Ross Gibson is professor of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Technology, Sydney. For 25 years Ross Gibson has worked as a writer, teacher, editor, filmmaker, curator and multimedia producer. Developments in digital technology have helped Gibson to refine the convergences of media, genres, ideas and emotions that are examined and evoked in his art. His interests are the histories of space and communication in colonial cultures, particularly in Australia and the Pacific. Recent projects include the museum installations Crime scene (1999-2000) and Darkness loiters (2000-01), both co-curated with Kate Richards.

ABSTRACT

Theatres for alteration

To get started let me propose that we know we are encountering art when we sense that the experience is changing us and we sense that, if we came back tomorrow, we’d undergo change again and differently. Art is a complex set of experiences, objects, subjects, processes and propositions that stimulate, disorient and re-format our senses and our cerebration. How then can we best manage the learning that might happen in art galleries and museums? If there seems to be no limit to what a good artwork can give, how can we help people take the first fruitful step into this infinitude?