limitations lie within its preformatted functionality and its quick and easily manifested results (Schindler and Broeckman 2011). In a lecture for the BBC, Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry (whose practice is predominantly ceramics) demonstrated exactly this position, saying:

I use digital. It’s now the default option of many artists. We live in the 21st century. I use Photoshop. My tapestries are woven on a computer-controlled loom and I’m not alone in this now […] technology is so amazingly quick and brilliant that it changes the way we look at art […] So art now really follows, chases technology rather than leads it […] technology in many ways is more cutting edge than art […] [Art] can’t compete in many ways with the kind of majesty of Google Earth or the kind of buzz and huge, humungous gossip of Twitter.

(Perry 2013)

The point missed by Perry is that the practice of media artists involves a critique of technology as much as it contributes new forms of art to the landscape. Media artists continually redefine their artistic practices to highlight critical arguments surrounding media culture, arguments they see as lacking in “mainstream” visual artists’ (or designers’) use of media technology. Therefore projects that use material scraped from the Web might be stylistically commenting on the interface design of web sites, such as Sakrowski’s curatingYouTube, a platform for a variety of projects based on and around the online video-sharing site that employ curating “as a technique of action, used as a means of orientation and to position itself in the web 2.0 phenomena by artistic strategies” (Sakrowski 2007).

Historically, the technologies from which new media art draws are strongly related to commercial “entertainment systems,” or come from a larger military-industrial-academic complex. This adds another contextual frame for understanding new media’s place in the landscape of the museological artworld and the fact that some early works of media art are found in media, science, or technology museums. New media artworks, perhaps more than other art forms, are rooted in contexts outside of the art museum or gallery.³ As Christiane Paul has noted,

While all art forms and the movements that sustain them are embedded in a larger cultural context, new media can never be understood from a strictly art historical perspective: the history of technology and media sciences plays an equally important role in the formation and reception of new media art practices.

(Paul 2006)

Most media artists are not seeking to be in competition with the technology industries and its commercial products, just as some of them are ambivalent about being part of an artworld with its own commercial products. A large percentage of self-identifying “media artists” considers the visual arts context as elitist, hermetically closed, and market-oriented, and therefore not a desirable place to be. It has been argued that media artists largely do not want to belong to a commercial world where everything has to be streamlined to a commercial outlook (Jones 2005). They consider the media art field as a better place to be because it is more open, gives them greater possibilities of experimentation, and provides more scope for connecting to fields that are commonly not considered art, including political activism, media criticism, and media culture (Schindler and Broeckman 2011).

Given this view of the landscape, it is no wonder that it is difficult to perform the curatorial tasks of identifying, describing, and historicizing the type or genres of artwork emerging from the intersection of art and “creative technology.” Many contributors to this book have done much to make this process easier for future investigators. Considering these conditions of production and reception, it comes as no surprise, then, that new media art is often described as process-oriented. Terms such as “collaboration,” “participation,” and “networking” are key descriptors of both the working method of the artist and the characteristic of the resulting media artwork.

Caitlin Jones has convincingly described how art is changed when the studio is the laptop, the network, and the Web (Jones 2010). This observation is just as relevant now as it might have been thirty or forty years ago when artists experimenting with video used TV editing suites as their studios. Technological developments change art practice by changing how art is made; this is a fact curators need to acknowledge and be aware of, as it necessarily has implications for how the work is shown, made accessible to audiences, and preserved for art history.

Media technologies are interactive or responsive. The digital is seemingly fleeting or ephemeral, but is accessed haptically, is tactile, instantaneous, live. Media are mutable and not static. They are variable, iterative, changing, morphing, and, above all, unstable.

Who?

[Curators’] stated objections to new media art can be contradictory and may be borne [sic] of lack of awareness about the conceptual and practical issues that new media art presents.

(Cook and Graham 2010, 285)

Given the variety of work that has emerged from this ever-changing field, telling a clear story of how museums and galleries have dealt with it has presented a number of obstacles. Firstly, as debates on curatorial practice are often driven by curators describing their own activities,⁴ they usually focus on aims and intentions rather than a critical examination of outcomes. What remains is case-by-case reflection on the “best practice” of curating. In each case the lessons learned may reflect different stages in the curatorial process—from siting the work (which might have involved commissioning it in the first place) and engaging audiences and the press in its reception, to documenting its impacts or effects on the understanding of art in society.

