Page 20 - The Black Box Book

them creatively. The study (Naef, P. & Birchler, B., 2022) provides insights
into the impact of the pandemic on performance art and artists in France.
An article (Zoljargal, 2022) focuses on using marketing skills by artists
who have had to adapt quickly to anti-pandemic measures. One study
(American Journal of Arts Management, 2022) is centred around the is-
sue of online broadcast performances in terms of audience satisfaction.
Elena Sidorova presents the economic impact of the pandemic on the art
market in her study. (Sidorova, 2022) 1
This publication is one of the first glimmers of reflection concerning
online exhibition practice in the age of the pandemic, and the research
cited above corroborates it to some extent. Yet, these previous reflections
do not overlap with the topics addressed in this book. It should be noted
that the issues of digital curation and digital art preservation have been
the subject of a long-standing debate from which our research team has
benefited. While making contributions with research inquiries centred on
2
internet curation during the exceptional pandemic period and introducing
artificial intelligence as a new force of curation online.
This monograph tries to answer the question of how curatorial
techniques, communication platforms, and the social role of exhibition
institutions have altered due to rapid and external circumstances, which
at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic compelled the shift from physical
gallery spaces to online environment. To achieve this set of objectives,
a combination of methodological approaches is used, navigating between
the inductive and deductive treatment of the issue, to provide the most
comprehensive picture of the lived practice of digital curation in the time
of the pandemic, accompanied by expert commentary and dialogue with
relevant academic discourse. From the online curatorial discussion stand-
point and the problems with archiving and mediation of digital art, case
studies of particular online curatorial projects incorporating digital media
are framed and analyzed. Members of the author collective frequently
describe projects in which they have participated, imbuing the studies with
a flavour of personal testimony and providing not only detailed descrip-
tions of the projects’ outcomes, but also conceptual context and unique
information about the specific circumstances of their work. The authors
consistently contextualize particular investigations into the growing topol-
ogy of online curation within the broader theoretical discourse and view
them in connection to other similar curatorial attempts.
The first chapter, Digital Curating and AI Curating: The Network
of Terms, focuses on the basic concepts used in the book and forms
the methodological framework of the book. It begins by introducing
the phenomena of the widespread digitization of cultural material and
1 The EBSCO scholarly database was used to search for studies:
https://www.ebsco.com/ (Accessed December 23, 2022).
2 See the chapter Digital curating and AI curating: The Network of Terms
dedicated to the terminology used and lists of references used in writing
each chapter of the book.
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the issue of the increasing number of ‘born digital’ artefacts and cultur-
al projects requiring specific preservation and mediation solutions for
the future generation. Digital Curating is elaborated upon to describe
the new phenomena of employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to interact with
digital traditional art collections and expand AI Curating methodologies.
The following chapters are organized into three sections. The first
section is The Black Box: The lock-down curatorial project. In each chap-
ter, the authors discuss the online curatorial project Black Box, which
was the primary impetus for the writing of this book that provides dif-
ferent perspectives of the roles played by the creative team members in
the process of the project’s realization.
Chapter What to look for in a black box? An attempt to recapit-
ulate the pandemic experience in gallery management places the pro-
ject in a broader context of the conditions of exhibition institutions in
the Czech Republic at a time of repeated lockdowns. It outlines exhibition
and dramaturgical trends that dominated Czech galleries in the 1990s,
the period preceding the pandemic outbreak. These include reinforcing
the idea that the gallery serves as a critical institution that hosts and nur-
tures social engagement. These ethical arguments affected Galerie TIC’s re-
sponse to the operational restrictions and existential uncertainties brought
on by the outbreak and lockdown. Therefore, the birth of the Black Box
project is not merely a result of the decision-making of a particular cu-
ratorial team but also of broader institutional strategies and progressive
art management practices. The key terms that emerge in the process
of reflecting on the transformation of art institutions in the first year of
the pandemic are words such as ‘paralysis’, ‘partial decline’ or the ‘mechan-
ical conversion’ of an off-line program to online, followed by a reflection
on the impact that these categories have bore upon art management.
The theoretical background within which the chapter operates frames
the (re)established practice of exhibition institutions to use already proven
or test new curatorial strategies in the environment of the world wide web
as a space that transforms the categories of art, institution, authorship,
audience or curatorial practice. The chapter recapitulates the reasons and
problems curators faced in seeking ways to meaningfully run an institution
during the exhibitions’ closure and imposed isolation. It describes how
the gallery has morphed from the expected role of displaying and me-
diating the experience of art to one where it becomes a co-producer or
a general supporter of artistic production. Namely, this support included,
above all, the provisioning of creative scholarships or long-term support
for contemporary artists. This text interprets various artistic interven-
tions that became part of the Black Box project, also in the wake of
the lived realities of a fomenting health and economic crisis. In conclusion,
the chapter summarizes the position that the project occupies in the con-
text of a critical reflection on the contemporary state of (not only local)
artistic and cultural production, understanding it as a project situated at
the intersection between an archive, a curatorial experiment and an online
gallery of artworks.
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