Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation
Abstract
:1. Introduction
In this sense it is perhaps not surprising that the slogan ‘everyone’s a curator’ gained prominence only ten years after the Web started.2 Yet, as described by curator and researcher Michelle Kasprzak, here “‘Curating’ is increasingly being used to describe an expanding body of activity in terms of new platforms and materials, but remains focused on the act of the curator as editor or selector” (Kasprzak 2008). Kasprzak’s description resembles that of the curator as “future filter feeder”—a term coined by Anne-Marie Schleiner to label the new role of the online curator (Schleiner 2003). What these descriptions fail to highlight, not unlike the online exhibitions curated by contemporary art museums, is the extensive work and the socio-technical relations that are involved in exhibiting art on the Web.3a very special moment in history when to be an artist was to be a curator, a system administrator, an art critic, an archivist or a vandal of your own work. But net artists were not the only ones to experience it. Actually everyone who was making their first web pages at the time was diving into an ocean of unknown, unexpected occupations.
2. Online Curation
Goriunova’s argument calls for a shift in curatorial discourse from the field of art to networked cultures, which entails a radical rethinking of the notion of aesthetics as simultaneously a “major mode of operation for contemporary society” and a practice in a constant process of becoming whose very constitution is being changed by networked technologies (Goriunova 2012, p. 94). Rather than focusing on the aesthetic and its implications, we want to address the changes to the curatorial practice that are caused by technical influences and systems (Terranova 2004; Fuller 2005), in particular online commercial and custom-build platforms. As such, we are seeing the role of the curator shifting between the curator as an exhibition maker and a ‘meta curator’,11 in which curating becomes ‘networked-co-curation’ and is heavily influenced by technological developments.To my mind, the problems of such terms and the theories they put forward originate from a move to account for the previously rather disregarded part that the technical plays in the subjectification of art, while at the same time finding themselves locked in the narrow confines of a particular historically defined area of practice. With the development of digital media, the grammar of the reciprocal genesis of the technical and the cultural changes, and such change spreads in domains and dimensions beyond the field of art.
3. Implications of the Web, or What It Means to Curate in a Commercial Platform
Goriunova’s definition of the art platform is particularly useful in framing the role of the project within the larger media ecology of eBay. But first, what is an online platform, and secondly, in what way can a commercial platform function as an art platform?a stand-alone website that, together with other actors, forms an ecology of aesthetic production, but it might also take place as a subsection of a large platform, or even as a space between a corporate service, artists’ work, hacking, collaborative engagement, and a moment of aesthetic fecundity. An art platform engages with a specific current of techno-social creative practices and aims at the amplification of its aesthetic force.
In her thesis ‘The Web as Platform. Data Flows in Social Media’ (2015), media studies scholar Anne Helmond makes a further distinction in which she sees platforms operating within a ‘double logic’. She explains how, on the one hand, platforms are based on an infrastructural model that stresses their technical construction, which is “geared towards their expansion into the rest of the web” (Helmond 2015, p. 3). Furthermore, she explains how at the same time they function as economical models by employing and reformatting data for the platforms themselves (Helmond 2015, p. 44), preferably capitalizing on the process. While recognizing this ‘double logic’, Goriunova focuses particularly on the creative production in online platforms. Rather than looking for art online, she investigates practices that do not necessarily see themselves as art, yet their modes of production and the processes through which these practices can make them into art, thus stressing the importance of art platforms as experiments in the aesthetics of organization. Rather than a set of objects, such an experiment shows a specific kind of cultural practice that is open-ended and emerges from grassroots processes. More importantly, she describes an art platform as an entity, an activity and a process of development that reflects on its own media ecology: “Art platforms engage with living practices in their blurred and ‘dirty’ forms between a more broadly defined swathe of culture and art” (Goriunova 2012, p. 13), and they are to be found in the ‘grey’ zones of cultural production. Furthermore, she argues, art platforms make you think about the organizational forms of culture, thus it is organizational aesthetics. Organizational aesthetics is grounded in a digital environment and, while structuring and organizing creativity that traverses art platforms, it highlights the development of new forces to overcome repetition and strive for vitality. Moreover, it pays attention to the interplays of power and the kinds of structures and conduct these imply (Goriunova 2012). By acknowledging that the brilliant can be found in the grey and banal corners of the Web, #exstrange provided an interesting opportunity to see what online curation could mean within the commercial platform eBay.Platform is the abstraction level beneath code, a level that has unfortunately received some attention and acknowledgement, but which has not yet been systematically studied. If code studies are new media’s analogue to software engineering and computer programming, platform studies are more similar to computing systems and computer architecture, connecting the fundamentals of digital media work to the cultures in which that work was done and in which coding, forms, interfaces, and eventual use are layered upon them.(Bogost and Montfort 2009, p. 147, original emphasis)
To comprehend and navigate the complexity of today’s computational culture, we argue, is necessary to step into these ‘blurry zones of transfer’ between the commercial and the aesthetic, between art and non-art. In this process, the role of the online curator in these examples can be compared to that of a “filter” (Paul 2006) or a “filter feeder” (Schleiner 2003), as it distils content and creates meaning by differentiating information, albeit within certain restrictions, in particular around the mechanisms of exclusion. Whether the act of filtering is engrained in the processuality of art curating and its system or in the specificity of the technology that the online curator enters into an alliance with, its effect is that of influencing the circulation of and access to cultural content among different audiences and in distinct areas of the world. At the same time, being embedded in algorithmic infrastructures, online curation comes into contact with a set of agents and power relationships that define the contexts of commercial platforms not simply as commercial spaces but also as social ones, where users interact, taste is co-produced and aesthetic germination can arise. Due to this socio-technical specificity, and shifting the focus from artists and artworks to processes and systems, online curation recasts the function of the curator; in which the curator is part of a complex network of human and technical agents, networked images, digital objects and machines.The technical is aesthetical is political is cultural; each of these domains folds into the other and is fed back on itself. Every layer informs, embeds, and models the others, distributing their particular power patterns throughout societal systems and their blurry zones of transfer.