Most of the recent critical writing on curating has reflected on art institutions and how emerging forms of art have challenged the institution. While new media and the digital continues to be an emerging form of art, it has not often been featured in this literature, which draws a thread from debates such as “new museology” (Vergo 1989; Stam 1993) through the “third wave of institutional critique” (Sheikh 2006; Raunig and Ray 2009) to what has been known as “new institutionalism” (Ekeberg 2003; Doherty 2004; Farquharson 2006; Möntman 2006), all of which are best explored elsewhere than in this chapter. To this list we can add the debates specifically addressing how changes to institutional curatorial practice have been brought about by new media. These debates can be summarized by noting that the changes in practice have been more readily accepted when the new media in question are a technological tool of education or interpretation (Gansallo in Cook 2001; Dewdney and Ride 2006) than when the digital is in fact the medium for the art shown in these institutions (Paul 2008; Quaranta 2010).

From this literature we have learned that there are potentially as many curatorial “modes,” or ways of working, as there are curators (Cook and Graham 2010). Curating entails processes of creation and interpretation, or staging and historicizing. The more challenging the work of art is to its site, and the more demanding it is of its audience in terms of engagement and participation, the more frequently is the analogy drawn between the tasks of a curator and that of a producer. The practice of curating, it has been noted, has changed from one concerned primarily with selection, storytelling, or careful keeping of objects to one in which networking, advocacy, and commissioning are key roles (Gleadowe 2000). There has always been a certain amount of impresario in the figure of a curator.

When?

What changes with the introduction of new media and the digital into the field of art is not so much the curatorial task of selection or collection—though the scope of material available, and access to it, is considerably widened—but rather the timeline on which these processes take place. Within the digital medium, it is possible for the means of production of the work of art to be synchronous with its means of distribution. British artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead, for example, make artwork that sometimes uses live webcams available freely online. Their Internet-based project Template Cinema (2004) draws together video from camera feeds, soundtracks from streaming sources, and, in some cases, inter-titles from online message boards or chat rooms, to generate new short films every few minutes, which are projected into gallery space as well as available for watching online (Figure 23.1). While some aesthetic decisions about the framing of the work are written into the code of the work, the films are essentially authored live as visitors watch them. This requires a steady Internet connection for the piece to function, as well as an Internet populated with freely available webcams, presenting challenges to the collection of that work for permanent exhibition.

This type of “liveness” and contiguousness distinguishes new media art from other art forms that use the digital in production but not necessarily distribution—such as photography—though parallels can be drawn between new media and live performance such as theatre and music. But if the production—the making, the bringing into being—of the work takes place at the same time as the art audience’s witnessing and appreciation of it (as in the case of generative art, for example), then the curator’s role is changed, as is the artist’s and the audience’s, especially in cases where audience response is part of the work. All parties have the chance at involvement with artistic intention earlier in the timeline of the work’s conception (a work may consider audience response as part of its conception and not be launched without it).

For instance, in projects that use mobile technologies—app-based artworks such as Jason Sweeney’s Stereopublic, to name one example—users may be invited to contribute to a database that makes up the work during the project’s lifetime; in this case by mapping locations in a city that are quiet and noise free, and uploading audio, video, photographic, and text-based contributions. In these works there may be a set timeframe during which they are “live” or they may exist indefinitely, available to be viewed and interacted with in public space. Works like these, as with much Internet-based art, could be said to exhibit themselves: they are launched by artists and exist without the obvious need for the curatorial framing that a museum or gallery provides in order to engage their publics who might encounter them while browsing online on their computers, or mobile phones, whether on the Web or in an app store.

