Joanne McNeil will write a series of articles on the artistic labor required to produce and maintain digital art. Attention will be given to the subject of archiving digital work and to the creation, conservation, and maintenance of databases and repositories for digital art collections. McNeil will also write about how the production of digital art intersects with labor in the contemporary arts, from public-facing union drives, to the less visible but far more ubiquitous conditions of workers who are contract-based and functioning within a precarious gig economy; to the work performed by administrative support staff.
Joanne McNeil writes about art and technology. She is the author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User (MCD, 2020), named among the best books of the year by Esquire and OneZero. Since 2019 she has written a column on visual art, film, and science fiction for Filmmaker magazine. For over a decade, McNeil has been producing criticism, reporting, and commentary for publications including The Baffler, Dissent, The Nation, New York magazine, and the New York Times. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. In 2015 she was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation’s Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer working in the digital arts. Her debut novel, Wrong Way, will be published by MCD in 2023.