Curating New Media by Focusing on the Recipient’s Attitude: Immateriality and Entertainment

Abstract

Curating new media art exhibitions challenges the understanding of how new media technologies reconfigure user’s relation to reality. Artists explore the potential of new communication models to encode ideas and experiences that relate to familiar concepts and to new paradigms. The paper presents two aspects that characterize communication in new media, its problematic materiality and playfulness, and illustrates them with two ArtNetLab group exhibitions: Immaterial and Enter/tain. The object that the curatorial practice reconstructs in the two experimental exhibitions is the attitude that the gallery visitor or the user assumes when coming into contact with a communicative artifact.