As we can see, new media art practices, through their collaborative, participatory and networked guises, present substantial challenges to the institutional structure, never mind the physical walls, of the museum.⁵ New media art can also be highly contextual—critically or playfully responsive to its context of presentation—changing its guise for its reception, such as for instance, web site-based works that noticeably redesign their pages for different screen sizes (from mobile devices to desktops), a technological feature exploited with glee in works by net artists JODI or Constant Dullaart. However, this dependence on context could be due to many different aspects of the work and not just one condition of its technological implementation. For instance, the work may challenge the notion of a single author, or a set timeframe of its exhibition, or the response required from viewers/users, as well as the ways in which projects are modified for presentation online versus presentation in a physical space. Consider, for example, the biological project Pigs Bladder Football (2011– ) by John O’Shea, which marries the industry of synthetic biology and organ “growing” with debates around ethical meat products and the food industry, all through the appealing metaphor of sport. The iterative artwork is ongoing; it began with substantial research in a scientific laboratory in which the artist learned from a scientist how to grow synthetic spheres from bladders (in reference to the fact that footballs were previously made from animal bladders rather than plastics) (Figure 23.2). The work exists in documentary form, with prototype evidence for gallery presentation, but also in the form of participatory football games as performance events, and public engagement workshops aimed at making balls from offal and discussing the issues of food production, waste, and medical research.

Furthermore, new media art might undermine existing museum structures, such as the collection, by being seemingly reproducible rather than consisting of a unique single object. New media art’s “liveness” and, in some cases, easy accessibility or participatory nature, “reorients the concept and arena of the exhibition” (Paul 2006) as the raison d’etre of the gallery.

At a professional development workshop hosted by the Harris Museum in Preston, UK, other issues concerning the disadvantages of the museum in addressing media art were discussed. A key problem identified was the creation of an appropriate historical narrative for digital arts in relation to existing art collections. Curators noted that one problem audiences might have with media art in the museum is the gap in the collection narrative—as much work dating back to the 1950s (such as site-specific, network- or systems-based work and other ephemeral forms) is “missing”—which then makes it difficult for audiences to make conceptual leaps between older and contemporary projects. Not all museums have the budgets or mandates to retrospectively collect, and there also is the problem of finding a display strategy for this missing work, which, perhaps due to its informational nature—which characterizes any networked or algorithmic or instruction-based art practice—is often buried in archives.

This situation begins to explain why new media art has struggled alongside longstanding presentation formats for art, which have historically been static. These formats have been safe, not “live.” They have sought to preserve works in an immutable form, for generations to come to see and appreciate. Museums—those with collections or those without, such as Kunsthallen and galleries—have prioritized slow and steady, long-term exhibition formats and clear checklists of objects. These generalizations are not without their contradictory tales—of Roman sculptures cleaned rather than left with their faded paint, or of the inclusion of holograms or 3D fly-through of architectural monuments in blockbuster exhibitions, for instance. The traditional exhibition of art has been deeply disturbed by the introduction of the digital age, despite active curatorial attempts against that incursion. For the many museums that have experimented with handheld devices or flashy web sites, there are just as many that have completely ignored art made through the use of digital means (sometimes for the reasons mentioned above). Alongside those who create technology-led educational projects, artists too are using digital tools, but as their medium, to make really exciting and genuinely interesting work (politically, socially, and aesthetically).

As such, new media art engenders a new kind of museum—one “without walls” or one that is “ubiquitous” (Dietz et al. 2004). This new kind of museum has been described as “a parallel, distributed, living information space open to artistic interference—a space for exchange, collaborative creation, and presentation that is transparent and flexible” (Paul 2006). In the context of the earlier list of institutional critique, and new institutionalism, we find new media art as a key player in the debates about the future of museums.

What has made this historical trajectory interesting to witness in the recent overlap between the rise of an awareness of “the curatorial,” and the maturation of new media art—which surfaces in blockbusters, itinerant exhibitions, the museum without collection, and the public-consultation/celebrity-endorsed rehang of the collection, on one side, and a complete upsetting of the notion of what art is, how it is made, who its authors are, how it should be attributed, and how it comes into being or engages its public, on the other—is that the more interesting responses have not always come from the traditional players in the art sector. The institutional organizations that have supported media arts have not always been recognizable as museums or galleries, public or commercial.

Where?

