October 4, 2018
Lecture, Community Room, 6:00pm-7:00pm
Reception, 7:00pm, Library Lobby
The public is invited to attend a lecture by artist John Gerrard as part of the international conference, “Memorizing the Future: Collecting in the 21st Century,” sponsored by Vanderbilt University and University of California Riverside. The conference’s goal is to lay the foundation for a new theory of collecting in the light of both the most recent and anticipated technological innovations. It aims to facilitate dialogues between scholars from different academic fields, artists, archivists, curators, and IT experts; to reassess our traditional understanding of cultural memory in light of technological advances; to examine how the private and public spheres of collection are merging or diverging, and identify how both collecting institutions and individual collectors are reaching out to their virtual and actual visitors and followers; and to determine the common interests that academia, institutions, and businesses as well as private collectors share in a market of collecting.
Mr. Gerrard is best known for his commitment to large-scale works that take the form of real-time computer simulations, created in painstaking detail over the course of many months or years. Often exploring geographically isolated locations, the works frequently refer to structures of power and networks of energy that have made possible the expansion of human endeavor in the past century. Mr. Gerrard’s lecture is sponsored by Vanderbilt Libraries. The presentation will be followed by an interview with Lutz Koepnick (Vanderbilt University).