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FLUID AND EXPRESSIVE ENTANGLEMENTS
OF MATTER AND MEANING
Streaming Museum finds inspiration at the crossroads of
art, science, and technology.
by Natasha Chuk
Exhibition view of Mark Amerika, Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix) (2005) in Streaming Museum’s Second Life program
Perhaps now more than ever before, the world needs art that centers human values and responds to our unique challenges. “Art is the ultimate universal communicator of complex ideas,” says astronaut Nicole Stott in a musing on the inner and outer spaces of expressive entanglement, matters, and meaning from the perspective of astronaut life amid scientific inquiry and creativity. It is an apt parallel to Streaming Museum’s platform for addressing contemporary global challenges, identifying the combined innovation efforts of scientists, technologists, and artists, and bringing their discoveries to the public. These themes reflect founder Nina Colosi’s creative work as a musician and the humanitarian goals and values that shape her work, inspired by her childhood days spent absorbing the dynamic conversations of professionals from numerous fields and artists at Sunday family dinners. These inspirational gatherings were led by her uncle, who worked at the intersection of science and medicine, education, politics, and environmental advocacy. Colosi witnessed firsthand the positive effects of bringing together visionaries, proving that dialogue can lead to understanding, action, and change. This, coupled with her formal training as a classical pianist and composer, helped cultivate her vision for what eventually emerged as Streaming Museum, launched in 2008.
Colosi applied the ways she interpreted and expressed themes in music to curating exhibitions and programs. This work began as large-scale exhibitions of international artists in New York City, Moscow, and Buenos Aires, and as the producer and writer for the publication Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time (2002), a collection of essays and artworks in Leonardo Journal. The issue features contributions by leading curators of new media art and their selection of the ten most influential new media artists from all over the world: Christiane Paul, Jon Ippolito, Lev Manovich, Walid Raad, Peter Weibel, Masaki Fujihata, Chris Cunningham, Shirin Neshat, Ryoji Ikeda, and others are included. Following this, Colosi launched and produced The Project Room for New Media and Performing Arts at Chelsea Art Museum, where she held a position from 2003-2010. Several activities Colosi curated and produced during this period reveal where inspiration for Streaming Museum were shaped: the New York City launch event in 2004 of Peoples’ Portrait, the first internet artwork connecting international cities, by Zhang Ga; the year-long exhibition and public program series Digital Art @Google (2010) at Google headquarters in New York City; and the hybrid art exhibition and performance We Write This to You From the Distant Future (2011), in which Colosi brought together the work and collaborative efforts of international artists working across digital art, music, and theater at Juilliard at Lincoln Center.
A Nomadic Museum
Since the start of the World Wide Web in 1989, the emergence and growth of networked cultures have shaped the ways we socialize, share knowledge, document our lives, and create things. In our current era of ubiquitous connectivity and an endless flow of information, the potential to disentangle meaning from the noise can be easily lost. But in the care of artists situated where science, technology, and the humanities intersect, the hidden entanglements that connect our world can be parsed and unveiled in artworks that emerge from their inquiries. Streaming Museum was founded on the premise that artists are often the first to adopt new methods, take risks, and pursue unlikely collaborations. Colosi invokes media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s view that artists reliably articulate cultural change, asserting their artwork issues a kind of Distant Early Warning system (DEW Line). The artist is the first who “picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge” and then “builds models” to face them. (1) McLuhan recognized not so much the prophetic nature of art, rather its ability to shed light on technology as a pharmakon: the capability of being both a remedy and a poison. This element of trust in art and the artist’s critical perspective and the desire to bring disparate audiences together through works of art are recognized in Streaming Museum’s diverse presentation formats.
