Featured Roundtable // Curators in Conversation

Whitney Museum Curator of Digital Art Christiane Paul and Helen A. Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center discuss Techspressionism as it relates to art-historical movements of the past as well as to digital art at large.

Christiane Paul is Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, as well as Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, May 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 2003, 2008, 2015, 2023); Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts(Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012); and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 - 2018 (2018/19), Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011) and Profiling (2007), and is responsible for artport (https://whitney.org/artport) , the museum’s portal to Internet art.

Helen A. Harrison, a former New York Times art critic and NPR arts commentator, is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York (http://pkhouse.org/). A specialist in modern American art, she has been the curator of the Parrrish Art Museum and Guild Hall Museum and a guest curator at the Queens Museum. Her books include Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach, monographs on Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers, and three mystery novels set in the New York art world.

Bronx-born artist Colin Goldberg’s work explores the relationship between technology and personal expression. His studio practice bridges multiple disciplines, notably painting and digital media. Goldberg first used the term Techspressionism as the title for a solo exhibition in Southampton NY in 2011, and curated the first large-scale group exhibition of Techspressionist works, entitled Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond at Southampton Arts Center (Southampton NY, 2022). https://www.goldberg.art/biography/

Techspressionism is introduced as a new art-historical term to describe fine artists using digital technology to convey subjective, emotional content. Techspressionism is defined in Wiktionary as “An artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience.”

Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond included the works of over 90 artists working with technology from more than 20 countries around the world including Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Canary Islands, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine and the United States. More information on this exhibition is available here: https://www.southamptonartscenter.org/techspressionism

Notable contemporary artists featured in the exhibition, as defined by Wikipedia, included Victor Acevedo, Suzanne Anker, Frank Gillette, Clive Holden, Patrick Lichty, Chalda Maloff, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky , Steve Miller, Joseph Nechvatal, Michael Rees, Christine Sciulli, Nina Sobell, Anne Spalter and Nina Yankowitz.

Further information on Techspressionism is available at http://techspressionism.com/