Past Event
A talk launching Information, the latest title in the Documents of Contemporary Art book series, with editor Sarah Cook.
Sarah Cook is a researcher and curator working at the intersections of art, science and digital and electronic media. In this event she is joined in conversation by artist Erica Scourti and artist/writer Tom McCarthy to re-assess information-based art, considering exhibition curation and how artists have investigated information’s materiality, immateriality, overload and post-digital unruliness.
Documents of Contemporary Art are published by the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT press. See the full series of books here.
Sarah Cook is a curator, writer, and new media art historian. Her recent curated exhibitions include Right Here, Right Now (2015) at The Lowry in Salford; Alt-w (2014) at the Royal Scottish Academy, SSA Annual Exhibition in Edinburgh; and Not even the sky: Thomson & Craighead (2013) for MEWO Kunsthalle in Memmingen. She is the author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Sara Diamond) of Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (Banff Centre Press, 2011). She co-founded and co-edits crumbweb.org, the online resource for curators of media art. She is currently Dundee Fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, where she curates the programme for LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery and works as an associate curator with New Media Scotland and the digital arts festival, NEoN. In 2008-2009 Sarah was the inaugural curatorial fellow at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York, and was adjunct curator of new media at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art until 2006.
Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece (1980) and is now based in London and Athens. Her work across different media draws on personal experience as a way to explore networked subjectivities and the infrastructures of life, labour and love in a fully mediated world. Recent presentations of her work include Block Universe festival, London; Big Bang Data at Somerset House; The Practice of Theories at Wysing Arts Centre; Trace Programme at Flo Skatepark, Nottingham; and Dark Archives, a solo commission at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. . Her work has been shown internationally at institutions and galleries like Microscope Gallery, New York; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Munich Kunstverein; EMST Athens; and South London Gallery. In 2015, Scourti was in residence at Wysing Arts Centre and the White Building, London, and she is a Near Now Fellow 2015/6. She is currently finalising a commission for Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond at the Wellcome Collection.
Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, C, was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books; of the novel Men in Space; and of numerous essays that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In 2010 he wrote the screenplay for Johan Grimonprez’s multiple award-winning film Double Take. In addition, he is founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers and artists whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Palais de Tokyo Paris, Tate Britain and Moderna Museet Stockholm. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University.
