This conversation features Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Art Museum, in conversation with Christiane Paul, curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, an internationally renowned expert on the history of art and technology. Together, they will explore how digital technologies are transforming artistic practice and shaping new ways of thinking about art, technology, and the posthuman. The conversation examines the promises and pitfalls of emerging technologies, their potential for social critique and cultural transformation, and the role of contemporary exhibitions in advancing discussions on environmental issues and posthuman thought.
Begin the evening with a performance in the Grand Lobby from 5:00 to 5:45 p.m., featuring local interdisciplinary artist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Lawson White. The museum will remain open until 9:00 p.m., allowing guests time to visit the galleries after the conversation.
Presented in conjunction with Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman, this keynote conversation precedes A Symposium on Art, Technology, and Empathic World Building, which will bring together leading artists, curators, and scholars for a day of thought-provoking conversations on Saturday, September 26.
About the Presenters
Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala focuses on engaging with contemporary art to create exhibitions that museum visitors will find emotionally impactful and intellectually stimulating. With its emphasis on bridging humanity, technology, and nature, Shimmer is the latest in a series of exhibitions curated by Scala that find common ground in the representation of the human body as a site of metamorphosis, instability, and possibility. These have included Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood (2022), Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century (2018), Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art (2015), Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination (2012), and Paint Made Flesh (2009). Scala has also organized solo exhibitions of the works of internationally acclaimed artists Diana Al-Hadid, U-Ram Choe, Inka Essenhigh, Angelo Filomeno, Alicia Henry, Simen Johan, Otobong Nkanga, OSGEMEOS, Virginia Overton, Liliana Porter, Mary Sibande, Do Ho Suh, and Mel Ziegler, among others.
Christiane Paul is the curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a professor emerita in the School of Media Studies at the New School. She received the 2023 MediaArtHistories International Award and the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her latest books are Digital Art (4th ed., 2023) and A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016). At the Whitney Museum, she has curated exhibitions including artport: A History of Internet Art (2026–27), Parting Worlds / Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow (2025), Harold Cohen: AARON (2024), Refigured (2023), and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965–2018 (2018/19) and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to internet art. Other curatorial work includes Chain Reaction (feralfile.com, 2023), DiMoDA 4.0 Dis/Location (traveling show, 2021–23), and The Question of Intelligence (Kellen Gallery, The New School, NYC, 2020).
Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is an internationally renowned expert on the history of art and technology, from the kinetic sculptures of the early twentieth century to recent projects made with blockchains or AI. Until recently, she served as editor in chief of Artforum, where she led the magazine’s editorial initiatives globally. In addition to contributing to magazines ranging from Artforum to Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Spike, she has written commissioned essays for many notable museums—including the Met, Dia, and Tate Modern—and has delivered invited lectures at museums, universities, and other organizations globally, from the Menil and the Clark Art Institute to the Sorbonne and Art Basel. As a curator, her notable projects have included Electric Op (2024), Peer to Peer (2022), and Difference Machines (2021). An art historian by training—with five degrees in art history, including a BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia—her approach to art and technology emphasizes its relationship to the broader narratives and concerns of modern and contemporary art. Her professional honors include an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators, and being named to Artnet’s “Innovators List” and the Observer’s “Business of Art” Power List.
Vanderbilt University is proud to support the symposium presented in conjunction with Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman, bringing together artists, scholars, and museum audiences for conversations at the intersection of contemporary art and technology.
Image: Amelia Winger-Bearskin. I Would Like to Be Midnight / I Would Like to Be Sky, 2023. Video; 10 min., 27 sec. Courtesy of the artist. © 2023 Amelia Winger-Bearskin. Image courtesy of the artist
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