Panel Statement

The importance of the audience as part of the media art event is widely acknowledged, but although interaction and embodiment are well theorised, we are yet to achieve a well grounded understanding of audience experience. It is fundamental to defining the context around which an art work has been made and shown. The panel asks how we understand the concerns of audiences and how they respond to concepts of creativity and innovation in media art.

The premise of the panel is that understanding how an audience experiences media art is fundamental to understanding the impact of the art work. Too often the “idea” of the audience is invoked in media arts rhetoric in vague and general ways, and the effect that art works have is discussed in terms of expectation and supposition. This panel aims to move beyond these limitations and argues that we need to pay particular attention to the use and value of specific methods and approaches for studying experience. The panel aims to create an opportunity for practitioners and researchers from different perspectives to consolidate and develop a vibrant emerging body of knowledge about audiences of media art, which can empower artists, curators and academics.

As discussions around the necessity of archiving and collecting new media work expand, it is arguable that future iterations of such artworks can only have cultural meaning if we are able to provide information on the context in which they were experienced: how and why audiences responded to them. This also raises issues about the way such information can be recorded and incorporated within documentation of art works.

• Dr Lizzie Muller (AU) is a curator and researcher, Senior Lecturer at University of Technology, Sydney (AU). Lizzie’s research investigates audience experience from a curatorial perspective. She has adapted tools and techniques from Interaction Design to work with audience experience as a material, and was founding curator of Beta_Space, a dedicated “prototyping” environment for interactive art at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
• Peter Ride (UK) is a curator and Research Fellow, University of Westminster, UK. Peter’s research addresses how different organisations have a different understanding of their audiences and this is a ‘framing’ device that can affect how a work is encountered and experienced. He also looks at the way that audience research can be used to re-define the curatorial scope of an exhibition.
• Nathaniel Stern (US/ZA) is an experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He recently completed his Ph.D. on interactive art and embodiment at Trinity College Dublin, and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (US).
• Katja Kwastek (DE) is art historian and worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. from 2006 to 2009. Before, she was Assistant Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (Munich) and Visiting Scholar at the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, US). She has curated exhibition projects, lectured and published widely, including the catalogue “Ohne Schnur. Art and Wireless Communication” (2004). Currently she finishes a book on the aesthetics of interaction in digital art.
• Christopher Salter (CA) is an artist, Associate Professor in fine arts at Concordia University and researcher at Hexagram, Montreal. Salter’s performances, installations and publications have been presented at numerous festivals and conferences around the world. He is the author of Entangled (MIT press, 2010).

Full text (PDF) p.  311-314