Media Crazy: New and Old Technologies in Contemporary Art

Floor 3, Seminar Room, Laurie M. Tisch Education Center; Floor 8, Tom and Diane Tuft Trustee Room

This three-week course explores how technology—analog and digital, outdated and cutting-edge—shapes the ways that contemporary art is produced and how we experience it. How do artists use technological concepts like networks and algorithms to challenge the conventions of artistic practice, and to imagine alternative ways artworks might circulate beyond the gallery or the museum? In dialogue with the exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, we consider a range of artists and practices, from Nam June Paik’s use of television to the computer-based projects of Sondra Perry. Tracing key transitions in modes of production and the increasing prevalence of technological images and objects in our everyday lives, the course asks how artists explore the intersection of technology with urgent social issues including race, politics, and popular culture.

Instructor: Josh Lubin-Levy is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU. Specializing in modern and contemporary art and performance, for the past ten years he has also worked as a dance dramaturgy and performance curator.  He was a 2016–2017 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is currently on faculty at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University and in the department of Visual Studies at The New School.

Thursdays, October 4, 11, 18
2–3:30 pm 

Three-week series: $375 adults; $300 members. 

For general inquiries and information related to the course, please email courses@whitney.org.