Episode 014: Christiane Paul

Show Notes

This week features legendary curator of digital art, Christiane Paul. It would be fair to say that digital art is having a moment these days, so who better to provide some context than the curator who quite literally wrote the book on it. From publishing a glossy quarterly magazine on digital art and hypertext in the 90s (Intelligent Agent), to her extensive curatorial work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and as an independent curator, Christiane Paul has had a major influence on how the world collects, understands, and curates artistic practices that exist in, and evolve from the digital world. Tune in to hear the story of her career’s evolution, and what Christiane thinks about the current hype around crypto art.

Links from the conversation with Christiane
> Whitney Artport: https://artport.whitney.org
> Programmed: https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/Programmed
> The Question of Intelligence – AI and the Future of Humanity https://parsons.edu/sheilacjohnsondesigncenter/the-question-of-intelligence-ai-and-the-future-of-humanity/
> Sunrise / Sunset: https://whitney.org/artport/commissions/sunrise-sunset
> https://www.newschool.edu/media-studies/faculty/christiane-paul/
>  Christiane's book: https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/digital-art-softcover-third-edition

Join the conversation:
https://twitter.com/ArtObsolescence
https://www.instagram.com/artobsolescence/

Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin, and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. 

[00:00:13] Christiane: Hi, I'm Christiane Paul, and I'm the Adjunct Curator of Digital art at the Whitney Museum of American art and professor in the school of media studies at the New School in New York. 

[00:00:25] Ben: I've had the privilege of knowing Christiane for many, many years. And in fact, she was one of the very first folks that I ever got a chance to collaborate with in a sort of freelance conservation capacity a long time ago, while I was still in grad school. Despite this I've learned so many new things in this conversation. For instance, did you know that in the nineties Christiane ran a glossy print publication about digital art that could be found on the shelves next to wired magazine? So cool. 

I think at this moment we're living in where suddenly digital art has become incredibly mainstream and hyped up in some ways, the perspective of someone like Christiane is all the more important. She has been through the ups and downs and booms and busts of the past, and has seen many trends in digital art come and go. So who better to provide some perspective? 

Now before we get started, just a quick reminder that if you are looking for some worthwhile end of your giving, I could really use your help to make this podcast sustainable and to fulfill my mission of supporting the artists that come on the show. If you are in a position to give, you can make your tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York foundation for the arts, by going to artandobsolescence.com/donate. 

Thanks for any help you can provide friends. It is deeply appreciated. And a huge thank you to all of you that have already supported the show, especially this week, thanks ranjit for your donation. It means an awful lot. 

And now folks without further delay, let's dive into my chat with Christiane Paul.

[00:01:51] Christiane: I grew up in Germany and my exposure to the arts was the one that I guess most kids or children receive at some point, my parents would take us on trips and we would go to the Louvre and the Prado and all of the major museums. My dad was actually, although he was a lawyer, very interested in the art. So there was exposure early on and I always loved the arts. But I decided to study literature and, American studies, American lit in particular. And I took the route into digital art and digital media, that many people before me have taken, as I learned. I became obsessed with hypertext when it came about in the eighties.

Hypertext of course had a long history and was conceptualized in various stages. I guess officially by Ted Nelson in the 1960s and Nelson envision something that is in fact much closer to Wikipedia, then the worldwide web, because he saw this kind of two-way docu-verse that people would collaboratively edit that would keep a record of edits. And you would be able to see connections between texts, et cetera, quite a beautiful system, but not manageable when it comes to what we are doing online today, even earlier than Nelson, Vannevar Bush talked about the Memex which is often mentioned as one of the predecessors to the web and to hypertext.

So he imagined this kind of desk with translucent screens in which all of the knowledge would be imported on microfilm. And you could then scroll through it. And annotate, of course, also something that is absolutely not functional or operational. How would you even get that much information into a desk? But that is also often cited as one of the. predecessors. So in the eighties, I think we entered a new phase because HyperCard came along, which obviously is not exactly a hypertext system, but the idea of linked reading and writing began to enter the mainstream. You know, with HyperCard and then the philosophical discussions around deconstruction of texts. So there was kind of a convergence of hypertext and that kind of philosophical theory that I was exposed to at a university. I got obsessed with playing Dungeons and dragons games. Multi-user Dungeons are these early textual versions of this type of environment where you make choices where you want to go. For example, by just typing in commands and navigating textual universes, which to me always was really, really fascinating. 

