Interacting with the World’s Currents: New Media Art Now
Terry Smith
How does digital media art engage with the major currents and concerns of contemporary art today? Do these technologies tend to promote
acuity of insight––on the part of both artists and spectators––into aspects of the experience of contemporaneity,
or do they continue to distract attention onto their own becoming, as if it were itself marvelous? It will be argued that a number of artists
and media groups around the world have, in recent years, advanced beyond the experimental phase of “new media” and are creating
highly significant art. This lecture will offer interpretations of key examples of such work, and show how they are consequential as contemporary
art.
Wednesday August 22, 6pm
TERRY SMITH, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and
Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney.
During 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2007-8 will be a Fellow of the National
Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute,
Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of
Union Media Services (Sydney). He is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America
(University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation,
volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); and The Architecture of Aftermath
(University of Chicago Press, 2006). He is editor of many others including In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity
(Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 1997), First People, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia
(Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999), Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Power Publications and the
University of Chicago Press, 2001) and, with Paul Patton, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars
(Power Publications, 2001, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005). He is working on these books: Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity,
postmodernity and contemporaneity (with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Duke University Press, 2007), Contemporaneity; What is
Contemporary Art?; and Contemporary Art: World Currents. A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney,
he is currently a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of
the Humanities and a Membré Titulaire of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art.
See www.terryesmith.net
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