After the Future: Live Blog

Digital Utopias, Hull Truck Theatre
Jan 20 2015, 10:30 – 12:00
#artsdigital @ANDfestival

After the Future will be examining how art is changing in the digital age and how new behaviours and systems are emerging in the creation, exhibition, interpretation and dissemination of art. Through sharing recent and historical examples, the panel will examine the challenges of classifying a growing and chaotic field.

Asking questions such as; what are the practical challenges and values, which should inform the future? And how can our media art history inform the sector?

After the Future will be live blogged by AND’s guest author for Digital Utopias Dani Admiss, follow the conversation via the console below.

Chair: Sarah Cook, Morgan Quaintance, Ruth Mackenzie (The Space) and Jon Thomson (Thomson and Craighead).

About the Speakers

Sarah Cook 

Dr Sarah Cook is a curator of contemporary art, writer, and new media art historian. She is the author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Sara Diamond) of an anthology of texts about art and technology drawn from over a decade’s research at the world-renowned Banff New Media Institute (Euphoria & Dystopia, Riverside Architectural Press, 2011).

Sarah Cook received her PhD in curating new media art from the University of Sunderland (2004) where she co-founded the online resource for curators, CRUMB, and helped set up the MA Curating course. In 2011/12 she was theorist in residence in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and from 2012 an honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool (Centre for Architecture and Visual Art). Read more here.

Morgan Quaintance

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. Born in South London, he is a regular contributor to  Art Monthly, Art Review, Frieze, Rhizome.org and a number of curatorial sites and blogs. He is a contributing editor for E-Flux’s online publishing portal Art Agenda, and is a founding member of the curatorial collective DAM PROJECTS.

As a presenter he currently works with the BBC’s flagship arts programme The Culture Show, and is also the producer of Studio Visit, a weekly hour-long interview show broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, featuring international contemporary artists as guests

Ruth Mackenzie

Ruth Mackenzie CBE is CEO of The Space. She is also Artistic Director Designate for the Holland Festival, Amsterdam’s prestigious international arts festival, with her first festival being June 2015. She was most recently the Director of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and Curator of its finale, the London 2012 Festival.

Ruth was General Director of the Manchester International Festival and Scottish Opera; Artistic Director of Chichester Festival Theatre, Executive Director of Nottingham Playhouse, Head of Strategic Planning for the South Bank Centre. She has also been Consultant Dramaturg to the Vienna Festival, Consultant to the BBC, Tate, London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Centre, British Council and British Film Institute amongst others and Expert or Special Adviser on culture and media to 5 Secretaries of State for the Department of Culture, Media & Sport in the UK Government.

Jon Thomson

Jon Thomson (b. 1969) and Alison Craighead (b. 1971) are artists living and working in London and Kingussie in the highlands of Scotland. They make artworks and installations for galleries, and specific sites that include online spaces.  Much of their recent work looks at networked global communications systems and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us.

Recent exhibitions include; Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Haus Lange, Krefeld; Dundee Contemborary Arts; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Carroll/Fletcher, London; Brighton Photo-biennial; and Haus der Kunst, Munich.  Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Jon now lectures part time at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is a senior researcher at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University.

About Dani Admiss (Guest Live Blogger)

Dani Admiss is a Curator and Researcher based in London, UK. Her projects focus on the exchange between Art, Design, Technology and Socio-cultural production.

She is Curator of Ground Truth, an exhibition on mapping, territory and tactics. Prior to this was Assistant Curator of the international touring exhibition Digital Revolution at the Barbican Centre, London, and Co-curator of The Institute Effect at ‘Close, Closer’ the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Portugal.

Currently she is on an AHRC Block Grant-funded PhD studentship 2014–17 at CRUMB, the faculty for New Media Art at Sunderland University. Her research is on emerging types of curatorial practice, focusing on the phenomena of world-building and critical infrastructures in New Media and Digital Art.

She has been a visiting lecturer on the MA Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University (run in partnership with the Design Museum) and with Vassar College University, USA.