In the midst of Yelp reviews, Pinterest boards, and personalized algorithms, who are the cultural authorities for selection, decision-making, and connoisseurship? Artists and field professionals discuss the liberal and democratizing language of curation, collecting, and taste-making in the digital age.

Comments Section programs feature open and informal discussions-in-the-round to encourage debate and conversation in response to current issues, topical prompts, and community reactions. It’s an opportunity for comment threads to go live: all voices are welcome. Part of Mn Artists’ series of programs geared toward taking some of our cultural scene’s most intriguing, hot-button conversations offline and in-person.

About the Presenters

• Paige Guggemos is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer from Minneapolis who’s interested in interactive and community formats for sharing and documenting life and its infinite possibilities. A stranger to limitation, Guggemos is an obsessive maker and keeper of innumerable clubs, blogs, and interactive projects. Her digital work primarily explores themes in visual art and design, Internet and pop culture, film, feminism, and culinary delights such as pizza.

• Meena Mangalvedhekar is a visual artist, projectionist, and photographer based in Minneapolis. She received GD-Art from Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya and BFA from University of Minnesota, and has been active in group shows and public art projects in United States and India. Her works appear as fusion of tangibles and intangibles in which meanings shift, past and present merge. Time, place, and memory always play a key role. Through large installations, digital drawings and place-making experiments, Mangalvedhekar strives to connect community and place. She believes in assisting community organizations utilize these instruments to creatively claim and transform public spaces.

• Andy Adams is an experienced producer with a passion for visual media and digital culture. Since 2004, he has consulted cultural institutions that use the Internet to engage, inspire, and educate the public. Adams is a pioneer in the field of online arts exhibition and has collaborated with the RISD Museum of Art, the Australian Centre for Photography, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and numerous other organizations. Adams is an evangelist for the web’s potential to inspire communities and regularly speaks about the opportunities digital media provide creators to connect with their audiences and each other online. In his spare time, he hosts the FlakPhoto Network, a 13,000-member online community focused on conversations about visual culture. Find him on Twitter @FlakPhoto.

• Steve Dietz is a serial platform creator. He is the founder, president, and artistic director of Northern Lights.mn. The founding director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006, he also served as artistic director in 2008 and 2010. He is the former curator of new media at the Walker, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9, and the Digital Art Study Collection. Dietz also cofounded the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the artist community site mnartists.org with the McKnight Foundation. Dietz founded one of the earliest museum-based, independent new media programs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1992.

• Moderated by Jehra Patrick, Mn Artists Program Director