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Watch This! Revelations in Media Art:
The second half of the twentieth century introduced an array of technologies and electronic phenomena that sent humanity careening down a path of relentless acceleration toward futurity and set art in motion, innovations that brought us hi-fidelity stereo, broadcast television, videotape, orbiting satellites, computer systems, video games, and cellular communications also index the frenetic pace of social change from the 1940s into the present. Artists encounter these technological leaps with impunity, finding in them new modes of expression that continuously redefine how we imagine, receive, and understand our time. This fearless embrace of contemporary materials is a striking disclosure of the artists' ambitions, empowering them to confront the complex histories of the present and inspire new futures.
Watch This! is an introduction to media art and to the material and conceptual exchange with technology that is shaping artistic practice. Drawn from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the selection shown here invites an examination of technology-based artworks in dialogue with one another and identifies the pervasive interdependence between technology and contemporary culture. The range of aesthetic styles, formal arguments, and conceptual engagements represented, which is influenced as much by developments in science and technology as by style or medium, gives testimony to the compelling advancements in electronics and the cultural meanings embedded in them. |