Authorship & Ownership: Digital Art with Kevin McCoy, Co-Founder of Monegraph

As an artist, academic, and a cofounder to an art technology company called Monograph, Kevin McCoy brings a unique perspective to the idea of authorship & ownership in its application to the digital and internet art scene. Established in 2014, Monegraph aimed to solve issues of provenance and legitimacy artists and collectors face when selling and buying digital art works. In this episode, we speak with Kevin about how Monegraph was received in its initial years, why provenance matters in the art world, and what some of the hurdles are facing digital and new media artists today.

-About Kevin McCoy-

His artworks take many diverse forms including video sculpture and installation, photography, long-form film, curatorial practice and performance, kinetic sculpture and software-driven on-line projects. Thematically, his work explores changing conditions around social roles, categories, genres and forms of value. His primary research questions ask 'What counts as new,’ 'How is meaning established,' and 'How are cultural memories formed'. He has worked collaboratively with Jennifer McCoy for many years to try to answer what it means to speak together, often finding that experience outstrips available modes of presentation and discourse. To these ends their work has adopted many methodological approaches: exhaustive categorization, recreation and reenactment, automation, miniaturization, and most recently remote viewing and speculative modeling.

In New York City, his work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, P.S.1, Postmasters Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, and Smack Mellon. International exhibitions include projects at the Pompidou Center, the British Film Institute, ZKM, the Hanover Kunstverien, the Bonn Kunstverein, and F.A.C.T. (Liverpool, UK). Grants include a 2002 Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields, a 2005 Wired Rave Award, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Articles about his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, Art News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek. Residencies include work at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

His artwork is represented by in New York by Postmasters Gallery and in Geneva by Gallerie Guy Bartschi and can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM in Luxembourg.

In 2014 he co-founded monegraph.com a platform that uses the technology underlying Bitcoin to provide a mechanism for validating, owning and trading digital media assets. The project was presented at The New Museum as part of Rhizome's seven on seven conference and at Tech Crunch Disrupt in New York.

His teaching engages both undergraduate and graduate students in studio art and related arts professions and addresses practical and theoretical uses of digital media technology together with surveys of related theoretical and philosophical texts. The current semester's coursework can be found at mccoyspace.com/nyu.

Learn more at:

auxillaryprojects.com

monegraph.com

corespace.com