[iDC] Curating New Media Art

[John Hopkins]

>Bus tours are quite common. The travelling DJ and faux guide tour are a
>start. Consequently, I'm not canceling out Blue Ship contexts at all. At
>Art-Place-Technology and many other new media events isolation is
>frequently bemoaned. Perhaps this discussion can open up or inspire
>trajectories for different models of curating media art and theorizing
>it.

Isolation from what?  Isolation from a participatory group of people? 
or isolation from the dominant social order?

Might also be the artist who is the problem -- in placing their 
energies in the 'wrong' places in the social system -- falling to the 
seduction (subduction) of social 'success'.

I encourage my students to first off value the interactions in which 
they most frequently participate in -- friends and family (and in a 
teaching situation, classmates).  Building a network (by putting 
their creative energies into the flow of that immediate network) -- 
that elemental starting point directly creates a participatory 
'audience' (bad word in this context) that has a stake in the 
individuals creative impulses (and vice-versa).

This is in opposition to the tendency of some schools, some (art) 
teachers, and most social institutions to encourage the ego-based 
injection of individual creative life energies into dominant social 
formations (to feed the energy/power base of the social institution) 
without consideration of humane relation: the artist as (just 
another) producer in a consumer chain.

I would propose that this latter 'form' of participation is 
(isolating) alienating and de-humanizing.  The former is vital, 
connected, self-energizing.

The artist (or any individual) has an explicit choice how to direct 
their creative energies!

Be isolated and alienated or be vitally integrated .  It's a sliding 
scale, the end points do not exist except in the model, but one has 
the power to place oneself somewhere on that scale...

Too many other things to comment on in this thread, and alas, once 
again, and no time to reflect... so I wanted to at least address that 
issue of isolation.

cheers
John