Digital Art And Museum Culture To Be Subject Of Institute Lecture

Benjamin Weil, Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will speak on "Digital Art and Museum Culture" on January 17 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. A reception will follow.

"A growing number of artists are using digital technology to carry out their investigation, be it visual, sound or multimedia," notes Weil. "How is byte-based art changing the museum's functions? From collection to conservation, display and scholarly approach, all usual museum practice is being challenged by new art forms that require technical mediation, and are consequently unstable and somewhat dematerialized."

Weil's talk will address a number of such issues, "based on observation and experience with digital art, especially online art."

Cofounder and curator of �da'web, the pioneering experimental exhibition space for online art, Weil was director of new media at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London for two years before joining the SFMOMA in February 2000.

As curator of �da'web, which presented medium-specific projects by contemporary artists on the World Wide Web from 1994 to 1998,Weil selected artists and coordinated project production, furthering his vision of the site as a "digital foundry" where artists could address this new medium aided by the technical expertise of Web producers. The site's archive was donated to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, as the centerpiece of a new Digital Arts Study Center.

In 1999 Weil organized Plain.php, a selection of web sites that was part of an international exhibition at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany; and Readme.txt, a selection of websites for Virtual Tours at the Museo de Monterrey, Mexico. He has also organized web-based projects for many other institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Born in Paris, Weil graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 1989. His writings have been published in international art publications, and he has lectured widely on creating art on the Web.

The event is one of a series of public lectures sponsored by the Institute's School of Social Science during the academic year 2000-01 in connection with a year-long exploration of "Information Technology, New Media and the Social Sciences."