Episode 40: Christiane Paul

Art comes in all shapes and sizes--and sometimes it shows up on your screen. To separate the digital wheat from the chaff we turn to one of the world’s leading authorities in the field, Christiane Paul, author of Digital Art (Thames & Hudson), now in its 3rd edition. Prof. Paul is Director and Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York, and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She conceived and has for two decades overseen both the Whitney’s artport website and its new media exhibitions, beginning with Data Dynamics in 2001. Her talk at Tate last year provides a concise history of the field. We dive into the origins of digital art, preserving Net Art, museum collaborations, augmented reality, collecting versus licensing content, how artists navigate the commercial colonization of the Web, and the complex boundaries between acts of protest and anti-social hacking.