Page 22 - The Black Box Book

Chapter A New Archivist describes the intervention of an inhuman
curator in a collection of art projects inspired by the lockdown era. The in-
human curator, represented by an AI algorithm, was trained by an unsuper-
vised learning model to situate the curatorial project as a post-apocalyptic
narrative about the extinction of humanity, where the remaining artefact
of a black box contains artistic reflections concerning the experience of
the pandemic. The three phases of AI experimentation are described in
detail, whereby the aim was to coax the software into playing the role of
an alien, attempting in its manner to decipher the communication code
and understand the message of the box’s contents.
The Chapter Web Is the Key: On the Design of the Black Box gives
insight into the work of a graphic designer and web programmer. It de-
scribes the conceptual background and inspirational sources for web
design, emphasising on the complementary relationship or inseparable
link between graphic elements and functional features of the web. Finally,
it explains how the ideas of artificial intelligence (unsupervised learning)
have been woven into the website’s operation.
Section Curating online (2020) discusses the issue of curatorial
practices in the online environment, underlining the unfolding events in
2020, marked by the lockdown and the associated exodus from brick-
and-mortar galleries to online spaces. Responding to this circumstance,
internet curation fought traditional exhibition institutions for the first time,
establishing itself as a distinct discipline and developing its tactics in
parallel with the functioning of brick-and-mortar galleries for many years.
The opening chapter of this section, entitled 2020: Is It the End of
Curating on the Web? by Marialaura Ghidini, traces the evolution of digital
curating in terms of the changes and trends it traces from 2009 to 2020.
Respectively, the author underscores how the year 2020, or the lockdown
period in general, is a critical turning point in the discipline’s evolution.
These seemingly favourable conditions nourished the role of digital curat-
ing, which in turn has paradoxically led to its decontextualization. More
specifically, drawing attention to the reality of online curatorial projects
moving away from site-specific and infrastructure-specific strategies.
Online-migrating galleries were just relocating exhibitions from offline
to online without regard to the changed context, which generated ten-
tative or fuzzy results. To articulate this problem, the author introduces
the terminological distinction of “curating on the web” vs. “curating on-
line,” which enables her to pinpoint the fundamental differences with
respect to these approaches and their use of online platforms as vehicles
for exhibitions. According to Ghidini, curating on the web is a subset of
online curation, with the former referring to a range of practices from
a site-specific approach to curating web-based exhibitions, as opposed to
an approach based on re-formatting existing material to be viewed online,
such as displaying documentation of artworks or displaying digitized art
collections online. It provides a reflective consideration of the site-specific
elements of the online environment as a crucial feature of digital curation
(aka curating on the web).
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The juxtaposition of digital curatorial projects with the provisional
use of online platforms by traditional exhibition institutions with no prior
experience with online curation also serves as the argumentative thread
of Gaia Tedone’s following chapter, 2020 Digital Odyssey: Online or
Nothing. The author works with the notion of the “curatorial digital divide”
(an appropriation of Claire Bishop’s 2012 notion of the digital divide) to
articulate the new conditions of online curating that emerged due to
the pandemic. At this time, to maintain a dialogue and relation with their
audiences, previously web-resistant or conventional institutions shifted
towards a massive online presence without the implementation of online
curatorial practices they had established over the years. This situation may
have been a chance to abolish the difference between online and offline
curation, yet the opposite proved true. As a result, many internet-spe-
cialized galleries and artists resisted this, and some even temporarily
suspended their online curatorial operations. Moreover, the proliferation
of exclusively online art projects during the pandemic has made visible
another pressing problem of digital art, which is the absence of a policy
for archiving online cultural and artistic production, which, however, has
yet to be discussed and taken into account in the practice of memory
institutions. In the conclusion of the study, Tedone uses examples of good
practice to demonstrate how the “curatorial digital divide” can be bridged
by cultivating a dialogue between the two camps with projects based
on “networked co-curation” (Tedone) through productive collaboration
results in mutual enrichment of knowledge and experience, as well as
the emergence of new curatorial formats.
The chapter Networked Art Practice After Digital Preservation dis-
cusses the preservation of networked art practices, such as pre-internet
mail art or born-digital software-based or net art, from the last sixty
years. Sarah Cook and Roddy Hunter endeavour to answer the question
of appropriate strategies for their preservation in light of their specific
materiality. The authors observe, along with the so-called dematerializa-
tion of the art object, the material features and ideological dimensions of
these works have challenged existing approaches, methods and protocols
of art conservation. They find appropriate strategies for preserving these
artworks in the context of performance art, for instance, in the form
of re-enactments. In addition, Internet archiving technologies such as
the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine indicate a shift in preservation
tactics and the concept of artistic creation, authorship, and curato-
rial agency. This chapter contributes to current research that traces
the margins and limits of networked art practice following digital pres-
ervation.
Michal Klodner’s chapter, Ecosystems and Artistic Research in Form-
ing Digital Curatorial Infrastructures, expands on the preceding chapter
with his observations on proper preservation solutions for digital art and
online art initiatives. He advocates for media art preservation strategies
that approach these works as open cybernetic systems involving social
actors or living ecosystems, which means that the preservation of these
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