If we step aside from the “mainstream” visual art discourse, then one of the social contexts in which new media art has emerged is that of the media-specific infrastructure accessible to technically minded artists—servers, databases, and computer networks (peer to peer, open source). Developed in parallel with, or even against, the more commercially minded digital landscape, are grass-roots, ad-hoc, and temporary “autonomous zones,” meet-ups, get-togethers, and file exchange initiatives.

The written art history of this media art activity, and its outputs in the form of net art, to name one example, is very much in development, and key case studies in this history would be artist-run servers such as irational.org, or those with attendant e-mail discussion lists about art, culture, and technology such as The Thing, Rhizome, Faces, Sarai.net, Nettime, 7-11, and many others.⁶ The artists who configured, administered, and populated these servers with their projects and documentation usually did not identify themselves as an artistic group, or movement, per se. But irational.org, in particular—through its affiliation with a shared domain name and its attendant filing system—appears to be a curated collection of socially engaged, industry-critiquing work dating back to the earliest point of social networking and the Web. In the context of technological development, at least in the UK, irational.org is related to other initiatives that have emerged out of London, such as backspace, I/O/D, or the artist-led network Furtherfield (who run the net-behaviour mailing list). Through a medialab space, then an informal exhibition space, and now a more publicly sited small gallery in a building in the middle of a London park, Furtherfield have championed art that critiques the current digital age. Funded by Arts Council England, in part a result of their educational roots as an open access media space, Furtherfield may be maturing into a good example of how to marry the curating of new media art exhibitions with lively critical discussion and online publishing.

On the sketchy map of the landscape of pioneers of new media art, one could place —alongside these networking, exchange-space projects—the not-for-profit educational organizations that, through attracting funding from research councils and thus amassing industry-level equipment, ensured the tools of making and the critical discourse around the digital and were accessible to artists in the early days. Centers such as Ars Electronica in Austria (the center was founded in 1996, the organization Ars Electronica in 1979), The Banff Centre’s New Media Institute in Canada (active 1994–2007), and Eyebeam in New York (founded 1997, with their early e-mail list, Blast) all began with an agenda of ensuring art practice kept pace with commercial media industries such as television and filmmaking, and science and technology disciplines such as engineering, robotics, and software (Druckrey 1999). Artists were often the caged mice in these “labs”—getting to play with the tools but being evaluated on what they did with them, in case a commercial product or piece of valuable IP emerged. This model continues today.

Other kinds of laboratories based on creative technological production, with less of an explicit remit to support art, have also hosted artists for the same ends, and early examples of this practice have been well documented at commercial technology companies such as Xerox or Bell Telephones (Harris 1999; Century 2009). Much has been written about the culture of creativity in university labs such as those at MIT, and city councils have followed the scent of profitable blue-sky research at which artists are so good, supporting labs such as Kitchen Budapest or Medialab Prado in Madrid. An example of this type of environment is Inspace at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which for over four years was home to an at times office-based arts commissioning organization, New Media Scotland. Until early 2014, Inspace functioned as the university’s own in-house, public-facing industry partner. To audiences attending Inspace’s regular expanded-cinema film club (Atmosphere), festival-related exhibitions, or live new music and performance gigs, the fact that they were in a university research lab might not have been obvious. To the university’s fundraisers trying to woo research partners from industry such as, for instance, the Disney Corporation for animation technology or the aerospace industry for robotics, a space in which prototypes could be tested on an audience open to experimental experiences was a clincher in the deal.

University or city-funded medialabs are also incubators of new media and digital arts practices for philanthropic and social-inclusion or educational remits, not just for commercial gain. An example of the latter category is the Centro Multimedia in Mexico City, which is part of an enormous college complex, the Centro Nacional de las Artes, incorporating dance, music, and visual arts schools. While Centro Multimedia is known internationally for its cutting edge biennial festival of electronic arts (Transitio) and its international symposia, which bring key thinkers worldwide to Latin America, its lab spaces are production sites in part for government-funded art in the media industries.

