An Iterative Conversation was a lively exchange echoing the big ideas embodied in the work in the exciting concurrent exhibition featuring Polish artist Alicja Kwade. These include time and space, reality, systems, how we perceive the world and what is real. What are the roles played by material, form, and language? Through material transformations, what possible view of meaning, value, and terminology are created. Seth Mnookin and Caroline Jones together and separately addressed how we experience reality, every-day and otherwise, and what that means in our ever-changing digital age.

Caroline A Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Trained in visual studies and art history at Harvard, she did graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York before completing her PhD at Stanford University in 1992. Previous to completing her art history degree, she worked in museum administration and exhibition curation, holding positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85) while she completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, the Boston University Art Gallery, and MIT’s List Visual Art Center, among other venues. Jones’s ongoing research interests include globalism, the agency of the artist, and new media art, the focus of her latest book The Global Work of Art (2016).

Seth Mnookin is a longtime journalist and science writer. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers “Science in Society” Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox. His first book, 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Seth’s 2014 New Yorker piece on rare genetic diseases won the American Medical Writers Association prize for best story of the year and was included in the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. A former music columnist for The New York Observer, he began his journalism career as a rock critic for the now-defunct webzine Addicted to Noise. He graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a degree in History and Science, and was a 2004 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a 2019 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Image Credit: Installation view: Alicja Kwade, ParaParticular, 303 Gallery, New York, 2019 © Alicja Kwade,

Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery, New York. Photo: John Berens