So I was deeply immersed into hyperlinked reading and writing before the web came about. And I early on wrote a hypertext on TS Eliot's wasteland. So kind of combining these two interests in literature and, technology, which was published as educational software by East Gate Systems. 

 I got my, uh, PhD in Germany and then I came to the US as a visiting scholar to NYU in 1988. NYU invited me and that was still the English department. Of course I you know, met people there and together with a friend of mine whose parents owned a publishing house, we founded a newsletter and later on magazine on new media in arts and education called Intelligent Agent first, a weekly newsletter and then later on a quarterly magazine. That launched around the same time as Wired and Mondo 2000 and Rhizome was also founded around the same time in the mid nineties. 

The first iteration, the newsletter that looked fairly, you know, low key, although for a newsletter it, was fairly, high-end, you know, color, et cetera. The magazine was really beautiful. Our designer was a German architect, graphic designer, Joerg Laser, and he did a really beautiful design and yeah, the magazine was really sold in bookstores. You know, we're sitting there next to Wired and the other magazines, of course, as opposed to those it was very artsy and this was the beginning of it all. We were way ahead of our time and finding advertisers was a nightmare. At one point it was all CD rom publishers. Then they all went out of business and, you know, in the end it just wasn't sustainable. And we switched to mostly online and I, at that time, uh, hired Patrick Lichty, also a well-known media artist. So Patrick became the editor of intelligent agent for quite some time and ran it as an online publication. 

I think the experience of early net art was pure magic for me. I so remember Olia Lialina's Agatha Appears in 1997, because that was one of the first works that really use the browser environment as part of the piece and manipulated it. So you had dialogue appearing within the browser frame, for example, rather than just inside at that time, it was much, much easier to mess with those systems. 

 If you look at the earlier digital art at least of the eighties or nineties, all of them are coming out of different disciplines. Some are trained as painters. A lot of them are architects. Of course digital art has existed since the 1960s at that time, still very much algorithmic drawings that were then executed by drawing machines. And there, have been many pioneers, but it was essentially the launch of the web that kicked everything into a new era and Intelligent Agent was covering new media and arts and education. So galleries started showing digital work. A lot of it still CD rom work, net art was coming about and we were basically chronicling that and writing reviews, and then we got more and more requests from galleries or even museums as well. How do you show that stuff? How is it contextualized? And at some point I figured rather than consulting for everyone, why don't I curate myself? And that was really the beginning of it.

Then the Whitney museum for the first time in 2000 included Net Art in its Whitney biennial, and shortly there after they hired me as an adjunct Max Anderson hired me in 2000 because he realized that they needed to be someone who could answer some of the questions that were coming up. So it was very fairly low-key at the time, but then already in 2001 I created and initiated Artport, the Whitney's portal to Net Art that is running until today. 

And then in parallel with curating at the Whitney, I also did a lot of other exhibitions around the world. That is one of the great advantages of being an adjunct. If you are a full-time curator or employed by an institution than curating outside of the institution is something that you typically cannot do or it requires permission and I always had the privilege of being able to do whatever I want to. 

[00:10:34] Ben: Yeah, that's incredible. I think a lot of people in mainstream society just think of a curator as somebody who decides what's good, like what art gets shown. That's certainly a component of it, but I'm curious from your perspective, ultimately, what is the role of a curator?

[00:10:51] Christiane: I'm so glad you're asking that question because one of my pet peeves is that the term has become so diluted in recent years. Now that everybody is curating window displays and panels and conferences, and that's fine, you know, they're all making selections of content, but that is so far away from what a museum curator does ultimately.

Another job that curators typically take on at a museum is the processing of gifts. So obviously institutions get approached a lot with gifts and they then need to be researched and presented if we decide to move forward with it.

So that's also a part of it. Then curators also very often lead acquisition committees because you as music. Acquire art, mostly through committees. Meaning there are people who are giving money on a yearly basis in order to make this happen. And these committees then meet curators, present work, and the committee votes on it. And collection planning in general is also something you're involved in a lot as a curator.

So, on the one hand, as you already indicated, curators of course are engaged with exhibition making, you know, so you're always researching art. You're coming up with proposals, et cetera. But as you can imagine, within institutions in particular, you have so many proposals that never see the light of day because you're competing with many other people and there are, of course decisions in terms of the overall programming that need to be made, you know, which shows go well together. You need a balance between emerging artists and established artists and the major retrospective. And, and, and. So I think every curator has a few exhibitions in the pipeline or ideas and proposals that do not necessarily go forward once they do, then you're really part of this beautiful machinery that starts planning and executing, you know, from getting loans from institutions, getting a work shipped, working with the exhibition designer on the floor plans, you envision working with the education department on the labels and on all of the texts and with digital media on the web presence. It's endless. So it's very, very involved work on so many levels. 

