HMKK03204U Critical Curating: Urban Digital Art

Course goals:

• Students can identify significant and problematic issues and tendencies in the genealogy of urban digital art and outline these in relation to their underlying theories and methodologies in a clear, oral form
• Students can characterize relevant hypotheses relating to curatorial practice with urban digital art as a cultural phenomenon, and in relation to viewpoints in the broader domain of urbanity and aesthetics within arts and cultural studies
• Students can independently analyze and evaluate discourses in curatorial practice with urban digital art and reflect on the perspectives as a domain of criticality in the media city
• Students can translate methodological and theoretical reflection into curatorial potential and implement research and theory in concrete curatorial practice

The course is a module focused on the theoretical, methodological and conceptual aspects of curatorial practice with urban digital art, which students will translate into practical reality in co-curating a collective exhibition. Students will gain knowledge of the main discourses and ideas that have shaped the domain of curatorial practice with urban digital art. They will gain competences in urban and artistic analysis in relation to the domain of digital art, and in translating critical understanding of issues and tendencies in urban digital art into curatorial potential. Students will further get skills in conceptualizing an exhibition, in collaborating with the artistic vision, in outlining and realizing an exhibition narrative (adjust ideas to real-world restrictions), and in formulating a curatorial statement.

The urban has recently gained renewed attention as a conceptual, practical and phenomenological condition for digital art. In this course we will conceptually and in practice question and challenge dominant exhibition schemes in the domain of urban digital art, in order to challenge our understandings of what role and meaning digital art has, and could have, in the urban context, as a response to the increasing density, acceleration and politicization of visual aesthetics in the media city.

Emerging in the cross section of fine art, new media, technology, architecture and urban culture, urban digital art is currently expanding the artistic field, while its role and purpose in the urban domain is a subject of vast experimentation. Our subject matter is initiatives with video art in public space, urban art screens, context-specific screenings, architectural projection mapping, media architecture, nuit-blanche festivals, new media connectivity projects, permanent urban digital galleries, and mobile and software art. We will look at the developments and changing discourses in this domain from a curatorial perspective, from the early initiatives with expanded cinema in the late 1960s to experimentation with broadcasting turning private situations public in the 1970s, to practices with video art in public space up through the 1990s and the urban screen movement in the 2000s, to contemporary LED media facade installations of software art that turn entire buildings into digital galleries.

The course is structured through the thematic issues and tendencies in the genealogy of urban digital art. In each class, we will build on a common theoretical framework, a toolbox of critical concepts and knowledge of case-based references, and gradually advance our analyses of, in particular, site and the urban context, visual and medial idioms, artistic premise, audience considerations, and the curatorial position, methodology and ethics. These theoretical considerations we will apply to our conceptualization and planning of the exhibition, as a pentagon for analysis and blueprint for exhibition planning. While the first half of the course we will be mainly theoretical, in the second half of the course we will bring theory and methodologies to use in the conceptual and practical preparation of an exhibition. This will involve concrete urban analyses, formulations of curatorial statements, analysis of the artistic material commissioned for the exhibition, conceptualizations of exhibition elements, and production of art installations.

Based on our theoretical discussions and in preparation of the exhibition, we will formulate five obstructions for urban digital art. The curatorial project will consist of five installations that respond to these obstructions. Students will be co-curating four of these installations with the aim of challenging current exhibition schemes for digital and moving image artwork in the urban exhibition context, conceptually and methodologically. The artistic material will be commissioned with an artist for the project, and the installations will be conceptualized in collaboration with the artist. Each installation will be a conceptually challenging experiment.