Media Art 21 Symposium at Rhizome World
EVENT DETAILS: 🗓 1-3 PM, May 10th, 2025 📍 WSA, 161 Water Street, NYC
Media Art 21 comes to Rhizome World for a new symposium on the platform’s three key themes: The Posthuman, Ecologies, and the Commons. In Partnership with Onassis ONX and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, this convening features artists and scholars who offer critical reflections on contemporary art practice and shifting paradigms in media art in particular.
Participants Include: Rudolf Frieling: Curator of Media Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Alistair Hudson: Scientific-Artistic Chairman, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe Zhang Ga: Professor and Vice Dean of the Institute of Sci-Tech Arts, CAFA, Beijing Doreen A. Ríos: Independent Curator and Researcher Lauren Lee McCarthy: Artist and Computer Programmer Tega Brain: Digital Artist and Environmental Engineer Miao Ying: Artist
The order of discussions will include:
Introduction to Media Art 21: Alistair Hudson (Online from ZKM), Rudolf Frieling & Zhang Ga
Conversations: 1. Commons and Platforms with Doreen Rios and Rudolf Frieling 2. The Posthuman and Ecologies with Tega Brain, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Miao Ying Moderated by Zhang Ga
Roundtable with all participants
About MA21 Media Art 21: Practices, Reflections, and Pedagogies of Global Media Art Since 2000 https://ma21.org/
Media art is an essential part of global contemporary art practice. It addresses the world of the present through the media of the past, present, and future. With the increasing artistic production of media art and its growing presence in international art exhibitions comes a growing need for critical and scholarly reflection, as well as for the inclusion of this field of practice in art education. For artists, scholars, curators, and students, access to original materials in conjunction with critical reflection is of prime importance for the study and development of an artistic field that has remarkably influenced, shaped, and stimulated contemporary art.
Organized by ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts) with the co-artistic directors of the platform, Rudolf Frieling (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Alistair Hudson (Center for Art and Media | Karlsruhe), and Zhang Ga (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), Media Art 21 is an online project with initial funding from the HE Foundation and additional support from the New Media Arts Foundation, and is hosted by ZKM. The project encourages contributions from potential partners—artists, scholars, critics, and curators—to participate in all constructive ways, making it a rich intellectual resource for the study of media art in the new millennium.
About ZKM: Founded in 1989, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe stands worldwide for an open concept of art in the digital age. At the ZKM, scientific collection and archive research is intertwined with artistic research on the electronic arts. Through these interdisciplinary connections, we at the ZKM present and produce the evolution of art and media of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Whether exhibitions, symposia, publications, concert programs or digital formats, the ZKM is the platform for the discourse of art and technology with society, science, business and politics in order to examine and better understand the effects of our media and digital world on us humans.