Page 80 - The Black Box Book

the other actors of this vast network (not necessarily of digital nature),
there is also a strengthening of social awareness and critical reflection
of the art institution itself.
When a person is ill, the symptoms of their condition intensify
their awareness of their body and the processes that occur within it.
The pandemic experience had a similar effect on social structures, includ-
fact, which is the creation of relationships between given objects through ing institutions such as galleries. It forced them to completely acknowl-
hyperlinks. This suggests that the main function of a digital archive is not edge self-doubt and continuously reevaluate the significance of their own
to document and preserve the content of each individual object but to existence: to ask who and in what way they can meaningfully assist. To
create relationships between them. Black Box as an archive, in contrast assess how the Covid experience has influenced artistic production, let us
to the archive as a space of the past, preserving collective historical be patient and wait for a reflection possessing greater temporal distance
memory, is an archive of the type of a ‘flexible system’, where the content and mental abstraction. It is premature to be “angry” at contemporary
is constantly recontextualised. art, or rather its representatives, for remaining too lethargic in the face of
On this platform, the selected works represent an online exhibition an event as powerful as the pandemic (Magid, 2021). It is our turn now:
or a collection of artworks, subjected to the curatorial selection of a hu- historians, curators and critics, to try to examine contemporary art pro-
man actor-curator (Curator 01: Only Artists will Survive) on the one hand, duction honestly and thoroughly and not to base this assessment only on
and at the same time subjected to the experimentation of a non-human the trends present in the prominent and influential biennial shows, which
actor-curator, which is an artificial neural network (Curator 02: A New are unable to respond quickly to the unexpected experiences and threats
Archivist) . Black Box is an archive in motion or a ‘living archive’ that is we are currently experiencing. And the Black Box is one such attempt.
24
synonymous with openness, creativity and the possibility of collaboration
on its content. (Lehner, 2014, p.77) Archives of this type “are not designed Figure 14: Juliana Höschlová (2021).
for long-term storage and memory, but for reproduction, for endless circu- Photo Eva Rybářová for Black Box, 2021
lation between different levels, people, networks and locations.” (Dekker
(ed.), 2017, p. 17)
Dekker’s (2018) method of the ‘network of care’ that she finds useful
when considering a conservation approach to net art, is also borrowed
here to describe the community-based approach involving multiple actors
when it comes to the curatorial project Black Box. In addition to the re-
quirements for a “transdisciplinary attitude”, an operational “transmission
of information”, and more, Dekker stresses “collectivity in networks” in
the context of net art conservation. (Dekker, 2018, p. 89) This method
of a collective approach to shaping artistic production and distribution,
appears to be one useful strategy to examine the cultural institution as
an important actor in shaping contemporary social realities in the field of
art and artistic operations. The collaborative process naturally influences
the roles of the curator, the artist, the audience and ultimately, the in-
stitution. The Black Box curatorial project can be seen as close to such
a collective practice. It embodies the network of human and technological
relations within which the project itself and the resulting challenges and
artistic realisations have emerged and are taking shape. It also exists as
a collaborative model of cooperation, leading to both the presentation and
archiving of artworks and knowledge, and the subsequent critical reflec-
tion on the state of contemporary art. As a consequence of its active role
in the circulation of knowledge and the creation of interactions between

24 Curators (2020). Black Box. Retrieved from https://cerna-skrinka.cz/
curators
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