Arts organizations and funders face numerous challenges engaging with tech-centered artistic practices. These challenges include limited staff expertise, limited infrastructure, and difficulties in understanding how to evaluate artistic projects in this field.
Tech-centered artists have managed successfully to establish peer organizations, regional hubs, exhibition spaces, festivals, information networks, and academic departments across the United States.
Physical hubs, in-person gathering spaces, and festivals provide opportunities for core community-building, learning, debate about contemporary trends, public engagement, training, exhibition, and specialized programs such as residencies and incubators.
Online resources and communities provide training and networking opportunities that often are free to the public. They enable participation beyond physical hubs and are particularly important for artists outside urban centers.
Colleges and universities are prominent employers, incubators, and resource providers for tech-centered artists.
While there are interconnected networks supporting tech-centered artistic practices, there are also significant resource gaps in the U.S.-based arts infrastructure, such as access to technical facilities, training, and exhibition opportunities, which can inhibit the growth of opportunities for artistic and professional development.
Career pathways for tech-centered artists are highly varied, though as a group these workers encounter many of the same obstacles as artists in general.
*This is an excellent summary of the situation for American technology artists. European arts-and-culture people should look at that with all due care and do something else.