Foundational media art curator Barbara London’s first streaming-on-demand exhibition explores technological change, mass media, and the universality of moving images in contemporary art.
Perpetual Motion explores how the nonstop technological change permeating daily life impacts the dynamic activity of contemporary artists. In the continuously evolving domain of media art where interdisciplinary crossovers occur within the fields of film, video, music, sound, and performance, innovative use of the latest audiovisual tools is the new normal. Moreover, the moving image is one of the most vital art forms, and has become ubiquitous on smartphones, viewed in compressed durations in tandem with shortened attention spans.
The ten moving-image works featured in this streaming exhibition range between two and eleven minutes in length. Drawn from the ever evolving, inventive field of media art, each of the videos engages and inspires. In this moment of recalibration, new ideas about society and community have come to the fore. The selected works leave the viewer with as many questions as answers, which is what all art should do.
Participating artists include Kamari Carter, Richard Garet, Bang Geul Han, Cornelia Parker, Wong Ping, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Aki Sasamoto, Joey Skaggs, Federico Solmi, and Claudix Vanesix.
Perpetual Motion will be available for streaming on PAMMTV where viewers around the world are able to access cutting-edge video art through their web browsers, mobile phones, tablets, or Apple TV.
About Barbara London
Barbara London is a New York-based curator, writer, and scholar who founded the video exhibition and collection programs at the Museum of Modern Art, where she served as a curator from 1973 to 2013. At MoMA, London organized exhibitions with such media mavericks as Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, Teiji Furuhashi, Joan Jonas, Shigeko Kubota, and Zhang Peili. Her thematic exhibitions included “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” (2013); “Looking at Music” (2009); and “Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto” (1979). She was the first to integrate the internet into curatorial practice, through such projects as Stir-Fry (1994, http://www.adaweb.com/context/stir-fry/) and dot.jp. (1999). London recently published Video/Art: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon, 2020) and curated the exhibition “Seeing Sound” (Independent Curators International, 2021–26). Her writing has appeared in numerous catalogues and publications. She has taught courses on media as art at Columbia University, Yale, New York University, and the School of Visual Arts.