[00:13:34] Ben: But Christiane, what do you mean? It's digital, don't you just put it on a screen?

[00:13:38] Christiane: Yeah, right. So that is actually one thing that really distinguishes a digital art curator from a traditional art curator. Back in the nineties, we also used to think that digital art curators were completely different in that they were more of a mediator between traditional art and digital art that uh, one of the tasks really was to create platforms of exchange between artists and audiences and institutions, and their role was more that of a producer.

And I think gradually the role of a curator in general, through the influence, I think of digital media and culture at large, became that of a producer. So now I would say that what my colleagues in traditional media and I am doing as much more similar, but at the same time, there's a difference between hanging a painting or a print onto the wall, as complicated as that may be, and really making decisions as to how a work of digital art, which is so much more modular and flexible in many cases gets presented.

So if you show software art, Net Art, VR in the galleries, you're basically in collaboration with the artists are making things up from scratch. In terms of how the work gets presented. I did in 2018 together with my colleague Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, who's the head of conservation at the Whitney and Clemence White an exhibition called Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in art, 1965 to 2018 and included in that exhibition were a few pieces of net art.

And we really redid, those works massively together with the artists recreating interfaces, splitting up, work into different components. And that is what digital art curators have to do all the time, and what makes it very fascinating to me. 

[00:15:57] Ben: A lot of your major exhibitions at the Whitney have had such an incredible chronological span and really brought a lot of these very historic works to light. Have you had cases where for an exhibition you're collaborating with a pioneering artist where, you know, they maybe haven't shown something in like 40 years and it just materially actually doesn't really exist anymore other than maybe some documentation, or maybe at best some like obsolete software, have there been cases like that?

[00:16:26] Christiane: There has been one actually. At the Whitney, we have been very careful in also selecting the works and making sure that they were functional and that they could be exhibited.

But I did an exhibition in 2007 together with Jemima Relli, who was then working at the Tate and Charlie Gere called Feedback, which was also a historical exhibition and we included a work by Edward Ihnatowicz, one of the great pioneers of digital media, called SAM so . This is an automated summoned mobile, basically. It is a very beautiful sculpture that was also included in Jasia Reichardt's, landmark shows Cybernetic Serendipity in the sixties, and it consists of this spine with a flower, like head on it with embedded microphones and technically this spine should be moving and the head should be adjusting itself, according to where sound is coming from, and it wasn't functional anymore. So we decided, because it's such a beautiful object to show a non-functional work with video documentation next to it, because we didn't have the funds to engage in major conservation of the work. 

Etymologically the meaning of the word curating. Also comes from curare caretaking. So curators by definition are also caretakers. I have been very involved in the archiving of work on a conceptual level, and that can be just developing vocabulary for cataloging work and consulting on conservation issues. As most digital art curators, we have been more involved into, conservation than we should have been because people like you who have the expertise and, you know, the company and everything to do this didn't exist, you know? 

[00:18:40] Ben: I was just a little baby.

[00:18:41] Christiane: Yeah, unfortunately, we would have needed you, because traditional conservators weren't trained in the conservation of digital media. So there really was a gap for a while and curators were very much involved in the process. 

[00:18:59] Ben: Something that I also wanted to hone in on is, you know, you are a curator of digital art, not time-based media art. And obviously you have your colleague Chrissie who has a very different focus than you. To you, what really distinguishes digital art, you know, if we're calling it that intentionally, from the broader sphere of what is collectively called time-based media art.

[00:19:24] Christiane: Let's start with time-based media art. That is a very, very broad category. That would include film anything from 16 millimeter to 35 millimeter to super eight, et cetera. So linear, but, time-based then of course, video in all of its manifestations, but then it also includes computer games, for example, game art, software art, and the more digital side of it all because all of that is time-based it unfolds over time. Nevertheless, I think we have to make distinctions and the definition of digital art has changed quite a bit. So in its narrow sense, you could say that it is work that is created, stored and distributed via digital technologies that would at least cover, you know, a lot of installation art and definitely software art and also net art, but it leaves out more, contemporary practices that have returned to materiality to some extent.

