Curating and Conserving New Media Work
A discussion with Sara Tucker, Director of Information Technology at Dia Art Foundation and Tim Murray, Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
12–1:15 pm EST on ZOOM
This event is organized in concert with the exhibition Constance DeJong: A survey exhibition of the artist’s work (August 24–October 9, 2021), which includes the collaborative multimedia project Fantastic Prayers, created by DeJong, the artist Tony Oursler, and the composer Stephen Vitiello. In 1995, Fantastic Prayers was developed as an interactive website, becoming the first of Dia’s Artist Web Projects and in 2000, it was also realized as a CD-ROM. Using Fantastic Prayers as our entry point, the discussion will reflect on how CD-ROM became a popular medium for artists in the late 1990s/early 2000s and how conservators and curators are bringing this now obsolete medium back to life for means of research and exhibition.
This event is co-hosted by Sarah Watson, Chief Curator of Hunter College Art Galleries, and Sigourney Schultz, Lazarus Graduate Curatorial Fellow.
The programming for the Constance DeJong exhibition is made possible by a gift from the Legere Family Foundation in honor of daughter Elizabeth Legere (Hunter College MA 2017), and in appreciation of Hunter College distinguished lecturer Constance DeJong and Joachim Pissarro, Bershad Professor of Art History.
The Hunter College Art Galleries also extend our gratitude to the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Carol and Arthur Goldberg, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, Joan Lazarus, and the Leubsdorf Fund for their sustained support of the galleries’ programming.
Sara Tucker is the Director of Information Technology at Dia Art Foundation. She produced Dia’s Artists Web Project series from its inception in 1995 through 2015, and recently completed a conservation project to preserve access to twenty Flash-based projects.
Tim Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Curator of the Cornell Biennial and the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library, and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. He is Chair of the Board of Directors of Humanities New York, on the Executive Committee of HASTAC and Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory. His numerous books include Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008) and he is awaiting publication of two books, Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art (Minnesota) and, in Spanish, Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Electronically (Murcia, Spain). His many exhibitions include Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom (1999-2004), CTHEORY Multimedia (2000-2003), The Experimental Television Center: A History, Etc… with Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller Hocking (2015), Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive (2016), 2018 Cornell Biennial, “Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival,” 2020 Cornell Biennial, “Swarm: Ecologies, Digitalities, Socialities,” and, in preparation, 2022 Cornell Biennial, “Futurities, Uncertain.”
