Page 23 - The Black Box Book

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