Abstract

New media art, including net art, software/AI art and interactive art, is being exhibited and collected by both private collectors and museums. However, it changes notions of exhibition, audience, and archive. The art is considered here not under conventional media-specific categories, but as presenting different types of ‘behaviour’ to the curator or the art historian, based on Steve Dietz’s categories of Connectivity, Computability and Interaction. Lev Manovich has considered that much of the exciting new media ‘art’ is happening in ‘design’ contexts. This thoroughly disrupts conventional art historical models, which might be unaware of new media systems of Open Source, Critical Making, and a highly politicized understanding of AI and Data. Artwork examples discussed include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, YoHa, Nye Thompson, Garnet Hertz, and Cornelia Sollfrank. How can curators and historians rethink their systems to facilitate the exhibition and collection of new art beyond standard commercial models?