Open Score: Art and Technology 2016

Saturday 30 January, 2016
2pm, $30

New Museum
235 Bowery

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The New Museum and Rhizome jointly inaugurate an annual symposium titled Open Score that will explore the state of art and technology today. Convening luminary artists, curators, researchers, and writers to discuss how technology is transforming culture, the first edition of Open Score will consider how artists are responding to new conditions of surveillance and hypervisibility; how social media’s mass creativity interfaces with branding and identity for individual artists; how the quality and texture of art criticism is evolving in a digital age; and what the future of internet art might be in light of a broader assimilation of digital technologies. Supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Open Score: Art and Technology 2016 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the groundbreaking initiative Experiments in Art and Technology. The conference’s title is taken from Rauschenberg’s live performance Open Score during one of E.A.T.’s most iconic events, “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering.”

2 PM: Opening Remarks

Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, the New Museum

2:10 PM: Introduction to First Session

Michael Connor, Artistic Director, Rhizome, and Lauren Cornell, Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives, the New Museum

2:15 PM: Generation You

The rise of web 2.0 in the mid-2000s promised to democratize culture by putting individual participation center stage. A decade later, we have a more thorough grasp of the specific kind of self-expression that social media offers. On the one hand, it is limiting and restrictive: the users get little, while the platform reaps the benefits of their labor. On the other, it retains the ability to challenge prevailing cultural hierarchies and to facilitate the performance of new kinds of subjectivity. This panel will address a number of questions, including: How has social media influenced art production and remapped its boundaries and power structures? How do artists navigate pressures of commercialization and self-branding? And, what is the status of authenticity amid pervasive performance and self-branding?

Speakers: Jacob Ciocci, artist; Simon Denny, artist; Juliana Huxtable, artist; and Cathy Park Hong, poet

Moderator: Andrew Durbin, poet and writer

3:15 PM: Liking and Critiquing

How are the quality and texture of art criticism evolving in the digital age? This panel will address the following questions, among others: Is the expanded field of debate and art criticism—from the online platforms of magazines to viral Instagram posts—altering the boundaries of art? What problems accompany the greater immediacy that social media affords? How is this discourse shaped by platform design and its underlying mandates? How do magazines and journals operate within and speak to this new context? What voices are encouraged to speak, and which, if any, are quieted?

Speakers: Brian Droitcour, writer and Associate Editor, Art in America; Kimberly Drew, Founder, Black Contemporary Art, and author of @museummammy; Michelle Kuo, Editor in Chief, Artforum International; Laura McLean-Ferris, writer and curator; and Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic, New York magazine

Moderator: Ed Halter, writer and Cofounder, Light Industry

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