New on Outland: The People's Tools

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We're writing to announce the launch of Outland, the publication produced by Outland, a new, nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing and education in the field of art and technology. We've been invited to contribute a monthly column where we'll be writing about encounters between institutions and new media, and the shifting meaning of digital work. 

In today's first column, "The People's Tools," we throw back to an earlier moment in our professional life while reconsidering artist Cory Arcangel's pioneering 2011 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pro Tools. We were working at the Whit at the time as the museum's founding director of digital media, and were really taken—we still are, clearly!—by the way Arcangel navigated standard-issue institutional bureaucracy to create an experience that was truly memorable in so many regards. This show, for us, was a bit of a precursor to the focus on making big, digitally-experiential exhibitions that we see today.

Here's a little excerpt, below. Read the full piece on Outland.

Now, many years after Arcangel’s Whitney exhibition, it could be said that we as a society have all the “experience” we need, even as institutions and art—digital art, in particular—skew bigger and more experiential than ever. The concern is about the attention economy and the havoc technology is wreaking on our mental health and our cognitive ability to encode and retain information. As a value proposition, what makes a memory worth retaining beyond the point of mere nostalgia? Why drag the past forward through time? And why does Arcangel’s particular sensibility, rooted at its core in the visual and social language of a now rapidly degrading internet, still resonate in an age of AI-generated slop, so-called “brainrot,” and the enshittification of seemingly everything?