Whitney Museum curator Christiane Paul to discuss new media art Oct. 25

Over the last two decades digital technology has had a major impact on the production and experience of art. On Oct. 25 Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, will discuss digital art and other related forms — such as net art, software art, digital installation and virtual reality — for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

The lecture, titled “From Display to Membrane: Screen Interfaces in Digital Art,” is held in conjunction with the exhibition Window | Interface — part of the museum’s Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics Series — which explores the ways electronic windows and interfaces have come to structure the practice and experience of art today. Paul’s talk will outline the various functions of “screens” in digital art, exploring uses beyond that of mere surfaces for image projection.

The lecture is free and open to the public and begins at 6:30 p.m. in Steinberg Hall Auditorium, located near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards. A reception for Paul will precede the talk at 6 p.m. in the Kemper Art Museum, which is located immediately adjacent to Steinberg.

For more information, call (314) 935-4523 or email kemperartmuseum@wustl.edu.

Paul has written and lectured extensively on new media, net art, hypermedia and hyperfiction. She is the author of Digital Art (2003), which surveys the form’s development since the 1980s while also addressing a number of related issues, from viewer interaction, networks and “telepresence” to the nature of artificial life and intelligence and the role of political and social activism.

“It is debatable when exactly the history of digital art began,” Paul noted in her introduction for Re-Media, the 2002 FotoFest catalogue. “Artists have been experimenting with computers at least since the 1970’s… As in the evolution of photography and video art, this new medium was often considered a threat to traditional art forms.”

At the Whitney Museum, Paul directs artport, the museum’s online portal for Web art, for which she curated the online exhibition CODeDOC (2002). She also curated net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the exhibition Data Dynamics (2001), which explored the mapping of data and information flow on the Internet and in the museum space.

In addition, Paul is director and publisher of Intelligent Agent, a print and online service organization dedicated to digital art, which she co-founded in 1995. Other books include Unreal City: A Hypertextual Guide to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1995) and the forthcoming anthology Curating New Media.

Paul received her master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. She has taught at New York University and Fordham University and currently teaches at both the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design.