“Is the Museum a Database?” MA Curatorial Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
MA Curatorial Practice presents a discussion between artists Zach Blas and João Enxuto and Erica Love, curator Chrissie Iles and art critic Mike Pepi.
"The critique of the museum was a defining discourse of the twentieth century. But today the museum faces more virulent destabilizations that have emerged alongside new behavior from the general public. Today we find the museum organizing itself for transmission and retrieval, anticipating the final aspirations of an algorithmic regime. The resulting database logic aligns the institution with interests originating from the model of the Silicon Valley enterprise—in constantly updating streams/cycles, the museum reformats its content towards structured, indexed or digitally stored data sets or sets of relations among data."
—Mike Pepi, "Is a Museum a Database?: Institutional Conditions in Net Utopia"
Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security and control. Currently, he is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.
João Enxuto and Erica Love collaborate on projects about art institutions, labor conditions and value systems shaped by recent technologies.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Iles co-curated the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials as well as the recent exhibition "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905–2016."
Mike Pepi is a New York-based critic who works at the intersection of art and technology. His work has appeared in Frieze, e-flux, Flash Art, Art in America, DIS magazine and The Art Newspaper.
