Goldsmiths Thursday Club: 22 June 2006, 6-8pm

Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott building, Goldsmiths College, New Cross

Free event – All are welcome.

Working with audiences in the creation and curation of interactive art

Alfred H Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York declared his revolutionary museum to be “a laboratory; in its experiments, the public is invited to participate”. This concept of the exhibition as an active site for experimentation and collaboration between curators, artists and audiences prefigures a general cultural movement towards the centrality of experience and away from the reification of the object. By describing his vision in scientific terms Barr suggests that curatorial practice must become increasingly transversal and engage with the practices and products of many disciplines.

The evolution of curatorial practice towards a more interdisciplinary and participative model has been hampered by a continued emphasis, in most galleries and museums, on distinctions between art, science and technology, object and experience, creation and consumption. However in the field of digital and new media arts new kinds of art experience demand new approaches to curation. . Interactive computer based art is a provocative cultural form which breaks down disciplinary boundaries and has led to the emergence of hybrid spaces for production, experimentation and exhibition.

This talk describes my practice-based research on the integration of audience experience into a curatorial approach to interactive art. The research focuses on Beta_space, an experimental exhibition area within the Powerhouse Museum (in Sydney, Australia) which extends the interactive art research of the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology into the public context. My aim is to find ways to work with audience experience as a material, drawing on tools and techniques from Human-Centred Design, to create an iterative process which merges the contexts of production and presentation.

Lizzie Muller is a curator and writer working at the intersection of art, technology and science. She is currently researching a PhD on the audience experience of interactive art with the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the curator of Beta_space, an experimental exhibition area for interactive art at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.