Video Art and Social Change

Curator and writer Barbara London, artists Martha Rosler and Tony Cokes, and scholar Helen Koh join together to discuss how artists have championed video as an agent of social change for more than fifty years. The speakers will consider video’s prominence as presented in MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition, “Signals: How Video Transformed the World.”

The evening program looks at how changes in video and media art have accelerated through access to better and better tools, as well as with faster access to impressive amounts of information, coupled with the speedier flow of shared ideas through social media. The interdisciplinary artists with work featured in “Signals” have raised important questions about the impact that electronic media have had on such issues as identity politics and technological power. One might wonder, why aren’t there readily categorical movements in the perpetually evolving young field of media and digital art? Perhaps it’s due to the fact that neat narratives don’t fit our fragmented and technologically mediated lives.