From the start, Streaming Museum utilized the capabilities of newly accessible networked environments and digital media to showcase inquisitive, tech-forward art to a global audience. The onset of web 2.0 in the early 2000s marked a transition from static web pages to dynamic, user-generated content, and interoperability between interfaces. With this, the rise of wikis and centralized social networking sites (SNS) contributed to a burgeoning participatory and digital culture. At the same time, computing became ever more user-friendly. The availability of creative techniques and processes enabled by computer technologies and software increased: data visualization, 3D modeling and simulation, remote interaction, and others helped to expand the ways artists make and share work, seek inspiration, conduct research, and identify peers and potential collaborators. Streaming Museum emerged from a newfound ability to more readily work with tools and systems that encourage adaptability, uniformity, durability, reproducibility, and shareability. It was created to operate as a nomadic museum by utilizing various platforms and venues. It has leveraged the power, flexibility, and global reach of the internet, digital media, and international public spaces, and gained valuable support from cultural, educational, and business partnerships. This presentation strategy was created to expand the audience for art by offering innovative ways to experience it beyond the traditional gallery or museum. It has contributed to a redefinition of the museum and how people encounter art in their daily lives, shifting the experience of art from exclusive, institutional spaces to everyday environments.
Nam June Paik, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984)
Streaming Museum’s launch, on January 29, 2008, was marked by a simultaneous presentation of Nam June Paik’s influential Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) in public spaces on seven continents, including in the 3D virtual world Second Life. Paik’s work marked one of the first truly globally executed artworks, in what he referred to as “satellite art.” This rare form of art effectively pulled the avant-garde out of the art institution and into the TV set, a medium associated with mass entertainment. The 24-hour broadcast featured a global performance of live music, dance, and poetry performances and live graphics combined with pre-recorded content by participating artists such as Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and others. It was made possible through partnerships between broadcast stations in New York City and the Centre Pompidou in Paris and collaborations with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea. The work anticipated the potential for mass communication and content-sharing across geographic space in what Paik dubbed an “electronic superhighway,” a system we now call the internet. By choosing Paik’s first international satellite installation as its inaugural selection, Streaming Museum established a core philosophy aligned with the artist’s and his steadfast dedication to challenging the top-down frameworks of telecommunication, public spaces, and museums in the interest of presenting art to the masses. Its launch at precisely the same time on seven continents, was followed by a three-month program that thoughtfully included an accompanying 45-minute exhibition, Art and Pop Culture in a Modern Mix for the Electronic Superhighway. It featured 21 multimedia artists from around the world whose work contemplates Paik’s prescient predictions and inspiring ideas.
Paik believed that art could inspire curiosity and understanding about our world and how it operates. He advocated the unpopular belief that technologies are as much a part of us as the natural world. Streaming Museum has presented numerous high-profile exhibitions and projects that continue Paik’s legacy by periodically taking over the digital billboards of major cities—Times Square in New York City, the BBC Big Screens in city centers of the UK, and public spaces in Dubai, Hong Kong, Bucharest, Sao Paulo, Milan, Melbourne, Johannesburg, and others—to display video art and multimedia content. Art has been made visible to countless passersby—alongside commercial advertisements, buildings, and plant life, and in places ranging from dense city centers to remote locations in the snowy desert of Antarctica and the frozen landscape near the Arctic Circle—in an integration of art and critical reflection in everyday life and nature.
Creativity and the Range of Human Experience
Streaming Museum’s presentations and programming demonstrate how technology can be creatively wielded to bring people together, raise awareness, and help inspire solutions to the world’s most pressing issues. Artists are chosen for their work across a plethora of mediums, and in many instances for their research-based practices and collaborations with experts in various fields. By offering a new perspective, art can disentangle the complexities of issues like climate change, war and the refugee crisis, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, economic inequality, and human rights. At the same time, art joins strangers into a global community by making us laugh, inspiring awe and wonder, expressing beauty, and connecting us across language barriers and cultural differences. Streaming Museum has recognized the power and transcendence of this combination, especially through music and participation in immersive, interactive environments.
