Abstract

How can a history of exhibitions inform curators on the challenges of exhibiting new media art? How can histories of exhibitions dealing with interaction and participation inform the curation of new media art involving these behaviours? Exhibitions of broadly conceptual or immaterial work such as Information (1970) and Les Immatériaux (1985) lead to an examination of exhibitions where participation is key, including Bodyspacemotionthings (1971 and 2009), Serious Games (1996), 010101 (2001), The Art of Participation (2008), and Current (2011). New media artworks including Talkaoke, www_hack, and Random Information Exchange help to establish critical categories for different kinds of participatory systems. For future critical art histories of participatory art exhibitions, I propose that an effective method would include a combination of documentary sources, such as installation images, audience data and crowd-sourced documentation.