Online Curatorial Practice — Flexible Contexts and ‘Democratic’ Filtering

Screenshot from ecoarttech's Untitled Landscape # 5, commissioned for whitney.org (2009). Fluctuating, glowing orbs, whose size is driven by statistics of the numbers of visitors to whitney.org, disrupt the "digital landscape" of the Whitney's website at sunset and sunrise time.

By Christiane Paul

When Internet art officially came into being with the advent of the WWW in the early 1990s, it immediately inspired a variety of dreams about the future of artistic and curatorial practice, among them the dream of a more or less radical reconfiguration of traditional models and “spaces” for accessing art. As an art form that exists within a (virtual) public space and has been created to be seen by anyone, anywhere, at any time (provided one has access to the network), net art does not necessarily need the physical space of an art institution to be presented or introduced to the public and promises new ways of distributing and accessing art that can function independently of the institutional art world and its structures of validation and commodification. Net art seems to call for a “museum without walls,” a parallel, distributed, living information space that is open to interferences by artists, audiences, and curators—a space for exchange, collaborative creation, and presentation that is transparent and flexible.

An online art world—consisting of artists, critics, curators, theorists and other practitioners—immediately developed in tandem with Internet art and outside of the institutional art world. In the late 1990s, institutions also began to pay attention to net art as part of contemporary artistic practice and slowly incorporated it into their programming. Curatorial practice in the online world began to unfold not only independent of institutions—through Web projects created by independent curators and (artist) collaboratives—but also in an institutional context—through websites affiliated with museums, such as the Walker Art Center’s Gallery 9, SF MOMA’s e-space and the Whitney Museum’s artport. These different curatorial projects differ substantially in their respective interpretation of selection, filtering, and “gate-keeping” as fundamental aspects of the curatorial process. With its inherent flexibility and possibilities for customization and indexing, the digital medium potentially allows for an increased public involvement in the curatorial process, a “public curation” that promises to construct more “democratic” and participatory forms of filtering. This text will outline the effects of networks and collaborative exchange on the curatorial process.

Networks, Collaborative Exchange, and Democratization

The Internet, networked mobile devices—from mobile phones to PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants)—and increasingly affordable software and hardware have brought about a new era for the creation and distribution of media content. The utopian promise of this era is “technologies for the people” and a many-to-many broadcasting system that returns the power over distribution to the individual and has a democratizing effect. In its early days, the Internet was dominated by research and educational institutions and provided a playground for artistic experimentation. The dream of a “network for the people” did not last long and, from the very beginning, obscured the more complex issues of power and control over media. Only a portion of the world is connected to a “global” network, and some countries have been subject to government-imposed access restrictions. The Internet itself quickly became a mirror of the actual world, with corporations and e-commerce colonializing the landscape. The burst of the “dot com” bubble ended a lot of the hype surrounding the Internet economy and led to reconsiderations of e-commerce, but the industry of digital technologies is still very much alive.

Nevertheless, one could argue that networked environments enhance the potential for democratization and increase the public’s agency in several respects—for example through enhanced distribution, filtering, and archiving mechanisms that give importance to an “individual’s voice”; the fact that interventions (in the broadest sense) are not necessarily bound to a geographic space any more; through social media and a largely decentralized rather than hierarchical structure. This obviously does not mean that authority itself has been eliminated.

In networked environments, collaborative exchange is a fundamental part of artistic and cultural production and has led to shifts in the understanding of the artwork and authorship, which in turn has fundamental consequences for curatorial practice. Curators need to place more emphasis on and develop strategies for documentation of works that are created by multiple authors and constantly develop over time. When it comes to online art, a collaborative process and model is almost a necessity and naturally affects the roles of the curator, artist, audience, and institution. Collaboration leads to an increased openness of the production and presentation process; it requires awareness of process, and its results are not necessarily predictable.

Network structures and collaborative models tend to create zones of cultural autonomy—often formed ad hoc by communities of interest—that exist as long as they fulfill a set of functions and then often disperse or move on. This does not necessarily mean that networks create new models of democracy or self-governance, since they are supported by numerous protocols and governing structures and inextricably connected to the technological industry. The existence of networks has opened up new spaces both for autonomous producers and DIY culture, and the industry of market-driven media. Artistic production oscillates between the poles of openness of systems and restrictions imposed by protocols and the technological industry.

