About the Lecture

Media art is an art of multiple skill sets that often require collaboration whether it is a film crew or a complex audiovisual installation. Despite these collaborative necessities of production, the artist as "director" is still very much alive today. But so is the counterstrategy of going further to consciously refute the notion of the individual artistic genius masquerading in the anti-bourgeois and anti-establishment role models of the 20th century avant-garde. Media Art today is not anti-establishment when even hacking has been integrated into the portfolio of governments and corporations. Radicality, often associated with anti-establishment gestures, is thus a dubious concept that only survives in rhetorical gestures and attitudes. When an entire industry is based on radicality, here the notion of “disruption” in Silicon Valley, artistic value and relevance is elsewhere to be found, not in so-called radicality. This “elsewhere” is possibly found in forms of collective practice. The talk will highlight select protagonists in this context.

About the Speaker

Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where he co-curated the recent retrospectives Nam June Paik (2019-2021), Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here (2019) and Bruce Conner: It's All True (2016-2017) as well as the survey on contemporary artists working with sound Soundtracks (2017). Other monographic exhibitions included among others artists such as John Akomfrah, David Claerbout, William Kentridge, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sharon Lockhart, Richard Mosse. He curated SFMOMA’s influential survey exhibition The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (2008-2009) and Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media (2012). From 1994 to 2006, Frieling was a curator and researcher at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, where he organized and co-curated the projects Media Art Net (2004/2005) and 40yearsvideoart.de: Digital Heritage – Video Art in Germany from 1963 until the present (2006). Frieling is also a Senior Adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His education includes a M.A. from the Free University Berlin and a Ph.D. from the University of Hildesheim.

About the Project

The Media Art 21: Practices, Reflections, and Pedagogies of Global Media Art Since 2000 is a three-year project initiated by the Institute of Sci-Tech Arts of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).

Media art is an essential part of global contemporary art practice. It addresses the world of the present through the media of the past, present, and future. With the increasing artistic production of media art and its growing presence in international art exhibitions comes a growing need for critical and scholarly reflection, as well as for the inclusion of this field of practice in art education. For artists, scholars, curators, and students, access to original materials in conjunction with critical reflection is of prime importance for the study and development of an artistic field that has remarkably influenced, shaped, and stimulated contemporary art. MA21 – Media Art in the 21st century – seeks to address this need through an overview of media art since 2000 from a global perspective.

Project website: http://mediaart21.org

主编/何一沙

责编/吴靖