Curation and display of interactive new media art in the contemporary context

While interactive new media art continues to be an interest to artists, its integration within institutional contexts remains inconsistent at best. A literature and artist and curator perspective survey showed that the field has a lack of understanding of both the theoretical nature of interactive new media art and its specific needs at the installation level. Furthermore, the speed at which the technologies supporting this art form change means that literature becomes outdated within a short window of time. From these insights, it became clear that a more responsive and easier to maintain resource was necessary. This dissertation describes the research and methodological approaches implemented in the creation of the manual. The research questions aimed to determine what was needed from the manual from a curator's and a designer's perspective; how could it offer recommendations that not only met the needs of curators, artists, and the public, but also ensure that such efforts were accessible and useable as well. As part of this process, interviews and case studies of FACT in the United Kingdom and Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico were used to collect a variety of perspectives across curatorial cultures and budgets. The results of this research became an online manual covering the curatorial, display, and memory making aspects of exhibition design. The manual is a creative commons online resource in order to promote its dissemination through institutions. The manual accepts input from readers to continue its improvement past publication. The art world can benefit from this research in a variety of ways, the most obvious being from directly using the manual as intended, but it can also contribute to the better understanding of interaction, time, reproducibility, and virtual site-specificity in the broader context of art history particularly related to new media art. Rene Alberto Garcia Cepeda 2020 Curation and Display 2

The manual for the curation of interactive new media art is a creative commons living document meant to assist curators and exhibition designers engage with interactive new media art in a way that meets the needs of both institution and artist. This is a limited print version, for the full living document, please visit: http://inmamanual.wordpress.com

As time passes and digital technologies become obsolete, more and more new media artworks face the possibility of being lost forever. As many new media artworks depend on certain technologies, when these technologies are replaced with other or are not available any more, steps should be taken to make older artworks compatible with newer technologies that replace them. Using Jon Ippolito’s concepts of storage, emulation, migration and reinterpretation, this text attempts to provide a basic framework to understand each different concept and the advantages and disadvantages to their implementation. This is all done using Gilbertto Prado’s restoration of Desertesejo (2000/2014/2018) to illustrate the process.