part 1 of 2

Rhizome and lists devoted to new media curating such as CRUMB have
recently
spurred heated discussions about the practical and theoretical issues of
exhibiting new media art within a traditional museum context. As I sat
eavesdropping on these some of these debates, it became clear to me how
much
of the critical syntax around exhibition display strategies and audience
interaction echoed the conversations of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And more striking to me was the fact that at an earlier moment
discussions
about contemporary art and new media used to take place in the same
conversation, be written about in the same publications and show in the
same
venues. In the 1960s-1970s artists interested in issues of media,
computation, social networks, and communication theories used to be in
active dialogue with their contemporaries probing other issues under the
general guise of "conceptual art." There was a moment when Stan
Vanderbeek
would be exhibiting with Robert Whitman and Dan Graham (The Projected
Image
show at ICA Boston, 1967) or Les Levine could be in the same show as
Hans
Haacke, Douglas Huebler, and Lawrence Wiener (Software, 1970).

Of course back then the issue wasn