Festivalism

I call it Festival Art: environmental stuff that, existing only in exhibition, exalts curators over dealers and a hazily evoked public over dedicated art mavens. The [1999 Venice] Biennale’s director, the veteran Swiss impresario Harald Szeemann might be said to have invented Festivalism […] Installation art, of which the founding father was Marcel Duchamp, used to nurture a quasi-political hostility to “commodity capitalism.” That’s over. The battle line between non-sellable and sellable art has become a cordial abyss, with crowd-beguiling Festival Art, on one side, and, on the other, humanity’s eternal commerce in objects of esteem. (Marketed art works are not commodities, incidentally; economically, they behave more like handmade money.)

(Schjeldahl 1999)

Festivals have played a large role in how new media art has circulated, in part because they are regular (to keep up with new developments in the field), mobile (taking place in different cities related to a globally interconnected though sometimes placeless—because virtual or online—activity), yet also specialist events (gathering a critical mass of like-minded people otherwise “curatorial invisible” to the artworld) (Cook and Graham 2010). These new media art festivals have distinguished themselves in key programmatic ways from the artworld’s more common format of the “Biennial,” emphasizing skill sharing and professional development rather than trying to reinforce market concerns with the product of art. Many case studies could be written about how these festivals—Transmediale in Berlin; ISEA, which moves every year; 01SJ in San Jose; Images and ImagineNATIVE in Toronto; LA Freewaves in California; Impakt in the Netherlands; Sonar in Barcelona, FutureEverything in Manchester, NEoN in Dundee (Figure 23.3), to name only a handful—have shaped both the work exhibited at them, and the discourses around new media arts practice emerging from them. As Peter Schjeldahl’s (perhaps now outdated) criticism notes, festivals engender forms of art that are non-saleable, “environmental,” exist only for the time of the exhibition, and then return to being a pile of parts (hardware, software, the infrastructure of display or participation) again at the end. General trends can be observed in the development of these festivals, which started as subject-specialist events (focused on video, music, film, or video gaming), and expanded to encompass digital creativity more widely—as for instance in the case of the SXSW (South by Southwest) music and film festival, which from 2007 onwards included a strand on “Interactivity.” What follows here are three brief analyses of festival examples that illustrate, on an anecdotal level, some of the differences between modes of curating and programming new media art.⁸

Due to its unique geographic positioning between the UK cities of Liverpool and Manchester, and the more rural environments of Cumbria and North Yorkshire, the AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival is located at institutions with gallery and cinema spaces (including FACT and Cornerhouse), and contributes to a gallery program at a number of institutions, while also organizing a variety of festival-specific events. The AND curatorial model is a cross between more traditional institutional curating and a commissioning agency—it is collaborative, with clear artistic vision and branding. Part of the AND Festival mission was to become a platform for creative initiatives in the region, strengthening collaboration between its cultural partners. The festival’s curatorial process itself is also based on collaboration between curators from different institutions and partners. Working firmly within a curator-as-producer model, the festival does not have a main curator or an artistic director. The staff of AND are producers and managers who shape the program collaboratively with staff from partnering organizations.

This has meant that the festival has been able to stay focused on artistic risk taking and experimentation, with a keenly felt political slant. Its subtitle is “Festival of New Cinema and the Digital Culture,” but it takes the abandonment of normality as its key calling. AND is also noted for its producers’ and curators’ endeavor to support long-term, process- and research-based work. John O’Shea’s Pigs Bladder Football, mentioned above, was one of the works developed into exhibition form by AND. Among the reasons why they can do this is that they have been successful in attracting and nurturing a younger audience that is urban and familiar with the festival format in both cities (Liverpool and Manchester being just over 45 minutes’ travel apart and hosts to numerous other arts festivals). Many events, such as workshops and screenings, take place during the day, with some of the most exciting live ones requiring advance booking and having limited capacity, which adds to the appeal of being out of the ordinary. The fact that Manchester is internationally renowned for festivals of experimental theater and performance—with participants as varied as Björk, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass—and the future-casting thinktank conference FutureEverything (formerly a music and sound festival called Futuresonic) means that another festival focused on the digital in a geographic location bursting with media industries is more readily accepted.