So in what is now being called post-digital, which means work that is deeply influenced and created by means of digital technologies, but ultimately crosses materialities. And it's a final form. You're looking at a different picture. So an example would be work such as Rafaël Rozendaal's abstract browsing, which is a Chrome plug-in to start with that replaces images on websites with these colored kind of rectangles and squares, creating beautiful compositions, but then Raphael takes screenshots of that and actually turns these images into Jacquard weavings.

So in the end, you have a weaving hanging on the wall, but it has created via Chrome plugin. So here we are looking at a very different form that does not overlap anymore with the time-based or film video. So I am working with Chrissie often because there's naturally overlap between our areas. There might be a digital animation or more film like project that would fall into both of our portfolios. But in general, I would say the practices are very different when it comes to really coded algorithmic, generative work or work that exists as an installation. 

[00:22:12] Ben: So it's my understanding that it was only a handful of years ago that your department Digital Art at the Whitney was given its own collections committee, and thus budget for acquisitions. and I'm curious, what has that felt like? And, what did that mean for you? How has that really changed your work?

[00:22:28] Christiane: It was a major step to be able to spearhead my own acquisition committee because that really meant collection shaping and filling the gaps in the Whitney's collection when it came to digital art, there certainly were digital artworks in the collection. We had Cory Arcangel's work, for example, but if you looked at it from more of a bird's eye perspective, there were tremendous gaps. And I identified three major areas, the early algorithmic art and pioneering art of the 1960s, the work of the so-called algorists and others then, works of the seventies and eighties, for example, pieces such as Lynn Hershman-Leeson's, Lorna, which is iconic in this area. And then the more contemporary and post-digital practices.

So what I'm trying to do now is really fill those gaps and build out the collection. One thing that curators in general are struggling with right now is filling gaps when it comes to female artists, for example, artists of color, the way we want to build collections and at the Whitney represent American art has shifted quite a bit. So there's a lot of groundwork to do. And to me, it was really a major, major step to be able to write that kind of history within a museum collection and it's a lot of fun doing it. 

[00:24:12] Ben: You know, I have to admit, I think it's easy to forget that it's the Whitney museum of American art I'm curious, has that been more of a useful creative limitation or at times, does that feel like, you know, frustrating? 

[00:24:24] Christiane: The short answer is yes and no when it comes to frustrations regarding the limitation. Pretty much over the past 20 years, all the time I've been at the museum, we have been discussing what that means. You know, what American art means. But one thing we in the end always agreed upon was yes, it actually makes sense to look at what American art is and what American art means. Precisely. At this moment in time. I think that's a very, very interesting moment to question that from a also perspective of post-colonialism and queering the collection, you know, that whole spectrum. And American art was of course an area that came into being relatively late. You know, one of the reasons the Whitney was founded was basically to show that there was such a thing and that it wasn't the French European artists, alone. Basically to chronicle the richness of practice here. But when the new Whitney building opened in 2015, if you remember the big collection show that opened the building was titled America is hard to see and I thought that was a very beautiful title that is also struggling with what we are facing. So I actually do not mind looking, specifically, at the American angle of digital art. I also want to make clear that American in this context means either American born and US citizens, no matter where they live and practice in the world and artists living and working in the US and that has become a little bit more blurry because so many artists now have studios all over the world. They have their Berlin studio and their London studio, and their New York studio. Or they're just Digital nomads, you know? So that makes it also a little bit blurry and sometimes we have to make decisions on a case by case basis, or even an artist who comes to the US for a limited amount of time. Let's say lives here for only a couple of years, but makes a major work about the United States. That is also something that we have been looking at. 

[00:26:56] Ben: Yeah. That's fascinating. I think that it's obviously been a banner year for digital art in some ways, you know, I think I'm going to say the dirty word NFT. But it's interesting, right? You know, just the term digital art has become just such a mainstream string of words that comes out of people's mouths these days, it's kind of uncanny and remarkable. For somebody such as yourself who has just been, on the Vanguard of bringing, what it means to be immeshed in what it means to make contemporary art that engages and problematizes the digital realm, or also, embraces the beautiful aspects of it that are there. What does it feel like, to see this weird, crazy, kooky explosion of, at least some of these things becoming mainstream or just more in, popular discussion.

[00:27:58] Christiane: Yeah. To be honest, it has been really, really frustrating for me. Because on the one hand, yes digital art has entered the mainstream when it comes to the term. But I think that through NFTs and the gold rush surrounding them, the term has become less understood. Even in the New York times, I would read things such as now, digital art can be collected.

