The description of collaborative and participatory platforms informs much of the current critical debate around so-called social technologies, defined simply as platforms for connecting people or allowing for collaboration, and highlights how sociality goes beyond technology itself to the communities and individuals who use it.12 The argument is that practices in art and technology are increasingly characterised in terms of their social impact, involving processes of intensive cooperation, and communication.13 In this connection, Goriunova (2007) considers Internet platforms, such as collaborative and participatory art platforms for collective production, distribution, and presentation of works, as symptomatic of cultural production in late capitalism. The concept of a platform is explained as a website organised in a particular way, either as a relatively simple database containing artworks or a more complex portal built around a database. What is distinctive about a platform is the "creative, social, instrumental, educational and historical character it establishes and is involved with" (Goriunova and Shulgin 2006: 237). In functional terms, a platform provides a context and often tools to stimulate creative initiatives and experimental work, and furthermore acts as a space for presentation, exchange and discussion about the work. In this way art platforms can be considered "a successful system for production and management of an artistic trend, [...] something in-between a content management system, online web site, library and a club based on a networked platform". However, these online platforms can be regarded as expressions of creativity in a social context that in turn becomes the latest resource for capitalism to exploit. A particularly good example of these principles are online tools - so called social technologies such as wikis, lists, blogs, and online social networking platforms - that allow "open source" models of practice. With the current unprecedented rise of their popularity curators increasingly attempt to engage with these systems testing their potential, developing new forms of practice, and providing critique. For instance, the curatorial project unDEAF, a satellite event of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2007 (DEAF) in Rotterdam, used an open and unmoderated wiki as a platform to facilitate and schedule an art event. It described itself as "an uncurated, unmoderated, self-organizational online and offline ecosystem where the content and development is driven and created by the participants". In this sense the project served to undermine the usual centralised and hierachical organisational model of curating.14 The screenshot emphasises the more measured popular science description "self-organized", as clearly any claims to be unmoderated or uncurated is an act of moderation and a curatorial decision in itself.
Much in the same way as exploring wiki as a collaborative system for curating, blogging can be thought of as a participatory curatorial activity in the broadest sense. For instance, the curator Luis Silva (2005) speculates on the idea of "curating as blogging" and asks: What if a blog could be thought of as an exhibition? It would turn blogging activity into curating. The idea isn't new at all, but is still somewhat difficult to accept by those practising in traditional curatorial activities. [...] What has SOURCE CODE become? I (the blogger) am responsible for selecting works (and other relevant documentation for the purpose of this blog/exhibition), displaying them (their urls) and recontextualizing them from my own point of view. What I am doing in this process is basically what any curator does."15 This line of thinking, that conceptually can be linked to montage techniques, informs the development of the exhibition link.of.thought_thought.of.link (2007) for TAGallery (an online curatorial platform established by CONT3XT.NET16, where the format of the blog is applied to the idea of curating.17 The curators of the project explain their interest in blogging as a curatorial model, "where every thought leads to a new thread. Our technique takes inspiration from exquisite-corpse by the surrealists, but plays it by its own rules. Instead of concealing the part that was written we used it as some sort of chain-reaction (...) Therefore each collaborator adds sequentially a new choice of links."18
A similar speculative idea based on aspects of social media is tagging as curating, making reference to web sites such as del.icio.us, a social bookmarks manager in which users can add bookmarks and categorise them through the use of tags to describe the bookmark in more detail.19 This informs the development of another project by TAGallery, "I tag you tag me: a folksonomy of Internet art" (for TAGallery) where the method of tagging allows the attribution of artworks to different thematic fields. Luis Silva, curator of this online "exhibition", describes it in the following way: "If tagging creates meta-data about pre-existing content, it can be seen as the creation of a discourse about it. And if that content happens to be an online artwork, tagging both allows for a subjective juxtaposition of art works and the elaboration of a critical discourse about it. Curating then. But this isn't new. This is regular curating done in a schematic way, using a different tool to get the job done. But since tagging is a social activity in its essence, giving birth to folksonomies, it allows for social curating, with social selection of works and social production of discourse about them."20
The Hack-able Curator project combines curating with robotics, social technologies and the practice of "hacking" to offer an experimental curatorial system that questions the singular subjective role of the curator and the possibility of democratisation of curating by hacking the curatorial process.21 The robot curator is connected to the Internet so that it can expand the physical space into networks (both social and technological) and the entire system represents the figure of the curator. The curatorial processes involve: 'a pre-selected set of tags, the tags to search the social platform Flickr for images for use in an imaginary show, creating a pool of images to choose from, presented these images on a computer screen nine at a time, making a selection of one or more images that fits its curatorial criteria by the robotic arm via a software algorithm, informing the owner of the image about the intention of including their image in the show giving them the opportunity to opt-out, and finally displaying selected images on the project website. Simultaneously, the robot prints label stickers for each of the tags associated with the chosen image.' The intention behind this experimental work is not to replace the figure of human curator (with a machine) but to de-construct it and reflect upon the emerging social tools for curating in a collaborative context.22
The examples mentioned so far are by no mean an exhaustive list in this field but what they indicate is an increasing curatorial engagement with software and networks that facilitate a social dimension. Consequently, the suggestion of this paper is that the curatorial practice is now closely integrated with the dynamics of the socio-technological networks and with software that is not simply used to curate but demonstrates the activity of curating in itself. Describing curating in such terms implies a state in which curatorial system continuously interacts with the socio-technological environment: the system is opened up to the communicative processes of producers/users and to the divergent exchanges that take place and that disrupt established social relations of production and distribution. Importantly, it is a network of users that constitutes the system, along with the technological apparatus in its broadest sense. An emphasis on the user in the curatorial system is particularly significant in this context, as it is the user who dynamically determines its openness. Thus, and importantly for an understanding of the power relations involved, the software opens up curating to dynamic possibilities and transformations. What these emerging curatorial forms suggest are new ways of organizing the curatorial process, new presentation platforms and new ways of involving users - exploiting the properties of socio-technological networks and merging software and curating more explicitly. In this context, the emphasis is on software used not only as tool and display platform but importantly as part of curatorial process that is increasingly distributed over networks and is social in character. As a result, the term software curating necessitates an engagement with instructions (the program) and the writing of these instructions (programming) but also a networked system (an online software and a dynamic network of users) within which these instructions are executed. Additional information This paper draws upon my earlier work: Curating in/as Open System(s): social technologies and emergent forms of curating paper presented at ISEA 2008 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) July 2008 and published in conference proceedings, and Software Curating: programming and curating for networks presented at the Computer Art Congress [CAC 2] at the Tecnoló'gico de Monterrey in Mexico, March 2008 and published in conference proceedings by Europia Productions, Paris. |
|||