This idea is exemplified in one of Streaming Museum’s featured collection of stories titled Kindness, Key to Survival, which brings together an eclectic mix of writing, art, and music—some of which were included in Centerpoint Now: Are we there yet?, a special publication of World Council of Peoples for the United Nations (WCPUN) featuring essays and artworks marking the 75th anniversary of the UN—and speaks to the magnificence and range of human experience. It leads with an essay of the same name by Daniel M.T. Fessler Ph.D., reflecting on how kindness is influenced by individual psychology and larger societal factors and is essential not only for human wellbeing but for the survival of humanity. Richard Mosse’s photography series Infrared delves into the haunting juxtaposition of the beauty and effects of infrared film and the destruction of war-torn landscapes, while Incoming focuses on the mass migration and displacement of people across the globe. Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s six-movement Mass for the Endangered (2020) reimagines the traditional format of the Catholic mass to produce an elegy for the natural world and its various inhabitants. In the realm of science and technology, Michael Najjar’s hybrid photograph supersymmetric particles (2019) offers a mesmerizing glimpse of the stunning monstrosity of the world’s largest machine ever built. Located at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), on the Franco-Swiss border, it is also the most powerful accelerator. Sound artist Stephanie Castonguay’s experimental sound performance work Capturing Light Frequencies (2021) and experimental video Sentient Beings (2021) probe the poetic language of circuits and natural resource materials that make up everyday electronics to explore their proximity to touching the stars. Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), founded in 2008, showcases large-scale works of art that double as plans for landscapes using renewable energy. Debbie Symon’s data visualization, Counting One to Four: Nature Morte (2015), traces the alarming trajectory of species extinction from 1975 to 2100 in a sobering testament to environmental decline. Sadalsuud (2020), named after the supergiant star in the constellation Aquarius, is a collaborative work by composer Emanuel Pimenta and filmmaker Dino Viani. It captures intimate portraits of individuals isolated around the world during the pandemic lockdown, evoking shared vulnerability, resilience, and joy. Finally, David Bates Jr.’s When the Moment is Right (2021) is an NFT short film that curiously follows its protagonist, a New York City pigeon, on the verge of take-off.
Emanuel Pimenta and filmmaker Dino Viani, Sadalsuud (2020)
Reflecting on the Technologies of Our Time
Through the years, Streaming Museum has both creatively utilized and reflected on the technologies of our time. It has presented exhibitions and discussions that home in on AI and data-generated works that are both expressing the impact of scientific methods and discoveries and shaping new artistic frontiers. Exploring the role of AI and working with data reflects Streaming Museum’s initial interest in the internet as a site of transdisciplinary activity, dynamic information flows, and an uncanny ability to simultaneously shrink and expand the world. Streaming Museum leans into the internet’s ontology as a massive archive with an unknowable scale: as a trove of information (images, text, sounds), connections (actual and potential), and hidden processes (infrastructure, data networks, servers). Generative AI (GenAI) and the internet share several key aspects that highlight their interconnection and common roles in transforming digital experiences. As GenAI and the vision for web3 continue to expand, their similarities become clearer. Both are paradigm-shifting technologies that change how we access and interact with information, yielding new forms of creativity and expression. While GenAI is not an archive, it enables the production of new content through networked activity and relies on massive amounts of stored data culled from the internet to function. GenAI tools generate text (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity AI), images (e.g., DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion), and video (e.g., Runway, Sora). They use a combination of technologies to synthesize new content based on a user’s input. Like the ways users interact with the internet, GenAI inputs require minimal effort, and unique information is generated based on data stored on the internet. The relationship between GenAI and the internet is thus tethered, which is recognized in the ways that generated content reveals the social tendencies and behaviors cultivated by internet cultures. GenAI tools functionally survey the past (the archive) to propose the future (unique content). Our likes, dislikes, trends, politics, histories, and biases influence newly generated content. Web3 depends on the integration of AI as it seeks to offer increased interoperability across the web. This will lead to an ever-expanding entanglement of expression and meaning on the humanities side. On the scientific side, questions about scale and the negative environmental impact of both the internet and GenAI tools abound.
