In May 2015, the Walker Art Center and Mn Artists hosted Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, a three-day conference of panels, keynotes, and a blog mentorship program, all dedicated to pondering the present and possible futures for arts publishing online. To complement the proceedings, the Walker and MnArtists collaborated on a series of commissioned essays features thinking by some of the field’s most incisive voices on key topics not addressed within the live event, published in the months following the conference. This page documents the entirety of this inaugural experiment.
With dismal representation by women and people of color in tech and art fields, it’s time to imagine a new landscape of digital art, one that’s diverse and equitable, writes Black Contemporary Art founder Kimberly Drew. Here she highlights—in their own words—18 artists shaping this new terrain.
In a time of digital hyperacceleration and an ever-shifting technocultural landscape, we encounter an influx of trends, microgenres, and fads. But how do we talk about music when so much of what we listen to feels transitory and historically inconsequential? Marvin Lin explores our critical voice in the face of such expiring aesthetics.
Archi-tourism is a web community waiting for its own digital address, writes Alexandra Lange. She longs for a dream site—“Archimaps, Designtrip, whatever”—to map her architectural explorations using smartphone photos. The trick: how to keep that contagious energy as you make snaps into an archive.
When a white, male critic wrote that African-American artist Alma Thomas’s paintings echo “the special middle-ground pleasures of domestic life,” Taylor Aldridge and Jessica Lynne wondered: How might this assessment look if written by a Black critic?
From #BlackLivesMatter to the #UmbrellaMovement, the Web helps artist-activists inform, inspire, and organize around key issues. But art can play a special role within social-change movements as well: It can help transform the Internet into a space for affirmation, self-worth, and emotional healing.
What does it mean for a museum to function as a publisher now? Publishing is no less complicated an endeavor within an institutional context than it is in the external “real” world, where the consumer-grade Internet began altering the production, consumption, and distribution of text decades ago.
With the ever-shifting demographics and economic realities of rural America, the dividing lines between country and city spheres are increasingly fluid. Art of the Rural founder Matthew Fluharty makes a case for rejecting calcified notions of “rural art” and redrawing the geography of the cultural center and periphery accordingly.
The best writing online does more than put beautifully turned phrases on a screen–it performs ideas in digital space. Dustin Luke Nelson ponders pixels and performativity for this new Superscript Reader commission.
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Our recent Superscript conference wasn’t a place where people came to firmly declare something. In fact, many of the speakers seemed more interested in a healthy deconstruction of the conference’s premise. But that didn’t mean that the speakers left without bestowing wisdom upon us, which we happily consumed and regurgitated as context-less bits of Twitter fodder.
Looking back on last weekend’s Superscript, we’re pleased that so much of what we intended with the conference came to fruition. We hosted an incredible array of thinkers who are daily engaged in innovating within digital arts media.
Employing stenographers has become de rigeur at conferences nowadays. Seasoned veteran stenographer Norma Miller has been transcribing every single word that’s been said at Superscript for audiences following the conference via live stream.
On a breezy, sunny day in Minneapolis, I sat down with the artist James Richards, whose newest work, Radio at Night (2015), premiered here at Superscript. The work was created for Walker Moving Image Commissions…
To give a little more context: during the second day’s session “Connectivity and Community,” the conversation moved away from the previous day’s forms of criticism as such, and toward criticism in a digital age.
In his Superscript keynote on “Post-Descriptive Criticism,” Ben Davis posited that the image might supplant description in art criticism today. At one point, he discussed using only images rather than words, citing his (“failed”)…
For artist James Bridle, technology is the means of examining the invisible in social and political domains, such as the locations of drone strikes and the technical systems that mine our data.
“Adding any words to this paper would make it less white than this fucking conference,” read an anonymously type-written note submitted at the Superscript opening party, Everyone’s a Critic. This #sorrynotsorry dis prompts the question of who is included in “everyone”?
Because there is too much fucking information out there, let’s stop and learn from the Japanese wisdom of saying more with less. We don’t have to be all-encompassing; we can write haiku. My poetic interpretations of today’s presentations on Sustainability, Growth and Ethics.
Superscript is touted as being the first conference of its kind, but that doesn’t mean the role of arts journalism in the digital age hasn’t already been explored.
In my application for the Superscript/Hyperallergic blog mentorship, I said something faintly melodramatic about having lived in an “Atlantic vacuum” and my yearning to attend Superscript to “[bridge] the gulf between Canadian and American art criticism.” Though the current climate of austerity in Canada means that Canadian critics must weather an economic landscape that is just as barren and precarious as it is for critics in the US, the mechanisms of our markets, museums, and money-allocation vary vastly.
How will we be reading and writing about art in 10 years’ time, if we are at all? And how will changes in technology shift the work of critics, curators, arts reporters, and artists? In part two of our series on the future of this field, we posed these questions to an array of experts–from critic Brian Droitcour to podcast producer Tyler Green, museum technologist Koven Smith to Kickstarter curator Willa Köerner.
I’ve always been “in-between.” I spent my first three and a half years in Tokyo, hardly learning the language before relocating with my family to a peaceful suburb just outside New York. We moved again, a year or so later, to a neighboring town where I made my first American friends, whom I left each summer for two months to visit relatives in a sweltering, humid Japan.
Throughout its history, art criticism has developed in contexts of relative image scarcity—print publishing—and hence “description” has long been at its core. The Internet, on the other hand, offers a relative surplus of available images, but the way we think about what art writing does hasn’t yet caught up. For his Superscript keynote, Ben Davis aims to name, define, and dig into the topic of “Post-Descriptive Criticism,” looking at the history of writing about art and the new opportunities opening up now.
To put ideas discussed at the Superscript online arts journalism conference into practice, we announce the Superscript Blog Mentorship, presented in partnership with Hyperallergic. This responsive blogging program will create a pop-up newsroom in the Walker Art Center Library and engage a trio of enterprising bloggers in covering the three-day convening.
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