I am pleased to be presenting in the seminar Transmissions and Transitions – (Post)media, Museums and Cultural Memory at the Statens Museum for Kunst: National Gallery of Denmark with Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Sarah Kenderdine, and Anna Ramos.
How can collection, exhibition and distribution practices adapt to and reflect new technological and social realities? Throughout the 20th and 21st century, the position of the museum has been constantly challenged by a number of intersecting cultural patterns and tendencies. At this seminar, we want to take a fresh look at the challenges posed by the impact of (post)media, real-time technologies and a distributed social sphere on art, publics and the museum as an institution. The questions facing museum professionals hinge on the ways that these complex cultural patterns are recognized and realized, affecting both archival and conservation work as well as exhibition, art interpretation and education. In this sense, the (post)medial condition also poses questions about the transition of the social, cultural and political construction of the museum and its contexts. This seminar addresses such questions in the light of state-of-the-art professional and academic practices and imaginaries. How do the instabilities of (post)media and real-time technologies affect museum practices? What does conflicting notions of ephemerality, materiality and intangibility mean for concepts of art, the artwork and cultural heritage and how must museums respond to this? Why, what, and how do we archive and how are the archives best cared for, accessed and actualised? Which ideas of (in)authenticity are expressed in the interplay between archiving, documentation and remediation? How do cultural concepts of media, history and memory underpin the practices and choices of museum professionals and the experiences of the museum visitors? These are all key questions that museums must address in order to move past a representational cultural paradigm towards a more constructive engagement with their surroundings. The seminar seeks to fold this debate into discussions about video art, the art market, animated archives, embodied experience, sound, radio, curation, preservation, debt and our obligations to past and future generations. Confirmed keynote speakers Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), Sarah Kenderdine (EPFL Lausanne), Hanna Hölling (UCL London) and Dieter Daniels (HGB Leipzig).
PROGRAM 9.00 – 9.30 Arrival and registration 9.30 – 10.00 Welcome and introduction, Birgitte Anderberg, Morten Søndergaard, Rasmus Holmboe 10.00 – 10.50 Dieter Daniels, HGB Leipzig 10.50 – 11.10 Coffee 11.10 – 12.00 Hanna Hölling, UCL London 12.00 – 13.00 Lunch-break (lunch is not included) 13.55 – 14.45 Sarah Kenderdine, EPFL 14.45 – 15.10 Coffee 15.10 – 16.00 Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths 16.00 – 17.00 Panel and wrap up