News Roundup: How Digital Distribution is Changing Forms
Every week, AMT-Lab contributors share articles on interesting news at the intersection of technology and arts management. Recently, this practice has generated lots of articles dealing with the distribution of art online. Using the Internet as the platform, museums and artists are spreading their work worldwide. Thanks to new types of digital distribution, the way people engage with art seems to be transforming into a wholly new form of its own.
Museum Exhibits Are Now Purchasable With Bitcoin
The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, MAK, recently purchased Event Listeners from artist Harm van den Dorpel using bitcoins--the first acquisition of this nature. MAK is using this alternative currency and the buzz surrounding it to highlight what they consider to be “post-internet art.” By combining this digital currency, the act of acquisition and the art itself, this latest transaction goes side-by-side with the exhibit’s goal in “[integrating] itself into people’s lives in a new way.”
The Guggenheim Launches Its First Ever Online Exhibition
This new online only exhibit expands the way museums incorporate technology into museum structure. Called Åzone, it “isn't just an exhibit about technology, the exhibition is the technology.” Participation in the piece is centered the “Future’s Market,” an online market in which users spend Åzone currency by investing in stock futures of trends that they predict will define the world of tomorrow. Check out the exhibit and make your own predictions here.
In the series “Brushes,” eight artists opened an online exhibition of paintwork they created with their computer. The artwork is not mechanically produced, but uses “mouse movements, digitized brushstrokes, or touchscreen swipes” that mimic human gestures. This way of expression aims to provide “contemplation of our technological society from within its complex apparatus.”
Banner image by Surian Soosay, licensed under Creative Commons.