When people ask me about the challenges facing Nashville’s art scene, I usually default to lamenting the high cost of real estate before enthusing about the local trend of independent curators. These DIY arts organizers are creating nomadic gallery programming in response to the challenges of more permanent brick-and-mortar displays. One of the newest faces among Nashville’s independent curators is John Holmes.
Holmes was studying audio engineering at SAE Institute in 2020, but when the pandemic hit, he moved to New Orleans. Holmes moved back to Nashville in the fall of last year, and he’s already organized a handful of interactive new-media-art happenings in domestic spaces and galleries like Buchanan Arts and Coop.
“I was very socially isolated in New Orleans,” Holmes tells the Scene. “Coming back to Nashville, I did the thing where you try to make new friends as an adult. … Basically, I was just trying to meet people with common interests and make friends, and have these conversations about technology and philosophy.”
His meet-ups and exhibitions since returning to Nashville have focused on interactive works combining tech and aesthetics, and his events have included contributions from local new-media-nauts like video artist Morgan Higby-Flowers, new-media sculptor and photographer Caleb McLaughlin, analog video artist Tuna Cat, and creative technologist DEDZ.
Holmes curates his interactive art and technology exhibitions under the banner of New Media Nashville, the organization he founded and directs. NMN is focused on empowering audiences to better understand the pervasive presence and influence of technology.
“I really love technology and always have,” he says, “and yet ‘technology’ is ruining my life, all of our lives, and the world around us.”
Holmes says experiencing technology through interactive art can create breakthroughs in understanding. These breakthroughs reveal the control paradigms that technological networks can represent and reinforce.
Holmes started NMN after finding very little techcentric art in the city’s galleries and institutions. Over the years, Cheekwood and the Frist Art Museum have done major new-media shows, and Coop’s original outpost in the Arcade was partly inspired by a desire to build an audience for new-media art in Nashville. Vanderbilt University Museum of Art hosted a great video exhibition in 2024 — Gloss: A Measured Response to New Video Art — and Unrequited Leisure eventually focused on a segment of new media dubbed “screen-based” programming during its storied run between 2019 and 2024. But since Unrequited Leisure left its space at The Packing Plant, the local dialogue between art and machines has gone rather quiet.
New-media art has been driven by the technological advancements heralded by Gutenberg and his printing press. But the cultural revolution created in the wake of the relentless progress of the machines has been shaped by artists’ reactions to printing and broadcasting, robotics and artificial intelligence. And the evolution of the concepts and methods that define new media can be traced from the Dada artists of the early 20th century, to the Fluxus artists of the 1960s, to the digital artists of today. Tristan Tzara, Yoko Ono and Beeple are the holy trinity of new media’s gospel of art and tech, proclaiming the good news of material liberation, the appeal of the random, an emphasis on process over product, and the democratizing of art-making.
Dada’s anti-art radicalism challenged what could be thought of as art. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades were everyday objects reframed as art sculptures, and prefigured new media’s interactions of art and technology. They elevated the commonplace and expanded the materials and techniques for artistic creation. Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins coined the term “intermedia” to describe artists working between disciplines, and John Cage’s experimental musical compositions embraced chance in a manner that redefined the role of the artist as auteur. Cage, using the ancient Chinese text I Ching to divine his musical changes, points directly to contemporary new-media artists exploring algorithmic and generative processes. Cities like Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., have established digital art festivals and dedicated new-media programming at their contemporary art centers. This could be Nashville, but it feels like we’re playing when it comes to embracing and celebrating these new categories of art.
It’s against this backdrop that Holmes is building Nashville’s new-media community.
“If the thing I want doesn’t exist, I will attempt to create it,” he says. “I’m just making the things that I want to see, that’s basically how I’ve always approached artmaking.”
Holmes was a musician and an audio engineering student before he discovered the possibilities of new media. An interest in psychedelic culture led to his moniker — The Shaman — and one senses that the title also reflects Holmes’ knack for bringing people together and creating communities. Nashville has shown a consistent appetite for new-media work, and there have been regular local examples of artists doing interesting projects with sound and vision and tech. Unrequited Leisure put out a recent call for new-media artists for an upcoming exhibition with The Wrong Biennale, and Begonia Labs has expanded the city’s art/tech displays. New Media Nashville is putting a focus on local new-media artists, with Holmes shaping a collaborative community that is similar to Coop in its early days — in fact, Holmes is a member of that group today. Holmes’ event-focused organization gives artists and audiences — and machines — a common space and level ground to experience one another, and to communicate about our possible futures.
The question facing Nashville isn’t whether the city has the creative talent or cultural appetite for new-media art — Holmes’ programming proves both exist in abundance. The question is whether the city’s institutions will recognize what’s happening in domestic spaces and pop-up displays, and help build the infrastructure to support it. Until they do, Nashville will keep losing ground to cities that understand the future of art won’t be contained within gallery walls — it’s happening everywhere technology and creativity intersect. In the meantime, Holmes is keeping Nashville’s contemporary art scene logged-in — one interactive art happening at a time.
