From the curator
I’m the curator of Act React and I thought you might like to know a bit about how the show came about and what it means to me. I am the director of Boston Cyberarts as well as an independent curator of new media. My interests in new media are varied. I have curated exhibitions on digital sculpture, biological art, issues of digital identity and the history of art and technology. Being director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival exposes me to other intersections between art and technology including electronic music, digital literature and dance and technology. But the growing use of interactivity in the arts has always been a main interest of mine. In fact, I am also adjunct faculty at Rhode Island School of Design’s graduate Digital + Media program and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where I teach on the history of interactivity in the fine arts.
So I’m very excited about Act React for two main reasons. First, in many ways, this is my dream exhibition. I’ve followed the field of interactive installations for many years and have known and supported the work of most these artists before. Many of them are friends of mine. It was fascinating to watch the seismic shift that occurred when artists moved away from techie interfaces to allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work with their own bodies. In fact, I well remember the SIGGRAPH Conference (a major annual conference on computer graphics) where, in 2000, I first saw works by both Camille Utterback and Daniel Rozin that accomplished this so brilliantly and first planted the seed in my head for this exhibition.
The second reason I’m excited is that I’m a Milwaukee native. I grew up on the North Shore and spent my childhood and teens here. Though after college I moved to Boston, where I reside now, I returned often to visit my parents who lived in the home I grew up in until they passed away a couple of years ago. I have many friends, both mine and my parents, still in Milwaukee. Returning regularly over the past thirty odd years allowed me to watched the city change and grow, including the creation of the Quadracci Pavilion extension to Milwaukee Art Museum, the museum I still think of as my first art museum. And it was on one of these trips back that I first proposed the idea for this exhibition to Joe Ketner, who was Chief Curator and is an old friend. It’s been a great pleasure to work with Joe and the entire staff of this wonderful institution.
So it is a special treat for me to present an idea I’ve been working on for years in the city where I grew up. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoy putting it together and bringing it to you. Please consider it my gift back to the city that has given me so much.
George Fifield
2 Responses to “From the curator”
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Hi George, thanks for the introduction. Local critic Debra Brehmer has some good words about the show in this month’s Milwaukee Magazine: “The problem with some high-tech art is that the human element is lost. Plugged in or projected art tends to spin in its own hydrosphere. The viewer is incidental. But George Fifield…has the solution. This University School graduate, a specialist in interactive cyber arts, has curated an exhibition of 10 works…that guarantees total immersion between man and machine. Each work in “Act/React” is by a well-known international artist, and each offers viewer involvement…The show sounds like a lot of fun.” We’re excited to finally see this exhibition in action! –John Eding, Milwaukee Art Museum
That has to be the clearest introductory curatorial statement I have read to date. Thank you for including your personal connections to the site and work- it makes it more memorable. Wish I could see the exhibit, but I’m glad there is a DVD. Hope all goes well with the opening!