Page 186 - The Black Box Book

est possible audience. Although the curatorial operation can be described
simply in terms of live broadcasting, the museums network it created
and the political undertone of the work, which denounces ongoing police
violence and racial oppression faced by Black Americans, produced a re-
markable impact, reaching an audience of 125.000 people across different
time zones. Viewers were encouraged to submit questions and reactions
to the video online, responding to the preposition that museums can be
safe spaces for difficult conversations (Stebich, 2020).
Another effective use of online infrastructure was conducted by
the Chronus Art Centre in Shanghai in occasion of the online project cu-
rated by Zhang Ga entitled We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces (2020). The project
was a direct and swift response to the lockdown in China in the early
year 2020 and was made possible by the participation of two additional
international institutions, the Art Center Nabi in Seoul and Rhizome in New
York, which contributed the budget to commission artists and organize
the show. The project aimed to reaffirm the importance of Net art as
a practice which responds to the infrastructure of the network. The dis-
positif of the ‘link’ was used as a central device in the experience of the
online exhibition. Artists of various backgrounds were involved in the pro-
ject, merging in this sense Bishop’s art digital divide and aimed at creating
a community of solidarity and a network of empowerment across creative
practitioners in a moment of profound crisis. The role of the curator Zhang
Ga, who works across both the contemporary art world and the media
community, was key in narrowing the curatorial digital divide. When asked
to comment on such a divide, Ga speculated that the problem consists
essentially in a knowledge gap from the side of the contemporary art world
and that the solution might lie in deeper understanding of the intricacies
of technology from a practical perspective as well as from a philosophical
one, and a better integration of these two communities of stakeholders.
The project We=Link evolved into an ongoing programme, a platform for
presenting online art, with a second exhibition entitled We=Link: Sideways
(2020–2021) which integrated both the online space and the physical
environment of the gallery.
In another case, two international museums decided to join forces
to create a brand-new curatorial format. The programme of Screen Walks
(2020) was conceived by the digital curators of The Photographers Gallery
in London and Fotomuseum Winterthur Jon Uriarte and Marco de Mutiis.
This online format, which relied upon the video conferencing platform
Zoom, used the devise screen sharing as a mode of entry into an artistic
and creative practice, enabling artists and researchers to open the black
box of their computers and to blend the boundaries between a studio
visit, a networked performance and an online workshop. Various practi-
tioners, such as artists, curators, researchers, were invited to creatively
respond to the possibilities and limitations offered by this format and by
the technology enabling it. When asked to participate in the programme,
I took the opportunity to collaborate with Cuban artist Nestor Siré and to
stage several blockages Cuban users experience in their daily navigation
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of the Internet, starting with giving visibility to the difficulty of connect-
ing to Zoom at the time of the event. The Screen Walk thus became
an opportunity to circumnavigate problems of access and connectivity
and to explore alternative ways for engaging with online audiences.
These examples reveal that, when technology is treated as ‘culture’
and the logic of cooperation combined with techno-social alliances replace
cultural gatekeeping and single authorship, it is possible to begin rethink-
ing the role of the museum in networked culture as a node within a much
wider constellation, or ecosystem, shaped by human and non-human
agents, software, images, and users. In this context, the museums should
approach online curating not merely as a counterstrategy to conventional
models of curating, but as a way to stage synchronic participation and
interaction with audiences, connecting distant geographies and different
socio-technical conditions. Through this formulation, the museum could
become an active participant in processes of networked co-curation,
creating a de-centralized and collaborative alternative to the dynamics of
hyper-individualism and cultural gatekeeping that are often at the core of
current art world systems and social media platforms.
Overall, the pandemic taught cultural institutions a number of impor-
tant lessons, some of which might take years to be fully comprehended.
One of the most important ones, was to gauge how the Web operates as
a catalyst for various art communities and audiences, which rarely interact
with one another, and to point to the necessity for a deeper integration
between them which could be potentially conducted by progressive mu-
seums. The knowledge gap identified regarding network technology could
be overcome through sharing resources consistently and literature about
the history of Net art and digital art practices. Or, additionally, through the
creation of novel training programmes for cultural operators which could
integrate technical and computational studies inside the curriculum of
humanities. Concerning the role of the museums more specifically, it has
become apparent that the process of recasting a new social role for them
should start from a self-reflexive evaluation of how art and creativity are
imbricated within the wider dynamics of the attention economy as much
as the creative exuberance of the networked culture. In this respect, there
are still many avenues that museums can explore to redirect the aggre-
gative power of online platforms towards radical forms of communality,
solidarity, and participation in concert with online audiences.
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