History
After applying to what he thought was a position as a museum guard, Ippolito was hired in the curatorial department of the Guggenheim, where in 1993 he curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and subsequent exhibitions that explore the intersection of contemporary art and new media. In 2002 Ippolito joined the faculty of the University of Maine's New Media Department, where he co-founded Still Water with Joline Blais. His writing on the cultural and aesthetic implications of new media has appeared in The Washington Post , Art Journal , and numerous art magazines, including in a regular "Cross Talk" column for ArtByte magazine.
Ippolito also has an abiding interest in the legacy for today's artists of conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s. His contributions to this subject include curating events for the New York presentation of Rolywholyover A Circus for museum by John Cage. He is particularly interested in the parallel between digital art, Minimalist and Conceptual art, a parallel that led him to propose a new paradigm for preserving art called the Variable Media Network. [1]
In 2015, Ippolito was the inaugural recipient of the Thoma Foundation Digital Arts Writing Award for an established arts writer who has made significant contributions to the intersection of art and technology. [2]
Projects
Often working collaboratively, Ippolito’s work traverses digital art, new media, and community building. He is a Professor of New Media at the University of Maine, where he teaches classes on programming, online culture, variable media, and viral media and directs the Digital Curation graduate program. With Joline Blais in 2002, he co-founded Still Water, a new media lab at the University of Maine at Orono devoted to studying and building creative networks.
In the 1990s, Ippolito worked with artists Janet Cohen and Keith Frank creating works that exposed the adversarial side of collaboration (Agree to Disagree and the Unreliable Archivist). During this time he also curated the Worlds of Nam June Paik and Virtual Reality: an Emerging Medium at the Guggenheim.
In the 2000s, Ippolito began working with collaborators John Bell and Craig Dietrich on digital tools. These projects include the distributed publication tool ThoughtMesh, a 2005 Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular commission that has grown to include conference proceedings, poetry, and full length books. ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online, which gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites. Authors can choose to post an essay in a central repository hosted by the Vectors program at USC, the sponsor of this project, or to self-archive an essay on their own Web site. Stemming from research into variable media at the Guggenheim, the team is producing the Variable Media Questionnaire and the Metaserver, a lightweight metadata registry that automatically connects related data in separate repositories.
Ippolito and collaborators, including Bell, Blais, and Owen Smith, developed The Pool, an online project design workspace noted by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a "new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs." The Pool is a collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of documentation systems, The Pool stimulates collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. [3]
Additional projects include MARCEL, a permanent high band-width network for artistic experimentation, and the Maine Intellectual Commons Web site, helping to establish standards for creative and scholarly research that contribute to a culture of sharing.
Publications
In 2014 Ippolito co-authored the book Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory with Richard Rinehart, which has been called "the first book dedicated to the subject of conserving new media art." [4] The authors examine the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first century creativity: technology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware; institutions, which may rely on old-media preservation methods; and law, which complicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. They point out that these three threats can also be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into new mediums when their original formats are obsolete.
With Joline Blais, Ippolito produced the 2006 book At the Edge of Art. The book examines prominent new media artwork and artists, such as Alexander R. Galloway and jodi, arguing that the confines of the established art world are failing to recognize the home–grown and often ephemeral art found online. The book creates a metaphor between digital art and the human immune system, relating the auto-immune response to the important role of art in society.
In addition Ippolito has published over twenty book chapters and over forty print articles in a range of outlets such as The Washington Post , Artforum , and Leonardo . He has also given over 100 presentations at numerous academic and culture venues including the National Academies, NASA, and the American Assembly.
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.
Knowbotic Research is a German-Swiss electronic art group, established in 1991. Its members are Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hübler and Alexander Tuchacek. They hold a professorship for Art and Media at the University of the Arts in Zurich.
Joseph Nechvatal is an American post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.
The conservation and restoration of new media art is the study and practice of techniques for sustaining new media art created using from materials such as digital, biological, performative, and other variable media.
Golan Levin is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression.
Douglas Matthew Davis, Jr. was an American artist, critic, teacher, and writer for among other publications Newsweek.
Still Water was a research and development laboratory at the New Media Department of the University of Maine that studied and built networks for artists, academics, and other creative professions. Still Water examined networking from technical, social, and political angles; specific areas of interest included online collaboration, indigenous sharing protocols, and limits placed on artistic remixes and filesharing by intellectual property law.
Martin M. Wattenberg is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. He is currently the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Hybrid art is a contemporary art movement in which artists work with frontier areas of science and emerging technologies. Artists work with fields such as biology, robotics, physical sciences, experimental interface technologies, artificial intelligence, and information visualization. They address the research in many ways such as undertaking new research agendas, visualizing results in new ways, or critiquing the social implications of the research. The worldwide community has developed new kinds of art festivals, information sources, organizations, and university programs to explore these new arts.
Eva & Franco Mattes are a duo of artists based in New York City. Operating under the pseudonym 0100101110101101.org, they are counted among the pioneers of the Net Art movement and are known for their subversion of public media. They produce art involving the ethical and political issues arising from the inception of the Internet. They are based in Brooklyn, New York, but also travel frequently throughout Europe and the United States.
Lia is an Austrian software artist. Born in Graz, she is now based in Vienna. Her work includes the early Net Art sites re-move.org and turux.at. In 2003 she co-curated the Abstraction Now exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Wien in Vienna, Austria. In 2003 Lia received an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision/Net Excellence Category for re-move.org.
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts. New Media art has origins in the worlds of science, art, and performance. Some common themes found in new media art include databases, political and social activism, Afrofuturism, feminism, and identity, a ubiquitous theme found throughout is the incorporation of new technology into the work. The emphasis on medium is a defining feature of much contemporary art and many art schools and major universities now offer majors in "New Genres" or "New Media" and a growing number of graduate programs have emerged internationally. New media art may involve degrees of interaction between artwork and observer or between the artist and the public, as is the case in performance art. Yet, as several theorists and curators have noted, such forms of interaction, social exchange, participation, and transformation do not distinguish new media art but rather serve as a common ground that has parallels in other strands of contemporary art practice. Such insights emphasize the forms of cultural practice that arise concurrently with emerging technological platforms, and question the focus on technological media per se. New Media art involves complex curation and preservation practices that make collecting, installing, and exhibiting the works harder than most other mediums. Many cultural centers and museums have been established to cater to the advanced needs of new media art.
John P. Bell is a digital artist, educator, and software developer at Dartmouth College and the University of Maine whose work centers on creative collaboration and digital culture.
Joline Blais is a writer, educator, new media scholar, and permaculture designer.
John G. Hanhardt is an American author, art historian, and curator of film and media arts. Hanhardt was the Consulting Senior Curator for Media Arts at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where he developed exhibitions, collections, and archives in film and the media arts. He is considered to be one of the leading scholars on video artist Nam June Paik.
Les Levine is a naturalized American Irish artist known as a pioneer of video art and as a conceptual artist working with mass communication. In 1967, Levine won first prize for sculpture in the Canadian Sculpture Biennial.
Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.
Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Xiaoyu Weng (翁笑雨) is a Chinese curator, writer, editor and educator in the area of contemporary art.
