I took a day off from work yesterday to go to the Museum of Modern Art with my wife. We were eager to see the exhibit “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” which is due to close on July 8. With one exception (Nam June Paik), I hadn’t heard of any of the artists or encountered their work before. What I was familiar with though where common themes that many of these video works addressed: the birth and expansion of the information society, the excitement of early ICTs as harbingers of a new global society, the broken promises of techno-utopians, the use of ICTs by surveillance states around the world, the creative embrace of ICTs by activists looking for ways to evade the gaze of authoritarian regimes, and so much more. These are issues that come up a lot in the courses I teach in my library’s information studies minor. My own understanding of these concerns comes primarily from reading (books, articles, blog posts, etc.), so it was especially exciting for me to encounter these ideas in works of art that used video in some way.

In other parts of the museum, I also ran into other works that, as an information professional, resonated with me: