A Companion to Digital Art

23The Digital Arts In and Out of the Institution—Where to Now?

Sarah Cook with Aneta Krzemień Barkley

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 ...