Today curators have to go beyond art platforms. Art platforms described by Olga Goriunova as "a platform on which to build an art trend", "an online platform that enables the building of a cultural movement entirely through the use of its own mechanisms" that "describes a Web platform that solicits, induces and produces a cultural or artistic phenomenon", as "a technical bottlenecks of moderating, featuring, voting and making comments that channel the collective effort (that) help(s) create an artistic or cultural phenomenon"18, have become obsolete, have to be challenged again. Building on art platform spirit and on the concept of art platforms as providers of naked infrastructure for collective context generation, content-aggregation, and art community generation, new curating is taking advantage of ready-made Web 2.0 applications that can be described similarly. Nowadays, artists and curators do not need to construct a software platform to promote their work or ideas. Web 2.0 applications are available for use. But how are they being used? What are these curators or artists trying to question this time? What are their ideological goals? Are they going beyond what these art platforms were trying to do? Are they using these technologies in a different way to institutions?19 Are they promoting curating in new ways? Some of them use "MySpace" or "Facebook" accounts and tools and typical MySpace/Facebook user strategies: 1. to exhibit works that "critique[s], mimic[s], or otherwise utilise[s] the structural logic of social networking sites and other Web 2.0 phenomena"20 (as Concept Trucking, an exhibition venue in MySpace held by LeisureArts); or 2. building on a recurrent historical utopian dream, "to bring the artistic way of thinking closer to everyone, trying to make contemporary art available for all"21 and to "exhibit art pieces that use the MySpace interface as it's main support" meaning that "the MySpace profile is the art piece"22 (as Nano-Corporation, a so- called art company)23; or 3. to "feature schedules of art from artists with a presence in MySpace ... endors(ing) the notion that 'everyone is an artist'"24 (as Top 8 Gallery, a New Media curatorial project); or 4. to try to be "an experiment in connectivity and networking", concerned about "a parallel abundance of accessible tools and channels to distribute creative production, in contradiction to the historical systems of collectors, dealers, museums and the various strata of agents who mediate among them and between them and artists"25 (as Blogumenta, a so-called "first art gallery in Facebook"); or 5. to put into place "an interactive platform ... based on the concepts of open art-work, cause and/vs. effect, and free association of ideas; where the last art-work is always inspired to the previous one, in order to generate an open art-work in continuous evolution that never completes itself"26 (as Tobecontinued, a so-called "group exhibition in progress"). An amazing experiment of physical and online collective curating and art organising, "Node London"27, used a wiki system to articulate curatorial and managerial work and to set up a collaborative art/curatorial platform in a remarkable way. Other projects mix mailing lists, blogs, physical and online discussion and physical gallery exhibition in order to help "peers connect, communicate and collaborate, creating controversies, structures and culture using both digital networks and shared physical environments"28 and to experiment with collaborative curating (as "DIWO", an E-Mail Art project).29 Others combine blogs and collaborative tools as "Platial"30 in order to foster public participation (as "Urban Curators").31 Some others use blogs as a platform for blogs: a blog which sends the user to other blogs, without any express curatorial statement (as "Blog Art")32 or simply use blogs as the "traditional" online exhibitions I mentioned before, although their supposed goal is to "create a flexible and open-ended space to address (their) ideas"33 (as "New Climates"). And others explore new Web 2.0 phenomena, like social bookmarking/tagging, to reflect on social curating and context (as "TAGallery"34, a project by CONT3XT.NET35). As we see, these curatorial projects work on similar ideological, conceptual and structural premises as previous art platforms, although they take advantage of naked commercial or non-commercial ready-made Web 2.0 infrastructures in order to offer almost empty platforms for future content. There are almost no theoretical statements about their goal, purpose or future development or if there are, they are summarised in two or three lines in order to provide a light guideline to participants. The curatorial concept evolves at the same time as content is uploaded to these platforms; and context, depending on changing fluid content, is in perpetual progress and transformation. Curating, therefore, becomes an everlasting "passing" ability derived from a fluctuating and flexible infrastructure. Simultaneously, these projects foster not only the development of artists' communities similar to prior art platforms, but also activate artist-public socialisation (due to be integrated in popular social websites). Looping link/RSS/trackback mechanisms between friends or network members (as in MySpace or del.icio.us or in the blogosphere) create circular claustrophobic collective self-referentialism. In multi-ring art infrastructures, curating is contaminated with circularity and cloisterism combined with a certain centrifugal spiralling. However, other social aspects of Web 2.0 websites, such as collective rating, voting, and ranking, are hardly used or explored. I think that a combative spirit against the development of hierarchies and elitism in the physical art world (where market quotations and rankings, gallery classification and other power structures create undesirable hierarchy ranks) is a common trait in these projects. That is the reason why these tools are hardly ever put in practical use in these platforms, although I must say that tagging systems in some of these projects (as "TAGallery") introduce, at least, a certain degree of link hierarchy and, thus, content hierarchy, with effects worthy of investigation. Thus, a non-hierarchical "looping-passing" curatorship is lately making its way. It is still too soon to draw conclusions on the evolution of online curatorship thanks to Web 2.0 tools. However, a first approach to these initial proposals shows us that they build on earlier art platforms philosophy, and that the main ideas of Web 2.0, its lights and shadows, still have to be deeply challenged and explored from a curatorial point of view. There is still ground for future research and experimental action on collective infrastructures and social curating. And other future questions arise: are online curators really interested in social curating? Can online social curating be the end of curating? Additional Information: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. This text was originally published in: CONT3XT.NET (Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl, Franz Thalmair (eds.)): circulating contexts--CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART. Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, 2007 |
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