Histories of Interactive New Media Art Exhibitions

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 system. A combination of documentary sources including installation images, audience data and crowd-sourced documentation is proposed.