Event
Barbara London in Conversation: New Media in the Museum
Barbara London is a curator of media at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; she has held this position since founding that institution's video program in 1974. Along with commissioning, presenting, and publishing on the work of significant media artists including Laurie Anderson, Terry Fox, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Zhang Peili, Gary Hill, and Bill Viola, London has embarked upon several travel-intensive "dispatch projects," prospecting for new artworks and electronic tendencies in a variety of countries including China, Russia, and Japan. Her pioneering exhibitions include Song Dong, Video Spaces, Automatic Update, Looking at Music: Side 2, among others. She will discuss how artists in the late 1960s spirit of counter-culture and revolution experimented with alternatives to traditional art making. Intangible, time-based practices became options, best suited to seat-of-the-pants-style, artist-run events and venues that were sprouting up in metropolises everywhere. The early media pioneers inventively found their way and set the stage for the do-it-yourself spirit of today’s gamers, hackers, and web designers. Media as an inter-disciplinary field is still ripe with invention.
This program is made possible through the generous support of the Department of History of Art and Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.