Institute of Contemporary Arts

Hi tech, Low tech: Technology in Art + Curating

A talk held at the ICA on Wednesday 19 March 2008.

Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA 1968) was one of the most important exhibitions of the 60s - kept open longer due to popular demand. That year, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, proposed a bold teleology of sculpture leading towards the cybernetic. So what happened to the robotic exhibition and computer generated art work? As proficiency with technology grew and computers became commonplace, the technological art exhibition seemed to become an anachronism. The only acceptable cyborg was the homemade kind produced by artists such as Bruce Lacey. Contemporary use of technology in art has become located in its own sphere of artistic practice, with galleries and groups dedicated to new media and new technologies with a special emphasis on the 'hope' of a super connected New Babylon. Why is there such a divisive split between art exhibitions and media art exhibitions? Should curators be more embracing of technologies? Is there good reason to be mistrustful of the use of technology in art and exhibition making?

Speakers:

Jasia Reichardt, writer and curator of Cybernetic Serendipity; Richard Grayson, artist, writer, curator of 2002 Sydney Biennale; Dianne Harris, art director, Kinetica Museum; Paul Granjon, artist interested in the co-evolution of humans and robots;

Chair: Dr Charlie Gere, reader in new media research and director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.

Developed in association with Ben Cranfield and the London Consortium. Ben Cranfield is a collaborative doctoral award student at the ICA and London Consortium, currently working on an intellectual history of the arts in postwar Britain.

In association with the London Consortium.

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