With these shifts in place, Streaming Museum has presented numerous artworks by international artists working critically to explore the state of our technologically expansive world and how emerging technologies intersect with nature, politics, economies, and people, including Richard Mosse, Shahzia Sikander, Federico Solmi, Maurice Benayoun, Michael Najjar, Claire Jervert, and Refik Anadol, among others. Streaming Museum featured Winds of Yawanawá (2023), a co-creation between Refik Anadol and the Yawanawá, an indigenous people of Brazil. The digital artwork is an artistic interpretation of live weather data—temperature, wind speed and direction—gathered from the tribe’s location in the Amazon rainforest, emphasizing the deep connection and mutual relationship between the Yawanawá and their environment. The work includes a limited NFT collection of 1000 pieces featuring a unique audio video composition derived from the central artwork. The proceeds go directly to the Yawanawá communities in support of key initiatives, such as building sustainable infrastructure and education. The work speaks to the importance of emerging Web3 technologies, such as the blockchain and NFTs, in promoting transparent and efficient approaches to supporting and protecting communities and their environment.
Refik Anadol in collaboration with the Yawanawá, Winds of Yawanawá (2023)
Sustainability concerns and public engagement are also addressed in The Energy+Art Garden (TEAG) (2023). Co-created by Nina Colosi, artist Raphaele Shirley, and a team of architects, it is an architectural design of clean energy producing structures and sculptures for Spinelli Park in Mannheim, Germany. Using geothermal, solar, and kinetic energy technologies, it supports flora and vegetable gardening, improves air quality, encourages eco-regeneration through rewilding efforts, and accommodates public interaction and activities during the day and night. Combining functionality and creativity, TEAG demonstrates how cities can be reimagined, and the quality of plant, animal, and human life can be improved with clean energy. At the same time, it transforms a public space into a dynamic and unique art form of the future.
Nina Colosi and Raphaele Shirley, The Energy+Art Garden (TEAG) (2023)
In Atmospheric Forest (2020), featured in The Next Renaissance?: Worldviews, Indigenous Lifeways, and Innovation / Three Stories+Art on Sustainability, artists Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits use the power of data visualization and sonification to immerse visitors in the ecology and micro energy of a breathing forest. Using point-cloud VR technology and eco data collected by environmental scientists, the installation reveals the influence of drought on the area’s weather conditions by showing interaction patterns among pine tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient forest in the Swiss Alps. Through doing this, participants are reminded of the significance and life’s work of trees as the lungs of the Earth’s environment. Trees play a crucial role in providing oxygen, cleaning the air through carbon dioxide absorption, regulating temperature, preventing soil erosion with their root systems, offering habitat for wildlife, and overall mitigating the effects of climate change by storing carbon dioxide. The work homes in on the environmental threats that disrupt these ecological behaviors by translating data into a one-of-a-kind experience.
Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, Atmospheric Forest (2020)
A Planetary View
In addition to exhibiting art, Streaming Museum has also created narrative videos, video documentation, and public programs that include conversations with experts and innovators in the arts and various STEM fields and in positions of global and cultural leadership. These programming efforts bridge any perceived gaps between the sciences and humanities and illustrate collaborations and alliances made among them. A View from the Cloud (2015-17) was a public series of events that brought together artists, neuroscientists, astronauts, humanoid AI, educators, UN leaders, and experts in global finance, the environment and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Co-produced with World Council of Peoples for the United Nations (WCPUN), the program themes were carried into the publication Centerpoint Now: Are we there yet? The title of the program cleverly consolidates the complexity of our current world in a reference to both cloud computing and an astronaut’s unique vantage point of Earth from outer space. The experience of this view is often referred to as the “Overview Effect,” a cognitive shift resulting from seeing the planet in its entirety, which can lead to a profound sense of interconnectedness and responsibility for the environment. Exhibiting artists in the A View from the Cloud program demonstrate the ways art can channel greater understanding and creative discovery of the interconnection of life.