By contrast, the Transitio Festival of Electronic Arts and Video (emerging in 2003 out of a former film and video art festival) is a biennial key programming component of the Centro Multimedia in Mexico City, with funding from the government’s cultural programming budget. In the alternate years, Centro Multimedia engages in an international conference on a topic of interest to the field of new media arts, such as biotechnology or open source software. The key components of the festival, devoted to a theme that is decided in advance, are a symposium, programming of exhibitions, screenings and performances, and a prize highlighting the work of young artists.

Transitio’s mandate is that the Centro Multimedia, for each edition of the festival, must appoint a new artistic director who is responsible for the decision making in response to the chosen theme, as well as for the appointment of curators and curatorial projects, and the fee structure to be adopted. While guidance is given by the Centro Multimedia team—and generous use of other government-funded exhibition spaces around the city, such as Kunsthallen, small museums, and cultural centers, is offered—the director is encouraged to work within the format of what has worked well in previous editions, ensuring some continuity of the “look” and “feel” of the festival.

The fifth edition appointed an artistic director and curatorial team from outside Mexico for the first time, on the theme of “Biomediations”; I was one of the curators responsible. This international team may have worked to strengthen the reputation of the festival outside Mexico, but put additional pressure on the local organizers to negotiate venues, technology rentals, and installation details in response to artists’ demands being issued at a distance. The emphasis on showing new installation work is greatly problematized by the format of a festival, which generally runs for fewer than ten days, as it is potentially cost-prohibitive to ship physical works of art and negotiate spaces for such a short exhibition timeframe. It takes time to build partnerships with venues in a city, or to convince an organization’s board that the majority of the year’s programming budget might be spent on such a short-lived event. Mexico City is a huge and densely populated city with considerable distances between the venues and varied local audiences (numbering in the many hundreds at opening events) for each of them. That said, the intense exchanges that can take place when artists and symposium speakers—including theorists, curators, and producers—are all physically present are worth the organizational anxieties.

The AV Festival in the Northeast of the UK, founded in 2002, can be said to be halfway between these two models. It has a full-time, year-round artistic director based in the region and has thus far only been able to hire production staff in the run-up to the main event. Despite, or perhaps because of, this small team, it hosts tightly curated exhibitions and commissioned works at partner institutions in the cities of Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough. Hardly anything but the AV Festival would link those venues, as some are collecting museums, others Kunsthallen or artist-run galleries, some science centers or libraries, and, of course, cinemas. This presents a challenge for branding and for journalistic research: Are all the works art? Can they all be given the same weight as finished projects rather than experimental prototypes? By developing relationships over the long term with its partners, the festival has moved from what started as a two-weekend, ten-day event in previous editions to a month-long season, in which different weekends might be programmed for target different audiences—one for live music, another for film, for instance—and the exhibitions can fit a museum’s usual four- to six-week timetable. For the 2012 edition of the festival (themed: As Slow As Possible), one national newspaper sent three different journalists—a music critic, a film critic, and an art critic—to cover the events, each writing entirely separate reviews from within the discourse of their own disciplines.

How?

Festivals continue to be a good format for experiencing new media art because their short duration alleviates some of the challenges of its presentation—from the potential lack of robustness of the technology employed in the work to the strains of heavy audience interaction with that technology. However, the drawbacks of the “festivalism” of new media art are that it promotes “short-termism” in both the presentation and appreciation of the work, emphasizes newness in the work itself, and struggles to move new media art away from trendy topics to more considered historicization that presentation within a museum program might allow.

Additionally, the curatorial role in festivals and their temporary installations of art definitely shifts further toward that of producer. Producers are the ones who coordinate and facilitate the collaborative process. Since most of the work is done on a project-by-project basis, even if it has been proposed and conceptually framed by a curator, the process of delivery is taken over by the producers once the project has been “agreed” upon. Festivals and commissioning agencies usually focus on “delivery” rather than generating critical debate or producing knowledge around certain practices (Krzemień Barkley 2013), though there are exceptions to this, as in the three examples discussed.

