The Ideas Digital Forum was a two-day symposium that took place at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, ON on October 12 and 13. Advertised as an opportunity to “pause, pivot and reimagine how artists and galleries respond more effectively to the challenges, issues and opportunities of the digital era,” the event set out to address two main questions:
1. How do we contextualize and understand contemporary digital art practices in the current moment while acknowledging the embedded and long histories located at the intersection of art, science, and technology?
2. How do we engage with the challenges of the Public Art Gallery sector in exhibiting and collecting these artworks and supporting artists?
The event begins with Executive Director of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, Zainub Verjee’s introduction and setting of the agenda. She claims we need to delineate our past in order to move beyond it, proposing that “innovation means shifting and changing things within a specific framework.” Verjee asks what the art gallery is going to become within a digital context, and how art institutions can productively embrace the vastness of the digital ecosystem. The introduction sets the tone for the forum as a whole: there is a significant focus on the historical lineage of media art, which addresses only one aspect of the forum’s guiding questions. Complex questions are posed; heady propositions are made.
As the keynote speaker, Mohammed Salemy raises an interesting point about how our public art institutions currently face similar challenges to that of libraries during the dawning of the internet; he believes that technology, though the primary contributing factor to these challenges, also holds the solutions. Where he and I disagree is in his argument that curatorial practice has been immune to technological transformation. He views technology – using the example of algorithms built for data analysis around exhibitions and collections – as an objective tool for making curatorial decisions that will help ease bias in galleries and diversify representation in major exhibitions. Is this truly how curatorial practices should evolve alongside technology? There is no acknowledgement of technological bias, nor discussion of altering the hiring practices or targeting the systematic reasons why exhibitions lack diversity. Salemy removes the onus from human curators in hopes that a machine or program will solve the problem for us.
After the audience is broken into groups to brainstorm the conference’s key topics, Niranjan Rajah leads a responsive presentation meant to directly address the comments and questions raised during these participant break-out sessions. These sessions were intended to function as a collaborative tool to help shape the forum itself—a strong idea in concept, but less so in execution. Rajah spent a significant portion of his time speaking about his own work (for which there was a separate dedicated period during one of the afternoon’s panels) followed by a brief and very loose philosophical interpretation of the ideas garnered from the audience. His slides take the form of bullet points removed from their original context – raising a difficult gap between audience intention and respondent interpretation – which are not re-visited or addressed in an in-depth way throughout the remainder of the forum.
It is the artists who ground many of the discussions throughout the two days by offering tangible, experience-based case studies. Scott Benesiinaabandan’s project Blueberry Pie Under Martian Sky (2017) uses VR as a way to tell Indigenous histories in a visceral and embodied way. Benesiinaabandan sees the potential in VR technology not only to augment the telling of stories, but as an accessible interface in engaging audiences and connecting to wider communities (culturally and geographically) both in a lateral and temporal way. Accessibility is also a key point for David Bobier, who speaks about his project VibraFusionLab and the importance of anticipating audience needs. He has worked closely with artists and spaces like Tangled Art + Disability in Toronto to re-configure and re-imagine technology as a tool to make visiting a gallery and experiencing artwork more accessible. These presenters, among others (such as Alison Humphrey and her participatory installation Shadowpox: the antibody politic) show that participation through technology does not operate in conflict with critical contemplation.
Other informative presentations include the Canada Council Digital Strategy Fund session, which outlined the fund’s goals to strengthen digital literacy and re-shape the relationship between citizens and art institutions, and Srinivas Krishna’s introduction to the AR/VR learning lab and the ways in which artists and art institutions can use AR/VR technology as meaningful tools for audience engagement.
From an institutional perspective, one of the most optimistic case studies enacting practical solutions to many of the issues raised during the forum was that of Gordan Duggan and Sarah Joyce, co-directors and co-curators of the New Media Gallery in New Westminster, BC. They spoke of their unique funding model – the space is completely funded by the city, and they function without a board – and their direct engagement with the community, where every visitor is offered a curatorial tour. By being “on the floor” and greeting their visitors, Duggan and Joyce not only collect valuable demographic data, but are able to educate a diverse audience about media art and what art can be. They exhibit emerging media artists alongside established and internationally renowned artists such as Tracey Emin and Martin Creed, and employ an equitable curating model, claiming to have one of the highest percentages of female artists showing in a publicly funded art institution. The gallery is extensively tailored to suit the needs of each exhibition, re-built and re-configured, while remaining environmentally conscious by recycling studs, drywall, and construction materials. The digital ecosystem co-exists with and acts upon the natural ecosystem, an important point to include in an event that looks to plan for the future.
As a whole, much of the forum served as an idealistic reflection on the past, with less attention paid to the present and few practical propositions made for the future. The majority of the speakers represented a precedent for new media art production and presentation in Canada that, although important historically, did not entirely reflect current discussions surrounding digital and technologically-mediated artworks. The forum would have benefitted from an increased emphasis on innovative and emerging practices, and a more optimistic sightline for where art’s digital-age accessibility will lead us.
As the event concludes Verjee, Rajah, and event coordinator Linda Jansma ask what changes can be made and how we, in practical terms, can do something to contribute. Although I left the forum feeling that these questions remained largely unanswered, here are my more pragmatic takeaways from the two-day forum:
- Large art institutions are behind in analyzing and responding to digital art and culture, and would benefit from improved systems for digital data analysis
- There’s opportunity for reforming the more rigid systems of larger institutions by looking to smaller organizations—both the ways in which they have approached the collection of data and the changes they’ve implemented as a response to artist and audience feedback
- “Art that behaves breaks,” according to Steve Daniels’ succinct life cycle of the new media artwork. Trust that the artist wants the work to succeed just as much as the curator and institution do.
- Work needs to be done to ensure that emerging digital practices are recognized within the larger lineage of art, rather than being subcategorized simply (and separately) as digital art
- Art institutions need to make room for specialized curators who possess in-depth knowledge of both the material and social concerns pertaining to digital art
- We need to create new public space for the dissemination of art and culture that more seamlessly engages the physical and the digital through mixed realities
