GDM organises symposium about quality in an age of visual overload

You me and everyone we know is a curator

While museums are developing strategies to digitalise their collections, online cultural production is growing steadily, with hundreds of thousands of new images posted each day. A lot of potentially interesting work is being produced online, which never reaches the physical world. The distribution of this high quality work is increasingly decentralised, leaving museums, foundations and professional magazines at a loss on how to redefine their role as gatekeepers. On the other hand, the time spent daily behind the computer on internet networking is pushing the demand for a physical experience of our fleeting culture. Designers, artists, mediators and policy makers need to redefine their position, because new technologies define to a large extent today's possibilities and means of presentation and archiving. The search is for new quality criteria, new frames of references, and alternative methods for enabling connections between the virtual and the physical space of today's culture.

Program of the symposium, Saturday December 19th 2009

10.00 Welcome, Coffee & Tea
10.25 Welcome by Mieke Gerritzen
10.30 Bruce Sterling - visions on digital culture
11.20 Julia Noordegraaf - the performing archive
11.40 Sarah Cook - curatorial strategies for bridging online and offline production
12.00 Coffee break

12.15 Rick Poynor - design criticism in the age of digital culture
12.45 Sophie Krier - me you and everyone we know is a curator
12.50 Metahaven - visual identity in the age of digital culture

13.00 Lunch break

14.00 Andrew Keen - on the selection procedures of the online
14.50 Aram Bartholl - online visual culture in physical space
15.10 Upload Cinema - bringing web films to the big screen
15.20 Mediamatic - new models for digital heritage

15.30 Coffee break

15.40 Introduction debate by Henk Oosterling
15.50 Debate about the changing positions of Dutch institutions and policy makers.
With representatives of the main Dutch Funds and Institutes

16.30 Drinks

Moderator: Koert van Mensvoort (artist/scientist)
Visual Interventions: Sander van der Pavert (LuckyTV)