The danger is that this leads to the weakening of the curatorial role, as well as the role of institutions, beyond facilitating the production of new work. It can be argued that institutional curating, by adopting models from festivals and commission agencies, loses sight of its other key roles—producing knowledge, instigating debate, presenting critical discourses, developing critical contexts in which to discuss emerging art, as well as historicizing the practices (Krzemień Barkley 2013).

In an earlier text I described three types of exhibitions that might respond to the challenges presented by new media art and still maintain some of these other aspects of curatorial work: the “exhibition as software program or data flow,” such as a traveling exhibition that generates a network of gallery spaces (each “node” able to adapt and modify the content displaying different aspects and outcomes of each project); the “exhibition as trade show” (a short term, commercial-like presentation for projects requiring specialized technical support or the testing out of new projects); and the “exhibition as broadcast” (in which the audience rather than the artwork might be what is distributed, and events might take place simultaneously in different locations with the use of networked technologies). I also theorized models of curatorial practice, which accompanied the changing exhibition formats: the iterative, the modular, the distributed (Cook 2008). Exciting examples of works of new media art can be found in all these types of exhibitions and others besides.

Many of the curatorial “platforms” responding to new media art practices are themselves hybrids addressing the hybridity of the forms they serve. They also highlight distribution as much as exhibition. For example, Kingdom of Piracy (KOP) was both an online and sometimes physically sited workspace that was first launched in 2001, presented at Ars Electronica in 2002, FACT in 2003, and other places beyond that, with commissioned artworks and writing projects curated by Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, and Yukiko Shikata.⁹ KOP encouraged remixing, released digital content freely, and questioned the proprietary structures of art making and exhibition. Another example is or-bits.com, a web-based curatorial platform curated by Marialaura Ghidini devoted to supporting practices and dialogues around artistic production, display, and distribution online.¹⁰ In the or-bits.com project, thematically structured exhibitions of web-based artworks are complemented by projects in other formats such as radio streams, limited edition boxes of multiples, booksprints and publications, writing and mapping workshops, and exhibitions in physical gallery spaces.

Yet, despite the already long tradition of curatorial experimentation with presentation models of “emergent” and hybrid practices (especially digital media, and “socially engaged,” collaborative and participatory practices),¹¹ gallery exhibition formats—even within institutions dedicated to presenting “new” practices—have proven to be inflexible, and remain largely conventional (Krzemień Barkley 2013). Some possible solutions, or ways to reinvigorate the formats for presenting and distributing new media art, which could be adapted to the more cautiously static museum or gallery settings, include the following.

Why?

In a Guardian interview, the CEO of FACT in Liverpool, Mike Stubbs, was asked to name one thing that is key to running a successful venue. He replied, “Continuing re-invention, knowing your audience, and enabling the most direct routes between the themes and messages explored by the artists and the public that will be coming to see their work” (Caines 2012).

Continual reinvention is the key challenge for curators in adapting their understanding of where, when, and how new media and digital arts are best received by audiences. As the above examples have shown, new media art has been at home in its self-created “digital commons,” but in order to be in closer dialogue with contemporary art, design, scientific research, or technological development, it has had to imagine new kinds of museums. Are these currently observable formats of exhibition, presentation, and reception doomed (or best utilized) as short-term existences whilst the ground beneath their feet settles? Or do they presage possible futures for how the digital arts might create entirely new types of institutions which cause us to rethink the notion that art history resides solely in the museum? Given the rapid rate of change within the technological sphere, context-responsive curating might raise the prospect of “context-generative” curating of new media art (Krzemień Barkley 2013). The rhetoric of constant reinvention of the types of spaces, places, and contexts most suited to new media art—whether online, in print, via mobile devices, in public space, etc.—seems to be logically contradictory when the institution’s own format is very clearly defined by its spaces (whether physical or virtual) and when it has a traditional approach to its main collecting activity or programming strands.

The sheer practicalities of working within certain exhibition formats strongly limit an institution’s flexibility and suitability for presentation of technologically or conceptually more experimental and hybrid practices. Curatorial approaches and models of production emerging on the “peripheries” of institutional practice, such as collaboration and engagement programs, or even beyond the institutions, such as festivals, are not without their limitations, but seem to offer a greater potential for incubating new practices (Krzemień Barkley 2013).

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