Page 145 - The Black Box Book

I consider Paul’s analysis one of the first that brings a shift in
the discourse about curatorial work on the web: from the idea of working
with immaterial objects to an analysis of the characteristics of the tech-
nological context in which curating takes place — a shift that had already
occurred in the context of net.art but was rather new in the context of
curatorial studies, especially 15 years ago. Although the technological con-
text described by Paul has become more layered since it is now entangled
with more rigid, yet almost invisible, economic and power structures, her
essay brings forth a critical element for discussing curating on the web:
the nature of such work is affected by working of the networked environ-
ment, and it requires new forms of negotiation and renegotiations, as well
as viewing and engaging with art.
THE LINEAGE, OR ONE OF THE
POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS,

OF CURATING ON THE WEB

Since the introduction of the first web browser, Mosaic, in 1993 to
the present multitude of downloadable apps that are interoperable across
multiple devices where user’s content is stored in various privately owned
clouds and servers, the way the tech industry has developed its servic-
es, and users experience them, have shaped (and have been shaped by)
the modes in which curators and artists adopted the web for the pro-
duction, display and circulation of art. However, there are just a few
Figure 2: Curating Online symposium (2021). discursive spaces and archives dedicated to the observation and
Screenshot of presentation from 2021. mapping of curatorial projects on the web. Amongst them there is:
Author: Marialaura Ghidini
the NEW-MEDIA-CURATING List (2000–) by CRUMB at the University of
Sunderland; the portal netartnet.net (2010–) by artist Anthony Antonellis;
the artwork An Incomplete Timeline of Online Exhibitions and Biennials
(2013) by Oliver Laric ; the Bay Area Online Exhibition Archive (2016) by cu-
rator Enar de Dios Rodríguez; the recent research work of Off Site Project
(2017-) by Elliott Burns and Pita Arreola-Burns; and the already mentioned
The Broken Timeline (2020) and curating.online (2020–).
I put a stress on this because during the boom of curated exhibitions
online in the year 2020, audiences were often confronted with announce-
ments claiming that the shows they were viewing were the ‘first’ to present
artworks from across the globe, or by new emerging artists, or developed
through collaborative efforts — claims that seemed to disregard the long
history and richness of the field of curating in the networked environment.
Because of this, tracing a brief lineage of curatorial strategies on the web
might be useful to understand the inaccuracy of many claims that were
made over the course of that year.
In the early 1990s, the web browser (with its visualisation of compu-
tational processes) meant that the web became a new medium for making
and displaying art. At that time, the web was not yet a slick, user-friendly
and visually dominated environment like the one of the following decade.
Yet, it started to move away from command lines and text-based content,
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