Digital art has been collected for decades. And what ultimately people are trying to say is. JPEGs can be collected. And I think for many people, digital art has been reduced to singular digital images. And they're not thinking about the breadth of the medium, be it algorithmic drawings or software art and installation, art, et cetera.

So I think NFTs and the whole discussion surrounding them has created enormous confusion. And it has also kind of eradicated the difference between a digital image of a physical drawing. And a digitally created image. So all of that to me has been very frustrating. Also the idea that a digital art couldn't be collected before. The smart contracts accompanying NFTs are not up to par with the paperwork and certificate of authenticity that collectors and museums usually would take on with a work. 

So I can see huge potential in basically creating a record of provenance on the blockchain. When I saw Kevin McCoy presenting what he called Monegraphs in 2014 at Rhizomes are Seven on Seven at the new museum. I got really excited about the potential of that and Monegraphs ultimately were NFTs. And it was a very artist driven approach to it. In terms of resale rights and really encoding more sophisticated possibilities for art sales. And I thought that would take off and it didn't, and then it comes back right now, pushed by crypto entrepreneurs. I think it's very unfortunate that the art world has been forced to ride the coattails of crypto entrepreneurs. That being said, I see that NFTs have opened a new audience of collectors, people who would not have been that involved into digital art before. I think it is actually more interesting to the people who have been into collectibles, like baseball cards, whatever. Serious collectors are also not that interested in NFTs because for the same overblown price of an NFT, they can get a major installation. So it means a new kind of collector audience for digital art, but once again, there has been a lot of confusion and I can't wait to see how it levels out and what kind of more interesting and serious work we might see in that area. 

I believe that the big advantage here is broadening the collector base and hopefully some of those people who have been mostly dealing in collectibles will also become interested in digital art. I realize that it's very easy to buy and trade NFTs, which is part of the appeal, but there is something to be said for the more cumbersome process of talking to a gallery and to the artist, and, you know, you learn about the work. That's what a real aficionado does, right? 

I think the art world has really changed over the years. Particularly the commercial aspects, you know, the explosion of art fairs, the kind of returns you can get for buying art and how it goes up in value. So for better or worse, there has been a considerable commercialization of the art world. Then I think there has been a massive change in how we perceive culture and cultural events. Obviously that always changes over time, you know, but through digital media and immersion and event based structures, what we see as art and art experience also has changed. It is not coincidental that a gallery like Pace does a branch like Super Blue now basically bringing experiences with ticket sales to an audience, and I think that is a major trend of what we're seeing, particularly in the digital field. And if you look at digital arts specifically, we also have seen massive, massive changes of course.

The way artists engage with digital technologies have really changed with the technologies themselves. So one of the seismic shifts definitely was the one from web 1.0 to 2.0 and social media, the way artists engaged with the online landscape. So, we have seen that net art as this really browser focused kind of experience of art has really branched out into physical space, into mobile devices.

So artists today do more of a networked art that plays out on, uh, various platforms. Then of course, the rise of artificial intelligence has brought major shifts. Artists have been engaging with that much, much more. We have seen so much art created by GANs Generative Adversarial Networks, to the point where people have coined the term GANism, you know, and as always artists really critically engage with the latest technological trends. So I think it's also much needed to do reality checks on whatever the latest developments are. Another seismic shift I think we have seen in the area of virtual reality where we're now in the third wave of this. There were pioneering works in the nineties and of course the technology itself was invented in the sixties, but now we're entering a really new phase as these immersive systems are becoming more available and terrific artworks have been created in that area. So those are just some of the practices that I think have profoundly changed over time.

Another thing I have seen changing is the accessibility of tools. The artists in the eighties and nineties were largely doing their own code or own tool. So good example, being David Rokeby's VNS, Very Nervous System, which ultimately was a software that fulfilled the function of Kinect for Rokeby and many other artists. So those types of works in earlier times would actually use Rokeby's, VNS for interaction. As Kinects entered the market that completely changed and shifted. So, now I would say artists are creating less tools and they're using more off the shelf. Software's particularly younger artists. Sometimes I run into the problem where I ask them. Okay. So can you explain this to me a little bit more on the code level? You know how this was done and I get the answer: oh, honestly, I don't know. Because they're working with off the shelf software while in the eighties or nineties, the artists would go into an hour long explanation of the finer points, how that software was coded. 

I think accessibility is a great advantage, but sometimes I find it a little problematic to operate with a black box somewhere in the picture without understanding what exactly is going on, and I think artists need to be careful about that too and critically engage with that fact. 

