“Digital Art Now — Histories and Futures”
Thursday, November 21st, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
Over the past three years, in particular, NFTs and new generations of AI technologies have both brought renewed attention to digital art and induced shifts in artistic practice. These latest developments have to be seen in an art-historical trajectory to understand the complexities of new aesthetic qualities and categorical instabilities of media today. The talk will give an overview of generative art practice in its relationship to NFTs and AI art, as well as different manifestations of art in the “metaverse” — from virtual worlds to virtual reality and augmented reality — to highlight key moments in the evolution of digital art’s visual expressions and aesthetics. Also considered will be the curatorial approaches to integrating all these different art forms into museum exhibitions and structures.
Biography
Christiane Paul is Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor Emerita at The New School. She is the recipient of 2023 MediaArtHistories International Award and the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her latest books are Digital Art (4th ed., 2023) and A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Harold Cohen: AARON (2024), Refigured (2023), and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018/19) and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes Chain Reaction (feralfile.com, 2023), DiMoDA 4.0 Dis/Location(traveling show, 2021- ), and The Question of Intelligence(Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020).
