Jon Ippolito

Jon Ippolito
Jon Ippolito, Cambridge (UK), 2008. Photo by Anna Malinowska.
Born	(1962-03-19)19 March 1962 Berkeley, California
Nationality	US
Awards	Tiffany, Lannan, American Foundation, Thoma Foundation
Website	three.org/ippolito

Jon Ippolito is an artist, educator, new media scholar, and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Ippolito studied astrophysics and painting in the early 1980s, then pursued Internet art in the 1990s. His works explore digitally induced collaboration and networking, a theme that is prominent in his later scholarship.

After applying to what he thought was a position as a museum guard, Ippolito was hired in the curatorial department of the Guggenheim, where in 1993 he curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and subsequent exhibitions that explore the intersection of contemporary art and new media. In 2002 Ippolito joined the faculty of the University of Maine's New Media Department, where he co-founded Still Water with Joline Blais. His writing on the cultural and aesthetic implications of new media has appeared in the Washington Post, Art Journal, and numerous art magazines, including in a regular "Cross Talk" column for ArtByte magazine.

Ippolito also has an abiding interest in the legacy for today's artists of conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s. His contributions to this subject include curating events for the New York presentation of Rolywholyover A Circus for museum by John Cage. He is particularly interested in the parallel between digital art, Minimalist and Conceptual art, a parallel that led him to propose a new paradigm for preserving art called the Variable Media Network.