Page 32 - The Black Box Book

D I G I T A L C UR A TI N G
The discourse surrounding the curation of contemporary media
art is strongly shaped by the environment in which it is realized (digital
network environment) and the artistic medium (digital technologies).
The environment and medium largely determine thinking not only about
the production but also the distribution and presentation of art, as a cu-
ratorial practice is closely linked to technological and social and cultural
developments. From this environment, represented by artists, theorists,
and curators, the conceptual field that defines the discourse emerged in
the thinking about strategies and methods of mediating digital art.
CURATORIAL DIGITAL DIVIDE
Gaia Tedone (2019, 2020) situates the term ‘digital divide’ (which in
the context of the social sciences signifies unequal access to technolo-
gies and network infrastructures, and which art critic Claire Bishop (2012)
borrowed to think about the relationship between new technologies and
contemporary art, understanding new media as a subfield of contempo-
rary art, albeit with its discourse and network of distribution) in the milieu
of curatorial practice. (Tedone, 2019) She asserts that the ‘digital divide’
contributes to the polarization of the position of new media art curators
and contemporary art curators. The digital divide of curatorial practice,
Tedone argues, is both a condition and a response to many factors:
“First, the networked infrastructure and level of digital literacy which
curators rely upon and have access to when conducting their pro-
jects and activities. Second, the different theoretical references and
historical genealogies that make up the fields’ intellectual discours-
es. Third, the different market dynamics which have an impact on
the circulation of artworks and their sales, as well as the employabil-
ity of curators inside both the academic and the museums’ sectors.”
(Tedone, 2020)
NETWORKED CO-CURATION
Developments in the practice of collective and network curating have
contributed to a shift of the curatorial agency from online curation to
‘networked co-curation.’ (Dekker, ed., 2021). At the time when an enormous
variability of constellations formed by “a collision of different interests driv-
en by economic, cultural, and socio-political agendas” and the emergence
of new relations consisting of “ human and machinic agents, objects and
practices, [...] a curator needs to take into account a complex interrelated
network of dependencies and contexts that are often invisible or incom-
prehensible to most people. In such a scenario online curation becomes
‘networked co-curation’ and shifts the attention from ‘what’ is produced
to ‘ how’ it is performed under the socio-technical conditions and relations
that characterize the current state of the Web”. (Dekker & Tedone, 2019)
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Tedone refers to ‘networked co-curation’ as a distributed, decentralized,
1
collaborative, networked, and performative process and practice of online
curation and provides some examples of such practice. She mentions the
work by artist Arthur Jafa, Love is the message, the message is death
(2016), or the online project curated by Zhang Ga, We=Link: Ten Easy
Pieces (2020). (Tedone, in her chapter of this publication) To underline
the shift in attention of the networked co-curation “from ‘what’ is pro-
duced and exhibited to ‘ how’ it is performed”, Dekker and Tedone (2019)
analyze the curatorial and artistic projects #exstrange: a curatorial
intervention on eBay (where curators Marialaura Ghidini and Rebekah
Modrak appropriated in 2017 the commercial, auction-based platform
eBay) and Harm van den Dorpel’s DeliNear.Info (2014), an experimental
space situated in-between ‘a sketchbook, a social platform, and an archive’
(Dekker 2015). While curatorial activity within the framework of networked
co-curation heavily relies on digital tools and networked infrastructure,
both projects represent “forms of creativity that emerge as the result of
unpredicted encounters on online platforms [and] show how online curation
is performed ‘ in’ and ‘through’ human and technical objects, relations and
interactions”. (Dekker & Tedone, 2019) As a critical ‘operational strategy’
and ‘theoretical concept’, networked co-curation could be well suited to
“ become a method for producing cultural differentiation and valorization
under the current state of privatization, corporatization and commodifi-
cation of the Web”. (Dekker & Tedone, 2019)
CURATING ONLINE/CURATING ON THE WEB
Marialaura Ghidini distinguishes between the terms ‘curating online’
and ‘curating on the web’ (2019), considering ‘curating on the web’ as
a subset of ‘curating online’ in that she understands ‘curating on
the web’ as a site-specific approach, for exhibitions realized in a web-
based environment. Namely, this perspective enables new ways of pro-
ducing and displaying digital art. Also, according to Ghidini, “‘curating on
the web’ is, at its core, responding to the characteristics of the web me-
dium, its tools and interfaces”. (Ghidini, 2019) Ghidini (2019) believes that
the testing of the networked environment and its research has enabled
the emergence of online spaces for the mediation of artworks: “with
the mass use of the web, exhibitions have evolved from spaces displaying
web-specific art to platforms that nurture its production and different ways
of engaging audiences” (Ghidini, 2019, p. 4) Concerning this situation,
she finds it beneficial in the process of ‘curating on the web’ to think of
the platform as an open-ended and grass-roots process rather than
a set of objects and a space that “focuses on a certain kind of cultural
practice”. (Goriunova, 2012)
1 Further analysis of the term available in Tedone, G. (2019). Curating
The Networked Image: Circulation, Commodification, Computation. PhD
Diss. London South Bank University.
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