As early as the late 1990s, when much of the art world had just gotten used to seeing video in the gallery, Crowley was helping organize master classes for artists as well as curators interested in ambitious technology-based art. High on the agenda were exhibition design strategies that provocatively but carefully introduced an often hesitant public to new media.

While the exact methods for creating exhibitions that overcome such skepticism vary depending on the work, Crowley insists that collaboration is key. "In the production process of most media artwork, there isn't a single artist, but a kind of creative director of the work, if you like, working with programmers, sound artists, and designers," she said. "Following that, even the curatorial practice needs to be fundamentally collaborative."

Successful curating of techonology-based art, she added, is often “about having an understanding of what a technician can do with the work."

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Eyebeam has begun hosting a series of exhibitions chronicling work produced there over the past decade. The first, “Source Code," which features work by eteam, Nina Katchadourian, and Cory Arcangel through August 11, was organized by Crowley and several technical experts, with input from a team of roughly 23 artists, staff members, and interns. It is intentionally installed with plenty of glare, which lends a busy, laboratory-like atmosphere and conveys a sense of ongoing creative activity in the show.

Out of the Ghetto, Into the Everyday
How does sound glare impact a painting? A few years ago, this question was a major cause for concern; now, it is common to install video pieces alongside work in other media, and many dealers agree that viewers and collectors have gotten comfortable with even more complex technology-based art.

"You definitely have to juggle issues of light and sound when exhibiting media or new media alongside traditional work," said Michael Gillespie, co-director of the Brooklyn-founded, Chelsea-based gallery Foxy Production. "There are some technical issues you have to get around, but it's the same with every show you hang—there's always something."

Foxy represents artists such as Paper Rad, a collaborative that makes spastic, 8-bit influenced animations, and Michael Bell-Smith, whose romantic, laboriously composed videos stitch together video-game graphics, as well as artists working in traditional media—and it has long showed them side by side. In "Solar Set," which runs through August 10, videos by Takeshi Murata and Olga Chernysheva cast colorful light over digital prints on canvas by Tony Labat and works on paper by Siebren Versteeg. The result is a unique play of color in the space that is so casual and everyday that it could easily go unnoticed by a viewer used to seeing video on everything from iPhones to taxi cabs.

Ultimately, said Postmasters’ Sawon, "in a real world where people are engaged with their electronic gadgets every day, hanging a media show is not much more complicated." Light and sound may have seemed jarring to a visitor a decade ago, but as audio and visual glare permeate more and more public spaces, they seem far less distracting in the gallery. Moving forward, curators may find that the challenge that media work presents has less to do with mitigating interference than with becoming attuned to the ways that viewers live with it outside the gallery.