If, in a conventional sense, curating follows a particular model of selecting, organising, displaying, contextualising and documenting of art works, then emergent curatorial forms attempt to rethink this model for the context of networks. What these forms suggest are new ways of organizing the curatorial process, new presentation platforms and new conceptions for the involvement with users - artists, computer programmers and wider audience alike - exploiting and in keeping with the properties of socio-technological networks. The history that led to the emergence of this distinctive approach to curating can be linked to number of parallel developments. Firstly, there is a long history of curators organising exhibitions of art that involves technology, such as Cybernetic Serendipity (ICA, London, 1968) or Software (Jewish Museum, New York, 1970). The Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (curated by Jasia Reinhardt), although not the first computer art exhibition as such (earlier exhibitions and project were held in US and Germany), is seminal in the history of computing and art.6 The particular significance of the project was in that rather than focusing on computer generated work it took a wider focus and drew attention to art in combination with cybernetics, a relatively new field of scientific inquiry concerned with - in Norbert Wiener's description - "the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal" ([1948] 2000: 11). It was organised in three distinctive sections: "computer generated work, cybernetic devices-robots and painting machines, and machines demonstrating use of computers / history of cybernetics" (MacGregor 2002). Around the same time, the exhibition Software, Information Technology: its new meaning for art (curated by Jack Burnham) explicitly used the term "software" as a metaphor for ideas, processes and systems as opposed to the "hardware" of traditional object-based practices.7 The exhibition included an eclectic combination of art and non-art from technological applications and experiments (computing and electronic research applications) through to conceptual art works and those overtly dealing with technology. Other historically significant exhibitions and projects that dealt with an increasing impact of communication technologies on art were: the Art and Technology project developed by Maurice Tuchman and Jane Livingstone at the Los Angeles County Museum in the period of five years (1966-1971), the Information exhibition curated by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970); and research projects by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) group (set up in 1967 by engineers and artists Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whiteman) and by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes). A further example is the exhibition of computer generated art Tendencije 4 in Zagreb (1968) which along with published at the same time magazine on aesthetic and media theory Bit International was recently revisited in a major "retrospective" bit international: [Nove] Tendencije computer and visual research curated by Darko Fritz in Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, in Graz (2007). More currently, the exhibition CODeDOC (2002) curated by Christiane Paul for the Whitney Museum's artport website (and later extended for Ars Electronica Festival in 2003) is significant in shifting curatorial attention directly to source code (displayed in the exhibition alongside its results as executed code).8
In parallel, there is also a history of critical tradition of artists directly engaging with computational technologies and the openness of technological structures (Internet and software) - artists essentially working like curators - that historically have made some of the most significant interventions in the field. For instance: Alexei Shulgin's Desktop Is (1997-1998), Eva Grubinger's C@C - Computer-Aided Curating (1993-1995), and more recently, Robert Lisek's FACE (2007, in progress) and Pall Thayer's CodeChat project (2007).9
Desktop Is was set up as a website displaying images of computer desktops collected by the artists through an open public call; the artist set out specific rules of public participation, collected and displayed "works" sent by public, thus acting in the manner of a curator. An even earlier example of a similar approach was C@C - Computer-Aided Curating a software-driven tool and a curatorial online system developed in collaboration with computer programmer Thomax Kaulmann. The system not only enabled artists to create their own works in online "artist-studios" with built-in editing tools, but also provided a context for presentation and selection of other artists' works creating the structure of a social network. The website also included a discussion forum for the exchange of comments by the public and curators, and spaces for art dealers to present and promote their activities. Christiane Paul, in "Flexible Contexts, Democratic Filtering, & Computer-Aided Curating" (2006) comments on the project in the following manner:
A more contemporary version of such an approach, both in terms of chronology and technological system employed, is FACE (Free Artists Concepts Exchange). The project can be described as a web enabled system for exchange of concepts, display of work, collaborative production and experimenting, and plays with "the meaning of media objects by creating, transforming the downloaded media objects, which are in a sense "source code" to work with". It builds upon the technical system that uses the structure of nodes and DAG (directed acyclic graph). This allows the user to represent and manipulate concepts and projects and the system facilitates an online, flexible and collaborative platform. The emphasis is on the collaborative aspect in that the curatorial responsibility for the architecture of FACE and its structural parts (i.e. nodes) is distributed across its participants. Furthermore, the process of creation, organisation and dispersal of concepts is represented by the flow of graphs, where each concept has a dedicated node, or a configuration of several nodes in the graph. The project website explains that while "the content published by participants is located at the edges of the graph, the nodes represent a system of tags used by participants for indexing of content". Simultaneously, participants can control their own graph(s), as well as navigate through the system exploring graphs of other participants. The significance of this lies in the productive interrelation between local interventions by each of the participants and the network's global behaviour, and the social relations that arise from this.
There is an increasing tendency in this growing field of practice to emphasise the integration of aesthetic with technical aspects in works that place source code at their centre. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the CodeChat project that is a code-based chat system developed as a means to discuss the conceptual and aesthetic implications of coding methods in art that involves programming. The system is structured as a single Perl script to facilitate a database of text-based code files submitted as open source (or at least part of the submitted code has to be open source to allow public commenting). According to the project description, the Perl script automatically generates an html file with comment sections for each line of submitted code. The commenting system is AJAX based, driven by Javascript, PHP and MySQL. The project is structured as an open dynamic system that entirely relies on public participation expressed in an active involvement in providing content (source code) and sustaining dynamic and transformative potential of the project through the function of public commenting. The project is particularly interesting for the context of this paper in that it combines the aesthetic potential of source code (essentially as an "artwork" that can be put on display for public viewing) with its technical and functional potential (demonstrated through public commenting on specific lines of code in order to share more technical knowledge).
Although in a general sense it is not new for artists to work like curators in organising public presentations of their and other artists' works, the interesting aspect of these examples is that they present an artwork that at the same time possesses attributes of an online curatorial system that relies on public contributions. Furthermore, these examples can be considered as symptomatic of a practice that deliberately confuses the firm distinctions between artistic practice, computer programming and curatorial practice extending what was described earlier as the process of collapsing and conflating of traditional roles of artist, curator and critic. The reverse of this holds too. Just like artists-programmers increasingly work like curators, more recently a similar tendency appears to be emerging from the curatorial field per se and there are growing numbers of overtly curatorial interventions in this respect. This tendency that emerged from the shared perception of the Web and the Internet as an increasingly independent and open platform for the production and presentation of art can be well instantiated in projects such as Runme (2003), unDEAF (2007), TAGallery (2007) and Hack-able Curator (2007), to mention only a few prominent examples.10 Runme is a software art repository and an online presentation platform that further develops the idea of curatorial engagement with software processes (software-based filtering of software art projects).11 The repository is structured through a taxonomy of categories such as "code art", "conceptual software", "games", "generative art", and so on, as well as more intuitively through keywords that provide further descriptions of submitted projects. Both the "category list" and the "keywords cloud" are open for public modification through the identification and proposal of new terms. In this case, curatorial control is exerted on the level of setting initial parameters of categories and through a review system that allows editors or so-called "experts" to highlight the perceived "best works" with short commentaries. The curatorial process is based on a relatively open, yet somewhat moderated, database that allows users to self-submit their works - an option almost embedded in the software. |
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