SUBTERRANEAN

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
(April–May 2019)
Curator

The life-cycle of media technologies begins and ends in the ground. Made of rare-earth elements, silicon, plastics, and other materials originating in extraction, these devices also produce waste in their manufacture, use, and disposal. Subterranean considered technology’s relationship to the earth while taking up its role to bury—and dig up—matters of concern. I designed the exhibition and festival as a testing ground for curatorial approaches with reduced environmental harms, taking earthly materials in into account by, for example, experimenting with alternatives to vinyl wall text, painting gallery walls with custom-mixed museum leftovers, repurposing labels from past exhibitions, and commissioning unique performances that required no air travel (prior to COVID-19).

Artists & Researchers: LaTurbo Avedon, Michelle Ellsworth, Brian House, Matmos, Kendle McDowell, Tabita Rezaire, Anna Ridler, Rick Silva, The Colorado Mycological Society, and Francis Marion Moseley Wilson

Commissioned works:
Matmos, Plastic Anniversary, Low Carbon (2019); LaTurbo Avedon, From Here We Dream Sublime (2019)

Subterranean was the 2019 edition of MediaLive, an annual international festival of digital arts and technoculture at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA). The festival is now a biennial and 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.`