Flexible Contexts and Changing Curatorial Roles

All of the issues outlined above require that curators and art institutions, at least to some extent, reconfigure their roles and adapt to the demands of the art. The shifts brought about by collaborative models and networked exchange are not necessarily specific to online art but also apply to many other forms of new media art, such as installations, software art, or mobile media pieces. In the organization of an exhibition presenting any of these different forms, a curator may play a role closer to that of a producer, supervising a team of creators, as well as the production and public presentation of the work. The variability and modularity of new media works implies that there usually are various possible presentation scenarios: artworks are often reconfigured for the specific space and presented in very different ways from venue to venue. However, the changes in the curatorial role tend to become most obvious in online curation, which by nature unfolds in a hyperlinked contextual network.

While some aspects of the curatorial role—such as selection of works, organization of exhibits and their art-historical framing—still apply to the process of online curating, transformations occur in the process of filtering, “describing” and classifying within the online environment. The Internet is a contextual network where a different context is always only one click away, and everyone is engaged in a continuous process of creating context and re-contextualizing. Linking to and commenting on other websites creates information filters, portals, and new contexts. The continuous flow of information creates fluctuating contexts that become a “moving target” when it comes to establishing our frameworks for creating meaning. On the Internet, the spatial distance that would divide the center from the margin or text from context in the physical world is subordinated to the temporality of the link.

In her article ,”¹ Anne-Marie Schleiner points out that every website owner assumes the role of a curator and a cultural critic by creating chains of meaning through association, comparison, and juxtaposition. “I am what I link to” is how Schleiner sums up the ontological status of online contextualization through linking. The embeddedness of online art into a rich contextual environment creates various tensions and oppositions. The Internet both blurs boundaries between “categories” of cultural production (fine arts, pop culture, entertainment, software etc.) and creates a space for specialized interests with a very narrow focus.

Online curation can hardly ignore the specifics of its environment and has to acknowledge these shifting contexts. An exhibition shown in physical space has a set opening and closing date, requires a visit to a physical locality and, after its closing, becomes part of the “cultural archive” through its catalogue, documentation, and critical reception in the press. An exhibition of online art, however, is seen by a translocal community, never closes and continues to exist indefinitely (until some party fails in sustaining it). It exists within a network of related and previous exhibitions that can be seen directly next to it in another browser window, becoming part of the continuous evolution of the art form. Depending on their openness, the artworks included in the exhibition (through linking) may continue to evolve over time. Ongoing discussions of the exhibition on mailing lists, in forums, blogs and social networks may include alternative versions of the exhibition through posts that feature links to additional artworks. For a curator of an exhibition of objects in a physical venue, selection is partly determined by space limits, budget, and availability of objects, all of which are not of immediate concern in online curation. The latter allows for “large-scale” shows, and concept and focus become the main criteria for inclusion or exclusion of artworks. The distributed model of the networked exhibition environment affects the curatorial role even if it is only a single curator and “filter feeder” who selects the work. From its very beginning, the exhibition is not bound by the framework of one institution but exists in a network where curatorial control tends to be more distributed.

Anne-Marie Schleiner summarizes the differences between the traditional curator and “filter feeder” in a deliberately polarizing juxtaposition:

(Schleiner, 2003)

One could certainly argue that the role of a curator of contemporary art is increasingly shifting towards that of a filter feeder, since cultural production in general has become more “networked” through the technologies of our time, and public art viewing practices have changed. However, the politics of selection and the role played by art institutions undergo more substantial changes in the online curatorial process, which takes place in the non-locality of a distributed network.

The reconfiguration of the roles of curator, artist, audience and museum necessitated by the nature and demands of digital media will certainly meet some resistance and might not live up to its potential for quite some time. However, this reconfiguration simply is a reflection of the potential of digital technologies themselves, which enable an “open-source” model for the creation and presentation of art. The idea of open source—making the source code of a project / software available to the public for further expansion without traditional proprietary control mechanisms—could also be applied to the curatorial process. This distributed, open source curation could be considered either in a more metaphorical way, where exhibition concept and selection become expandable by the audience; or in a narrower sense, where curation unfolds with the assistance of open source software that can be further developed by a community of interest.

NOTES

¹ Schleiner, Anne-Marie. ”Fluidities and Oppositions among Curators, Filter Feeders, and Future Artists.” Intelligent Agent Vol. 3 No. 1. 2003. Web. <http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_curation_schleiner.html>

Christiane Paul is the Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Prof. of Media Studies at The New School, NY, and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

* This text is an abbreviated version of the author’s essay “Flexible Contexts, Democratic Filtering, and Computer Aided Curating - Models for Online Curatorial Practice” in Joasia Krysa (ed.), Curating, Immateriality, Systems: On Curating Digital Media, Data Browser Series Vol. 3 (Autonomedia Press: New York, 2006)