Page 74 - The Black Box Book

(e.g. the implementation of an exhibition); the adjective ‘curatorial’ then
connotes the mode of realization of this collaboration, that is, curating
as a “mode, not a simple question of display or production [...] curating is
not about the display of work (be that in a gallery, or on the Internet), it is
about the development of critical meaning in partnership and discussion
with artists and publics”. (Drabble, 2003)
In a networked environment, curation is distributed among several
actors - in addition to the actors, as mentioned earlier, software and
technology networks are also crucial in this context. This vast ecology of
human and non-human relationships and connections means that the cu-
rator, like the programmer, must be able to demonstrate an understanding
of the complexity of social relations in a space of distributed systems.
(Krysa, 2006, p. 22) Online curation enables new ways of producing and
displaying art, while “curating on the web is, at its core, responding to
the characteristics of the web medium, its tools and interfaces.” (Ghidini,
2019, p. 3) The extension of everyday lived reality enforced by media has
fundamentally affected our technological experience of it. From the per-
spective of the content consumer - it is framed by screens as windows
to the ‘new outside’. Our public life unfolds in a networked environment
that we have constructed, and the landscapes mediated by our screens
are defined by the technical parameters of the screen of the particular
type of media we use to enter our new outdoor spaces (computers,
tablets, mobile devices, and so on). The experience of this synthetic re-
ality varies depending on the size of the computer screen, the quality of
the image resolution, the orientation of the screen, the physical space that
surrounds us at the moment we are looking through the screen window, or
the internet browser we are using. The ‘new outside’ is conveyed in many
formats, but also in many contexts. Mediating art through the interface
of a window looking into new spaces inhabited by art creates new visual
experiences and new ways of perceiving the materiality of the work and
the viewer’s aesthetic experience of it.
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THE BLACK BOX PROJECT AS A ‘LIVING
ARCHIVE’ AND A ‘NETWORK OF CARE’
The enforced and sudden transition of institutions that before 2020 did
not use the web as a medium to present, mediate, or curate their exhibi-
tions on the one hand, and the muting of the activities of some curatorial
and artistic projects already using the web as a curatorial and conceptual
tool prior the lockdown, on the other hand
“underscores the opposing views on how art (or curating) on
the web, and more generally technology, is understood: as a tool to mimic
the practices and dynamics of the white cube, or as an ecosystem in
which cultural, economic, social and technical dimensions converge
and hence changes the definitions of art and curating.”
(Ghidini & Tedone & Dekker, 2021, p. 299)
While some art institutions can be seen as falling into the category
of mirroring their program traditionally implemented in the physical space
and transferring it into the space of the web, other institutions or festivals
of contemporary (media) art have perceived the web as an ecosystem. It
is through the lens of the circumstances that occurred in the spring of
2020, that has helped to extend their program to international partici-
pation and audiences, freeing themselves from the burden of having to
move physically, while at the same time utilizing the typical characteristics
of digital media to convey content (such as interactivity, hypertextuality,
etc.) or, for example, testing models of curation by artificial intelligence
algorithms.
The curatorial-research platform Black Box, which was formed
at the beginning of the lockdown (2020) at Brno Galerie TIC, responds
at its core to the pandemic and the related lockdown, seeking to reveal
the challenges that Czech art and culture faced during this period. By its
very nature, it is situated between an archive, a curatorial experiment and
an online art gallery. At the same time, it represents an ‘open network’
(Terranova, 2006), shaping a communication that transcends physical
space and in which the social, the technological, the cultural and the
artistic interpenetrate and interact. It is close to a platform as defined by
Goriunova “A platform often [also] puts effort into translating digital cre-
ative processes into offline and more official cultural scenes” (Goriunova,
2006) by translating art projects presented on its website into physical
installations, both in the gallery and in public space.
Through its activities and program, Black Box contributes to a critical
reflection on the current state of the art and cultural production, which
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