Page 72 - The Black Box Book

CURATING ONLINE: THE NEW NORMAL
“Every single day, more hours are spent looking at a screen than
looking out of a window, the screen is our new landscape. Who de-
fines and who depicts this landscape?” (Dullaart, 2020)
The space of the web cannot be reduced to a medium or a tool; it com-
bines cultural practices and represents
“socio-technical culture that has enriched and transformed cura-
torial and art practices with new ways of creating and co-creating,
sharing and viewing, questioning traditional concepts and notions
of authenticity, authorship, ownership, and relations between cu-
rators, artists, institutions and audience members”. (Dekker (ed.),
2021, p. 299)
Within the confines of the web, a new order of art is emerging,
the status of the art object is changing, and curatorial practice is being
transformed. The computer or other medium mediating the gateway to
this space is a form “through which all kinds of cultural and artistic pro-
duction is being mediated” (Manovich, 2001, p. 76), a window into the web
browser, a virtual analogy of the walls of traditional art galleries.
Online exhibitions, but also their accompanying programs, including
the theoretical ones (conferences, symposia, etc.), which have moved into
the space of the web since the beginning of 2020, seem to be becoming
the new normal: “the online world became ‘the new normal’ for those
with computers and stable Internet connections”. (Dekker, 2021, p. 11)
Inhabiting the online world becomes ‘the new normal’ as a result of the
lockdown, and the Internet network is ‘the new outside’. Constant Dullaart,
in his curatorial text for the exhibition THE NEW OUTSIDE (2020) reflects
on the current state of social and economic lockdown and talks about
‘the new outside’ that has resulted from it:
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“A window to the world we take to the bathroom, a window to im-
aginary new landscapes. A landscape with newfound urgency, with
a private view on social relationships, family, other bodies twisted
in time and space, keeping distance. Do we use the commercial
methods easiest to us, or do we seize the opportunity to imagine
our own ways of being together? Unimaginable amounts of living
rooms tethered together by untraveled roads and well charged
devices allow reinvention of who we are in time and space, beyond
the cookies in our browser. The network has become our outside, but
who deals with the depiction of this new outside? Which ideologies
pass the horizon; how do we navigate the opaque infrastructures?
Instead of only looking on your screen, through this window to the
new outside, will we come out to play or walk in line? Who will help
redefine this important space to give hope, offer new ways of seeing,
reflect, create new worlds, make art?” (Dullart, 2020)
Several years before exhibition institutions entered the online space
to mediate art during the pandemic, Marialaura Ghidini (2015) explored
the ways in which curatorial work has changed according to curators’ un-
derstanding of the technology used for their projects. For Ghidini (2021),
the curatorial environment of the web is an area of practice that, because
of its site-specificity, moves away from the protocols of implementing ex-
hibitions in a gallery space. She argues that this area of curating requires
a revision of concepts of authorship, selection and display, collection and
archive, as well as audience participation in the artistic and curatorial
process (Ghidini, 2021).
For traditional art and cultural institutions, the network environ-
ment provides a different type of social space for the production, dis-
tribution, presentation, and archiving of contemporary (and not only
media) art. Closely related to this practice in a networked environment
is Dekker’s term ‘network of care’, which views networks as organized
networks of individuals with a common purpose, and as a space that
possesses the potential to act as “collaborative practices that work to-
wards the realization of projects” (Dekker, 2018, p. 89). ‘Network of care’,
in the context of the production, mediation and preservation of art, can
be described as the ‘curatorial network of care’, that is a situation where
the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated, for many
cultural institutions, the establishment of network connections and rela-
tionships that were crucial in the efforts to promote or even save art and
culture (an example of which is the Black Box project presented here).
The ‘network of care’ implies the presence of a sum of actors (curator,
artist, art institution, etc.) who collaborate to achieve a certain goal
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