A Year in Review with Jon Ippolito
| April 27, 2016 | |
| Digital & Media Art |
As the Foundation gets ready to announce the recipients of the second year of the Arts Writing Awards in Digital Art, we caught up with 2015 Arts Writing Award winner Jon Ippolito to find out how the award has impacted his career and work over the past year. Ippolito, Professor of New Media and Director of the Digital Curation program at the University of Maine, received the award for an established arts writer.
IPPOLITO: Digital creativity is one of the driving forces of 21st-century culture, yet in the past the mainstream art world has been slow to recognize its power. By setting a lofty goal for digital arts scholars, the Thoma Foundation has shifted the conversation among artists, curators, and critics to reflect an age in which apps and the Internet are the new brushes and canvas.
To me, the Thoma Foundation’s Arts Writing Award in Digital Art has meant three things: a practical means of supporting my writing addiction; a vindication of my preference for debating in online forums rather than pontificating in academic journals; and a soapbox on which to call for more attention to the critically important work of new media artists.
Beyond the award itself, I’m excited that a project grant from the Thoma Foundation will enable me to expand ThoughtMesh, an unusual publishing platform that I hope will breathe new life into scholarship on the digital art and culture.
Jon’s recent projects have included:
- “Emulation,” in Raiford Guins and Henry Lowood, eds, Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).
- “Trusting Amateurs with Our Future,” in Christiane Paul, ed., A Companion to Digital Art (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
- Co-author with John Bell, “Diffused Museums: Networked, Augmented, and Self-Organized Collections,” in Michelle Henning et al., eds., International Handbook of Museum Studies: Museum Media (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).
- “The Panopticon Is Leaking,” in Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer, and Nathaniel Tkacz, eds., Digital Light (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).
- “Confiando nosso futuro a amadores,” in Yara Guasque, ed., Arte Digital: Fraturas, preservação proliferativa e dimensão afetiva (Sao Paulo: Coleção Fast Forward, 2015), 172-201.
- Co-author with Richard Rinehart, Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). More at http://re-collection.net.
The winners of the 2016 Arts Writing Awards in Digital Art will be announced on May 3.