[00:37:24] Ben: I'm curious if for you, you kind of have a most memorable art viewing experience. Anything that's really stuck with you over the years?

[00:37:32] Christiane: I think one of the experiences that really was so profound that I think I will never forget was when I saw Lawrence Abu Hamdan's Rubber Coated Steel at the Liverpool Biennial in 2016, it was installed in the oratories or a little chapel, and is kind of a forensic architecture type of work where, Lawrence was asked to work on audio files that recorded the shootings of, these two boys on the West Bank of Palestine and what the work proved was that they were shot by real bullets rather than rubber ones, which is what had been claimed by the Israelis.

So what the experience was, I'm sitting there or seeing the work, which in and of itself is tremendous. And there was a woman coming in with her grandson, tiny kid. I don't know how old he was. Definitely under 10 and he was immediately intrigued by the screen that environment and, uh, his grandmother wanted to show him the statues and the chapel, and he was completely absorbed in the screen and sat down next to me. And at some point turned to me. Yeah. Excuse me, what is this? And I'm like, oh, you know, so I'm explaining, this very violent and, very disturbing work to a little kid thinking the whole time. This probably does not make any sense to him, et cetera. And, then the grandmother appeared again and wanted to lure him away to statues and the chapel and wasn't successful and then asked.

So what is this? And he, in the most beautiful way explained this work to her. And I was so blown away and I think he was just also deeply moved by the fact that it was a work about children who had been killed and that really affected him. But to me, that's so beautifully encapsulated the impact of art. Of a shared experience sitting there with this child and explaining an artwork to him and him really taking it in was just amazing. I think that's what you can only hope for in an art experience. And I was so blown away that I actually also immediately wrote a message to Lawrence and talked to him about this. 

[00:40:12] Ben: That's incredible. I think kids are just so much smarter than us when it comes to art 

Sometimes, you know, 

[00:40:18] Christiane: I believe that. 

[00:40:20] Ben: In this kind of interesting moment, we're living through in terms of art online and digital art in general, is there any advice that you would give to an aspiring curator of digital art?

[00:40:34] Christiane: Yeah, it sounds very general, but, I think a very good advice is awareness in general and follow the art, really doing research about who is showing what, where worldwide. We are so much in this broadcast yourself environment, where everybody is generating output and living ultimately in bubbles. And I'm not saying that the art world isn't a bubble, but really, um, paying attention to what artists are doing, what institutions are doing, looking at the back end of all of that practice and getting a sense of what's going on in different art worlds, I think is so important.

And yeah, for me, it's always been. Follow the art rather than coming up with curatorial ideas and then finding the artwork that kind of fits my ideas. Most of my shows have emerged from following artists and artwork. And that's where the idea originated. Yeah. So I think really awareness rather than being focused on, on output and getting your own ideas out there is really crucial. 

[00:41:48] Ben: What are you working on right now these days? What's next for you?

[00:41:51] Christiane: I'm at any given time working on the next few Artport projects. We just very recently launched a piece by Ryan Kuo as part of the Sunrise Sunset series, those are the 30 second interventions into whitney.org that play out at sunrise and sunset time in New York. And, coming up very soon is a project by Paolo Cirio, Criminal Data, that engages with the images taken of incarcerated people and marketed.

And I also very recently launched DIMODA 4.0, That's the Digital Museum of Digital Art, run by Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William Robinson. So I curated the 4.0 version, it's a virtual museum with different artworks within it, and it is now going on tour for the next year. So there will be a few more exhibitions of that coming up.

[00:43:02] Ben: That's all you're working on, that's it? Christiane thank you so much for your time. I feel like if this conversation was a hypertext, this was all basically the landing page. 

[00:43:15] Christiane: Yeah. 

[00:43:15] Ben: I could talk to you for five hours and we probably would just barely scratch the surface. There's so much I would love to dig deeper on. So I'll just have to have you back on the show in two years, you know? Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it so much.

[00:43:26] Christiane: Thank you and, until next time. Thanks a lot. 

[00:43:30] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you liked what you heard pretty, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help other people discover the show, which in turn helps with the fundraising to support artists. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can find the show on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. 

And lastly, do you have a question or comment or do you want to respond to something you heard on the show you can call and leave a voicemail at 1-833-ART-DATA. That's 1 8 3 3 2 7 8 3 2 8 2. 

Thanks again so much for joining me this week, friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.