Page 13 - The Black Box Book

questions lead to not only the selection of acceptable communication and traces of the pandemic that the artists were requested to provide,
channels, media, and media forms but also sentiments of absurdity and and the resulting database of artistic and non-artistic images and re-
meaninglessness that can be read between the lines, as we all sense that cords that were experimentally processed by artificial intelligence using
these are attempts at the unattainable. the unsupervised learning method.

C U R AT I NG A S C A R I NG C U RA T I N G O N L I N E

The curators of Galerie TIC, Katarína Hládeková, Zuzana Janečková and The support of the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Culture and
Marika Kupková, selected a different method. They chose to use the gallery the Czech Republic’s Technology Agency enabled us not only to create
operating funds, which could not be used for display projects owing to the online archive/curatorial project The Black Box but also to develop it
the pandemic, to support artists committed to investigating the current into a platform for sharing experiences in overcoming the limitations of
situation of the coronavirus pandemic and its effects on individuals and anti-epidemic measures by art institutions and festivals. We have also
society. It was a kind gesture intended for artists whose careers were broadened the scope of online curation to encompass the contemporary
catching dust in galleries, art festivals, and art schools; a gesture of ac- issue of employing artificial intelligence in the processing of digital art
knowledgement of creative involvement with the world as a comparable databases. Monika Szűcsová, the third member of the writers’ collective,
system to the natural and social sciences. It was one of the few, if not joined the tandem then and oversaw the organization of three Curat-
the only, activity geared at fostering artistic creativity and imagination ing Online symposia in 2021 that focused on galleries and festivals in
during the epidemic, as opposed to maintaining the exhibition institution the epidemic era and the application of artificial intelligence to online
itself. They gave the profession of curating a new meaning: curating as curating practice. Black Box gradually grew to encompass other activities
the support of artists and the maintenance of art, not as a collection of and took on the features of a more extensive research and application
objects for display, but as means of understanding the world. project.
The curators issued a call for submissions on the gallery’s website The discussion later grew to include theoretical deliberation, sharing
on March 27, 2020, with only very general guidelines. Indeed, the prima- actual case studies from domestic and foreign art institutions’ work in
ry objective was to encourage artists to work and convey the message the epidemic period, and online curating in general, including the appli-
that society needs their work, to help us identify with their statements, cation of artificial intelligence when working with substantial digital art
to connect, to share feelings and impressions, personal experiences of collections. These efforts culminated in The Black Box Book, which also
anxiety and fear for loved ones; but also the desire to help, in short, to carried them on in the form of (online) publication.
express everything that the leaky grids of statistical tables (of num-
bers infected, tested, vaccinated, and dead) filled with anonymized and THE BLACK BOX – PRESENTATION
abstract data can never capture. The activity and impassioned commit-
ment to art creation by the gallery’s representatives during the epidemic The Black Box project went online in September 2020, and since then,
were eventually extended to other issues. Due to Marika Kupková and it has been presented several times, both online and offline, or was re-
Jana Horáková’s personal ties, it was decided to continue the project to ported on in the form of conference papers. The Black Box was first
explore together the curatorial opportunities in the online network struc- presented to the public at the Ars Electronica festival (9 September – 12
ture and digital environment, not as a replacement for gallery institutions September 2020) (1), which took place partly online and partly in the
but rather as a medium in and of itself (in the sense of the specific ma- public space of Linz and in other cities around the world, from which
trix of digital and the peculiar communication environment of the www). festival participants joined the collaborative online program with live and
We decided to make The Black Box available online as a digital archive pre-recorded contributions. It was subsequently presented in the form
with access to other works, various curatorial interventions, and their of a conference paper at the HUMAIN conference (19 September 2020)
documentation rather than as an exhibition project. The interconnection (2) and was brought into the physical space of Industra gallery as part
with the research and application project centred on the experimental of the accompanying exhibition of the same event, where visitors could
use of artificial intelligence for processing the artwork archive-inspired enter a 3D black box resembling a pop-up screening room. Inside of it, the
the basic structure of the online presentation, which consists of two artists’ works were displayed to the audience as a slide show; the creation
complementing components: Only the Artists Survive (Jen umělci přežijí) of artificial neural networks was presented through an educational video
features documentation of initiatives chosen by the curators of Galerie (3) that captured the process of decomposing an image and its analysis
TIC; and the section entitled New Archivist (Nový archivář), which contains by intelligent software. A curatorial experiment with the method of “unsu-
documentation of art projects augmented by other personal testimonies pervised learning,” the New Archivist section of the Black Box website, and
12 13