Page 12 - The Black Box Book

questions lead to not only the selection of acceptable communication
channels, media, and media forms but also sentiments of absurdity and
meaninglessness that can be read between the lines, as we all sense that
these are attempts at the unattainable.
C U R AT I NG A S C A R I NG
The curators of Galerie TIC, Katarína Hládeková, Zuzana Janečková and
Marika Kupková, selected a different method. They chose to use the gallery
operating funds, which could not be used for display projects owing to
the pandemic, to support artists committed to investigating the current
situation of the coronavirus pandemic and its effects on individuals and
society. It was a kind gesture intended for artists whose careers were
catching dust in galleries, art festivals, and art schools; a gesture of ac-
knowledgement of creative involvement with the world as a comparable
system to the natural and social sciences. It was one of the few, if not
the only, activity geared at fostering artistic creativity and imagination
during the epidemic, as opposed to maintaining the exhibition institution
itself. They gave the profession of curating a new meaning: curating as
the support of artists and the maintenance of art, not as a collection of
objects for display, but as means of understanding the world.
The curators issued a call for submissions on the gallery’s website
on March 27, 2020, with only very general guidelines. Indeed, the prima-
ry objective was to encourage artists to work and convey the message
that society needs their work, to help us identify with their statements,
to connect, to share feelings and impressions, personal experiences of
anxiety and fear for loved ones; but also the desire to help, in short, to
express everything that the leaky grids of statistical tables (of num-
bers infected, tested, vaccinated, and dead) filled with anonymized and
abstract data can never capture. The activity and impassioned commit-
ment to art creation by the gallery’s representatives during the epidemic
were eventually extended to other issues. Due to Marika Kupková and
Jana Horáková’s personal ties, it was decided to continue the project to
explore together the curatorial opportunities in the online network struc-
ture and digital environment, not as a replacement for gallery institutions
but rather as a medium in and of itself (in the sense of the specific ma-
trix of digital and the peculiar communication environment of the www).
We decided to make The Black Box available online as a digital archive
with access to other works, various curatorial interventions, and their
documentation rather than as an exhibition project. The interconnection
with the research and application project centred on the experimental
use of artificial intelligence for processing the artwork archive-inspired
the basic structure of the online presentation, which consists of two
complementing components: Only the Artists Survive (Jen umělci přežijí)
features documentation of initiatives chosen by the curators of Galerie
TIC; and the section entitled New Archivist (Nový archivář), which contains
documentation of art projects augmented by other personal testimonies
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and traces of the pandemic that the artists were requested to provide,
and the resulting database of artistic and non-artistic images and re-
cords that were experimentally processed by artificial intelligence using
the unsupervised learning method.
C U RA T I N G O N L I N E
The support of the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Culture and
the Czech Republic’s Technology Agency enabled us not only to create
the online archive/curatorial project The Black Box but also to develop it
into a platform for sharing experiences in overcoming the limitations of
anti-epidemic measures by art institutions and festivals. We have also
broadened the scope of online curation to encompass the contemporary
issue of employing artificial intelligence in the processing of digital art
databases. Monika Szűcsová, the third member of the writers’ collective,
joined the tandem then and oversaw the organization of three Curat-
ing Online symposia in 2021 that focused on galleries and festivals in
the epidemic era and the application of artificial intelligence to online
curating practice. Black Box gradually grew to encompass other activities
and took on the features of a more extensive research and application
project.
The discussion later grew to include theoretical deliberation, sharing
actual case studies from domestic and foreign art institutions’ work in
the epidemic period, and online curating in general, including the appli-
cation of artificial intelligence when working with substantial digital art
collections. These efforts culminated in The Black Box Book, which also
carried them on in the form of (online) publication.
THE BLACK BOX – PRESENTATION
The Black Box project went online in September 2020, and since then,
it has been presented several times, both online and offline, or was re-
ported on in the form of conference papers. The Black Box was first
presented to the public at the Ars Electronica festival (9 September – 12
September 2020) (1), which took place partly online and partly in the
public space of Linz and in other cities around the world, from which
festival participants joined the collaborative online program with live and
pre-recorded contributions. It was subsequently presented in the form
of a conference paper at the HUMAIN conference (19 September 2020)
(2) and was brought into the physical space of Industra gallery as part
of the accompanying exhibition of the same event, where visitors could
enter a 3D black box resembling a pop-up screening room. Inside of it, the
artists’ works were displayed to the audience as a slide show; the creation
of artificial neural networks was presented through an educational video
(3) that captured the process of decomposing an image and its analysis
by intelligent software. A curatorial experiment with the method of “unsu-
pervised learning,” the New Archivist section of the Black Box website, and
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