This presentation will take place at Conflux HQ on Sunday, September 14, from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

Project Description::

IMA’s Variable Media Art Team focuses on the display and preservation of time-based, performance-based, and activity-based art. As a major encyclopedic museum, the IMA has been working across departments to move beyond traditional strategies and canons of presenting art, including expanding the contemporary art commission series, juxtaposing artworks with non-conventional counterparts such as programs in the sciences and humanities, and developing new media as a museum-wide focus.

Within this context, the VAT serves a strategic and documentary role. Our work aspires to create a framework for archiving all projects, from idea to execution. Variable art can rely on subjective decisions that are used to inform the museum display. Like psychogeographic practice, variable art challenges the reliance on a fixed map or presentation standard. Performance art, time-based art, instructional art – all of these practices of chance challenge conventional notions of “original state” in an artwork. The art in these cases is more closely bound to ideas and ephemeral moments than to formal attributes.

We will present the research projects of the Variable Art Team over the past year in a discursive format. Also, we will apply our multi-media archival experiments to document events and programs that occur during the Conflux Festival. These materials will be available to the artists/practitioners and festival organizers after the festival has ended. By making this archive public, we could provide access to the activities of the Conflux Festival for those who could not attend in person.