5 PATRONAGE AND COLLECTING AND THE ROLE OF THE CURATOR AND GROUP SHOWS

Patrons and collectors find that they can have a great deal of influence on the physical expression of technology-based installation art. Groups of art installations, when placed in a home or a museum exhibition, can take on qualities as a whole that can make them more than the sum of their equal parts or less than the sum of their equal parts. Anyone entering the Seeing Time exhibition was immediately struck by the overall sound and feel of the exhibition, which was unique and quite striking. Robert Riley, the curator for the exhibition, mentioned that he had “tuned” it to achieve an overall integration or harmony of some kind between all the sounds in the various works in the exhibition. When you reflect that this is a private collection soon to be installed in a private home, it strikes the viewer that in such an environment a collection of technology-based installation art becomes an installation in itself, not unlike a private house museum, a Wunderkammer, or a collection of automata. The next logical step is to assume that in future, such groupings will have a scholarly significance of their own. Accordingly, it will be important to document the look and feel of exhibitions such as Seeing Time, since they may be regarded as defining moments in the history of media art, perhaps not unlike the Armory Show or other landmark exhibitions.