Christiane Paul to give lecture on new media art

Over the last two decades, digital technology has had a major impact on the production and experience of art. At 6:30 p.m. Oct. 25, Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, will discuss digital art and other related forms — net art, software art, digital installation and virtual reality — for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

The lecture, titled “From Display to Membrane: Screen Interfaces in Digital Art,” is held in conjunction with the exhibition “Window | Interface” — part of the museum’s Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics Series — which explores the ways electronic windows and interfaces have come to structure the practice and experience of contemporary art. Paul’s talk will outline the various functions of “screens” in digital art, exploring uses beyond that of mere surfaces for image projection.

Paul has written and lectured extensively on new media, net art, hypermedia and hyperfiction. She is the author of “Digital Art” (2003), which surveys the form’s development since the 1980s while also addressing a number of related issues, from viewer interaction, networks and “telepresence” to the nature of artificial life and intelligence and the role of political and social activism.

“It is debatable when exactly the history of digital art began,” Paul wrote in her introduction for “Re-Media” the 2002 FotoFest catalogue. “Artists have been experimenting with computers at least since the 1970s. … As in the evolution of photography and video art, this new medium was often considered a threat to traditional art forms.”

At the Whitney Museum, Paul directs “artport,” the museum’s online portal for Web art, for which she curated the online exhibition “CODeDOC(2002). She also curated net art selection for the 2002 “Whitney Biennial”and the exhibition “Data Dynamics” (2001), which explored the mapping of data and information flow on the Internet and in the museum space.

In addition, Paul is director and publisher of “Intelligent Agent,” a print and online service organization dedicated to digital art, which she co-founded in 1995. Other books include “Unreal City: A Hypertextual Guide to T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land'”(1995) and the forthcoming anthology “Curating New Media.”

Paul earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. She has taught at New York University and Fordham University and currently teaches at both the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design.

The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. A reception for Paul precedes the talk at 6 p.m. in the Kemper Art Museum adjacent to Steinberg.

For more information, call 935-4523 or e-mail kemperartmuseum@wustl.edu.