Topic – Contemporary Artists as Digital Sociologists | Chloe Geoghegan
Notes & Links from Chloe’s talk [Google Doc]
Our guest this week is Chloe Geoghegan, Art curator at Te Uare Taoka o Hākena | Hocken Collections. Join us as she presents some of her favourite digital art works by contemporary artists, and hear how an Honours paper in digital humanities at UC helped her with her curatorial education.
Artists are hypersensitive to social shifts. They have an innate ability to pick up on trends before they become the norm and highlight them, often by creating art that holds a mirror up to society, asking us to look again with a more self-critical, self-reflective eye. In today’s art world, where mass production, mass consumption and an impending sense of doom follow the most conscious around, artists are taking note, and using the screen as a mirror to force those who take the time to take a closer look.
Reading
Contemporary Art, Daily | Michael Sanchez
Sanchez, Michael: “Contemporary Art, Daily.” In Art and Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, edited by Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw, and Nikolaus Hirsch, 52–61. Berlin: Sternberg, 2011.
The competitive image ecology of Contemporary Art Daily is a reflection of economic competition. With a record number of art students graduating from prestigious graduate programs in a market with less money to purchase their work, competition is more intense than ever. And although art since the recession arguably looks more friendly and less strategic, it is, in fact, strategic to the point of paranoia, since it must compete within an increasingly rapid and invasive system of image distribution joined with a system of social surveillance and exchange.
Works.Exhibitions – Duty Free Art, Merge Nodes
- Duty Free Art | Hito Steyerl – These works from 2014, exhibited in 2016, strike deep into art’s social function. Free-trade zones, where speculative art commodities are bought and sold invisibly and tax free, are, like civil wars, an important backbone of the international art business. Both facilitate the redistribution of public property into private hands, and are catalysts of global inequality.
- Merge Nodes | Joe Hamilton – Hamilton makes use of technology and found materials to create intricate and complex compositions online, offline and in between. The term ‘merge nodes’ refers to the collapsing of multiple geographical locations into one frame. ‘Merge node’ is also the name of a tool used to merge two digital image or video files.
WHEN: 1pm – 2pm, Friday 21 June 2019
WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building
WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!
CONTACT: Alexander Ritchie alexander.ritchie@otago.ac.nz