DATA RICH, DIRT POOR
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
(September 2025–January 2026)
Curator
What’s it all worth?
As narrow modes of valuation dominate the contemporary landscape, Data Rich, Dirt Poor digs into how values are constructed environmentally and technologically. As I write, the calculus is unbearable. It is one in which value is determined not by intrinsic worth or collective benefit but by utlility to systems of power. Territory is prized more highly than lives. Public lands and public health are cast aside for profit and influence. Soils and social services are depleted in favor of AI servers, and the costs of food and rent are rising faster than the appreciation of democracy. An exhibition is woefully insufficient for addressing any of these miscalculations; it cannot even adequately represent them.
So what return on investment can an exhibition offer? Data Rich, Dirt Poor suggests pathways toward switching up the value propositions. Together, the works and curation go beyond critique, offering proposals for degrowth in a world seemingly fixed in asset mode. Re-assessing the boundaries of media and media arts, the exhibition also champions low-tech, slow-tech, and no tech methods that resist the hypervaluation of the latest technologies.
Artists: Tega Brain, Sam Lavigne, Claudia Hart, open-weather, Xiaowei R. Wang, Sarah Rara, Isabel Beavers, Cassandra Marketos, Andy DiLallo, Jacob Riddle, Ian Anderson, and Josefina Buschmann.
Commissioned works:
open-weather, Year of Weather: Transmission Archive (September 2024–September 2025) (2025)
Cassandra Marketos, @the.rot.squad (2025)
Data Rich, Dirt Poor is a museum-wide exhibition and the 2025-2026 edition of MediaLive, an international festival of digital arts and technoculture at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA). In addition to curating this edition of the festival, which now runs as a biennial, I curated four annual festival editions from 2016–2019. The festival also features workshops, performances, screenings, panel discussions, and other events that take place at BMoCA and venues across the city of Boulder, CO. It draws thousands of annual visitors and, during my tenure, has garnered hundreds of individual mentions in intenrational, national, and local publications, including but not limited to: The Guardian, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, ARTNET, Colorado Public Radio, New York Daily News, USA Today, NME Magazine, CBS News, VICE Media, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, and the Huffington Post.`
