Home ANNUAL SUMMITS 2007 Summit Forging the Future

Forging the Future


Day 1, Group 1

Jon Ippolito, University of Maine
Richard Rinehart, UC Berkeley Art Museum.

Curators and conservators have traditionally prided themselves on their contact with the original artifact. While readers of histories rely on their imaginations to reconstruct a culture from texts or illustrations, museum visitors glimpse (and sometimes touch) culture on a pedestal directly in front of them...
Jon Ippolito © DOCAM 2007

... But chances are that culture didn’t happen in a museum–it took place in a paint-spattered garret in Bateau-Lavoir or a village in the Australian bush or the Arctic tundra. In many cases, it is happening there still, renewed annually, weekly, sometimes hourly through re-performance and reinterpretation. Of course, the culture of remix and renewal tends to resist glass vitrines and authoritative wall texts, a fact that makes museum professionals more than a little nervous. Yet the best means of caring for contemporary artifacts, whether aboriginal or digital, may lie far beyond the gallery walls in regenerative contexts and processes that kept local culture alive long before books and museums.

Jon Ippolito thinks up new ways to build and sustain networks, a fact that often makes him unpopular with media monopolists, bureaucrats, and other apologists for hierarchic culture. Ippolito works with the Variable Media Network to devise new preservation paradigms to rescue digital culture from obsolescence, with the Open Art Network to promote open architectures for media art, and with the Interarchive working group to find net-native ways to connect online scholarship. He’s exhibited collaborative artworks at the Walker Art Gallery, ZKM, and Harvard; curated shows for the Guggenheim on virtual reality and Nam June Paik; and written for the Washington Post, Artforum, and Leonardo. Ippolito’s collaborative architectures such as The Pool and ThoughtMesh have nabbed Wired headlines, while his book At the Edge of Art, co-authored with Joline Blais, offers an expansive definition for art of the 21st century.

Richard Rinehart is Digital Media Director and Adjunct Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. He also teaches digital art at UC Berkeley, and has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University. Richard is a working digital media artist who has exhibited at Exit Art, New York and New Langton Arts in San Francisco. He serves as the Associate Director for Public Programs of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. Richard curates digital art exhibitions and programs for the Berkeley Art Museum, curated digital art for New Langton Arts for six years, and has also guest-curated or juried for ISEA2006/ZeroOne, Creative Capital Foundation, Djerassi Foundation, Marin Arts Council, and San Jose City/Airport Project. Richard manages research projects in the area of digital culture, including the NEA-funded project, ‘Archiving the Avant Garde’, a national consortium of museums and artists distilling the essence of digital art in order to document and preserve it.