March 27th: George Fifield – History of Interactivity in Galleries
When: Wednesday, March 27th, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA
Presenter: George Fifield, Director of Boston Cyberarts
Free event
RSVP to info@atne.org. Space is limited.
In the early 1980s a new form of interactive installation art came into being, specifically designed for the white box of the gallery or museum. These gallery-based installations explored numerous themes, including ideas of expanded cinema and evolutionary simulation. The issue of the interface became a problem: What kind of mechanism drove the interaction? In the mid-1990s new work was developed that sought to eliminate the mechanical interface and replace it with an interface we are more familiar with: our own body.
About the Presenter
George Fifield is a new media curator, a writer about art and technology and teacher. He is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which has a number of projects in the Boston area including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery and Art on the Marquee, which puts media art on the 80 foot video marquee in front of the Boston Convention Center. He is also an independent curator of New Media with numerous projects here and abroad. His most recent exhibitions were Drawing with Code: Works from the collection of Anne and Michael Spalter at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in January 2011 and Act React: Interactive Installation Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum in October 2008. For thirteen years until 2006, Fifield was Curator of New Media at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. He is adjunct faculty at Rhode Island of Design’s Digital + Media graduate program and teaches at Massachusetts College of Art. He was executive co-producer for The Electronic Canvas, an hour-long documentary on the history of the media arts that aired on PBS in 2000. Fifield writes on a variety of media, technology and art topics for numerous publications. In 2006, Fifield was honored with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Boston Arts Community by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter. In 2007, Boston Cyberarts was honored with the Commonwealth Award by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the category of Creative Economy.