LASER Talk with Caroline Jones, Joel Slayton, Chris Chafe, and Piero Scaruffi on Rethinking Art for the Online World

West cost LASER Talk on Rethinking Art for the Online World: Online Art, Online Exhibitions, Online Audience will bring together on June 23, 2020 four scholars to reflect on the consequences of COVID-19 for the art world: The pandemic forced many activities to move online, and the art world was not spared; but what does it mean to move art online? The pandemic provides an opportunity to rethink art on and for the medium of the Internet. Which art is “exhibited” online (as opposed to just “documented”)? What is an online exhibition of art? The World-wide web “is” an exhibition of offline art, and any artist’s website is an exhibition of the artist’s physical art: but is that really an “exhibition”? or is it just the equivalent of a book describing the art? What do artists do online that they don’t do in a physical space? What is the role of the curator in an online exhibition? What is the role of the gallery and of the museum for online art?

A discussion with Caroline Jones (Professor of Art History at MIT), Joel Slayton (founder of the CADRE laboratory at SJSU and former Executive Director of Zero1), Chris Chafe (Director of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), and Piero Scaruffi (cultural historian, founder of LASER and LAST festival).

June 23, 2020 03:00 PM in Pacific Time (USA and Canada) is midnight Vienna time (24:00 Uhr) Registration link

Since 2018 the Department of Media Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna, is a co-host of Leonardo’s LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks — an international programme of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and take place in over 30 cities around the world. The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking. The host of Leonardo’s LASER Talks in Vienna is Klaus Spiess, an internist, psychoanalyst, medical anthropologist, and a specialist in metabolic psychosomatics, who runs the cross-disciplinary Arts and Science programme at the Medical University of Vienna, where he is Associate Professor of Arts in Medicine at the Center for Public Health. His performances and installations have been shown in Europe and the USA. He has published on his work in Leonardo, The Journal of Performance Research, and The Lancet, as well as other publications. Co-host Ingeborg Reichle is Chair of the Department of Media Theory and a full professor of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her primary area of research and teaching is the encounter of the arts with science and cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology and synthetic biology.