One such work is Inner Telescope (2017) by Brazilian American transdisciplinary artist Eduardo Kac in collaboration with astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Designed for zero gravity and created using only materials available aboard the International Space Station, it was made by Pesquet, per the artist’s instructions, during a mission in space. As its name suggests, it is “an instrument of observation and poetic reflection” meant to encourage looking inward with a device designed to look outward, and has the goal of getting us to “rethink our relationship with the world and our position in the Universe.” (2) These ideas are reflected in its design as a non-orientable object: it has no top or bottom, no front or back, and thus no sense of a beginning or end. These characteristics go beyond contemplating the greatness of the universe and its unknowable dimensions. They challenge us to think about the interconnections and depth of everything, from oceans and forests to culture and the internet. Perhaps no other artist better understands the web of relations and mutual connections between things than Kac, who helped create the global culture Streaming Museum celebrates, with internet-based artworks dating to the 1980s. He has a body of work that includes a diverse range of mediums: photocopies and faxes, RFID implants, performance, holography, photography, robotics, satellites, drawing, DNA synthesis, and poetry. His “space poetry” practice is the cornerstone of Inner Telescope, rather than technology. As his Space Poetry Manifesto (2007) indicates, his is an approach to poetry whereby weightlessness is the form of composition. It is a bold guiding principle, as it removes the expectation of an optical device reliant on computer processing power. It serves as a gentle reminder to look for meaning in all things, including those beyond physical matter and human perception, reflecting the overarching ethos of the program for A View from the Cloud.
Eduardo Kac, Inner Telescope (2017)
Making a Quantum Leap
The world is on the brink of significant changes in politics and quality of life, with computing nestled at its center. Developments in AI, blockchain technology, robotics, data mining, cloud computing, and quantum physics are expanding and expected to influence how we live, work, communicate, create, and understand the world around us, and how it understands us. As we take part in the nascent integration of GenAI in daily life, and witness the building blocks for web3 coming together, it is difficult to fully recognize the impact of technology on our lives. We wonder how widespread automation will affect knowledge production and social circumstances, how blockchain applications will reveal new social structures, or whether scientists will be able to simulate the entire universe, down to the last atom.
As digital technologies continue to evolve, Streaming Museum embraces new formats and mediums and remains committed to addressing questions about the state of the world with criticism and care. Recently, it has initiated partnerships and collaborations that explore the combination of AI and quantum to better observe how these changes unfold. Quantum computing leverages the strange properties of quantum mechanics to solve complex problems much faster than traditional computers by utilizing "qubits" which can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. It harnesses the ability of quantum superposition, where quantum particles exist in multiple states simultaneously, and quantum entanglement, the dependency of states between particles, to perform computations in a fundamentally different way. These phenomena not only speed up the calculation of vast amounts of data but also process incompatibilities to locate intricate patterns that are otherwise difficult to detect. This allows for parallel calculations on a massive scale, leading to more nuanced and detailed creative outputs.
The idea of computers as a meta machine will soon be fortified by the dual strategies and capabilities of GenAI and quantum to uncover insights from the entanglements of nature’s complexity. In the right hands, this combination can potentially yield unbounded critical knowledge as well as artistic expression to lay the groundwork for an era marked by intellectual, artistic, and scientific achievement on a global scale. This is desirable given the precarity of our global politics and the role technology can play to divide us. The quantum era, like the Renaissance, may promote a valuable shift in human understanding, ushering in a new age of exploration and creativity where digital muses spark new possibilities.
Creative Collaboration
At The Future of Museum and Gallery Design conference of K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong in 2015, Colosi delivered a presentation in which she proposed the possibility of museums becoming technology art hubs with art and ideas flowing in and out of them in real time, reimagining both museums and the idea of public art. This view aligns with the original meaning of “muse.” In ancient Greece, muses were believed to inspire musicians, poets, artists, and thinkers, playing a vital role in the creation of cultural and intellectual works. Now celebrating its 17th year, Streaming Museum continues to examine the entangled relationships between art, technology, and society. As an artist, Colosi’s own creative endeavors are entangled in Streaming Museum and its evolution. Moving forward, it will remain open to previous exhibition formats and partnerships and will focus on collaborating with multimedia artists across disciplines toward the creation of new original works inspired by themes explored over the past years. Streaming Museum has been and will continue to be a site of experimentation, inspiration, and fluidity. Cultivating relationships, utilizing various presentation platforms, and further driving the convergence of art, technology, and global culture will remain at its center.
(1) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964.
(2) See the artist’s description: https://www.ekac.org/inner_telescope.html
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Natasha Chuk, PhD is a Mexican-American media theorist, arts writer, educator, and independent curator whose work examines the relationships between art, philosophy, and creative technologies. She is the author of the forthcoming book Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025). She lives and works in New York City.