4. Networked Co-Curation
In other words, the ‘tensions’ in online curation derive from the easy to use applications, interfaces, and templates, and at the same time, the human attention that is needed to consider the implications of the cooperation with the technical systems. Rather than an automatic dismissal of algorithms to transform the practice of curation, Tedone (2019) argues in favor of the potential of human-algorithmic curation as an opportunity to explore more thoroughly algorithms’ wider socio-cultural impact. This is also something media theorist Tania Bucher points out, albeit from a more negative perspective:Curators and museums working with the new computational materiality are compelled to remain lightly operational, responding to the creation of new aesthetic value, whether by artists or those beyond-artists. (…) Confronted lightly and omnipresently with the new aesthetic values ceaselessly churned out by the operations of computational matter, the curator’s or art institution’s work is heavy.
Consequently, she argues, “knowing algorithms might involve other kinds of registers than code” (Bucher 2018, p. 113), examples of which could be critical analysis, speculative inquiry and poetic imagination. This is something that artist Harm van den Dorpel tried to achieve in his project DeliNear.Info (2014). The project counters the scenario in which online curation would become ‘darker’, as less and less is known about the conditions and outcomes of algorithms and computer processes more generally. Delinear.info sits in between a sketchbook, a social platform, and an archive (Dekker 2015). The content, ranging from texts to images, audio and video, that is uploaded by each user simultaneously functions as navigation. Different users take part and while they have their own space, they can connect to each other associatively through images, sounds or texts. An intricate ‘quilting’ takes place in which spontaneous and associative connections can emerge between the content. Van den Dorpel developed Delinear.info because he believed that many existing social media platforms are too chronologically driven and do not enable enough freedom for expression, as the systems are too rigid and pre-set. Looking for experimentation and the unexpected, much as in the older days of the Web, Van den Dorpel sees Delinear.info as a studio, a place to try things out. As he emphasized, he isAlgorithms matter in a variety of ways: in their capacity to govern participation on platforms, distribute information flow, embed values in design, reflect existing societal biases and help reinforce them by means of automation and feedback loops, and in their power to make people feel and act in specific ways.
particularly interested in how we can connect information in new, meaningful ways. In this context I mean meaningful as aesthetically surprising. I do not believe that knowledge is embedded in documents, just as that beauty is not embedded in objects. Beauty and knowledge arise through a game between the creators, viewers, contexts, historical stories, et cetera.
5. The Powers of Online Curation
Author Contributions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | The Last Real Net Art Museum was a self-reference to Lialina’s project First Real Net Art Gallery (1999) where she tried to sell net art. |
2 | This slogan was the title of the panel ‘Everyone’s a Curator: Do Museums Still Matter?’ at SXSW Interactive Conference in 2014. |
3 | |
4 | Most discussions of exhibitions of online art or net art are about the presentation of these artworks either in relation to physical spaces, see for instance Paul (2008); Graham and Cook (2010); and Graham (2014), about repositioning the problem of curatorial agency within the digital realm, see among others, Krysa (2006), or address the art historical problem of Internet art, see among others, Stallabrass (2003). |
5 | Here we refer to Goriunova’s notion of ‘light heavy weight curating’ (Goriunova 2013), which we will unpack more in the following sections. |
6 | It could be argued that this applies to any medium, but as this essay will show, this influence is most clearly manifest in the ever-evolving online environment of the Web. |
7 | Drawing upon her analysis of the project #exstrange, Tedone (2017, 2019) employs the term ‘network co-curation’ to refer to a collaborative mode of online curation which operates through the formation of strategic alliances between human and machinic agents. She adopted (and adapted) the term from digital scholar Arjun Sabharwal (2012) who uses it to refer to innovative outreach practices in archives and museums that use social media and other Web 2.0 technologies to curate online collections. Dekker (2017) further explores the concept by proposing the term ‘networked co-archiving’ in her earlier discussion of the project DeliNear.Info. In this essay Tedone and Dekker’s parallel explorations of the concept are integrated via a discussion of both projects. |
8 | See, for instance, the curator as ‘creator’ (Altshuler 1994, p. 236). Building on critical historical debates, O’Neill makes a further distinction between: 1. The Biennial, or nomadic, curator who operates between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ and produces event-exhibitions that shape new social, cultural, and political relations in a globalized world (O’Neill 2007, pp. 16–17); 2. The curator as a ‘meta/artist’ and the artist as ‘meta/curator’; the former regards the exhibition or event as an artistic product and the latter represents and self-exhibits his/her own work (ibid., pp. 22–24); 3. ‘The Curatorial’, understood as a research-based dialogical practice in which the focus is on open-ended forms of production (O’Neill and Wilson 2015, p. 12). With regard to the latter concept, Von Bismarck et al. (2012) also reflect extensively on the emergent discussion of the curatorial with a particular focus on the dynamic reconceptualization of the roles and relations between the multiple actors taking part in curation. |
9 | We use the term ‘media arts’ here, but other similar terms have been used throughout the last decades such as ‘computer arts’, ‘virtual art’, ‘digital art’, to name a few. However, ‘media’, or ‘new media art’, were the most widely used. |
10 | Bishop’s description of the digital divide has not been uncontested; especially ‘new media art’ curators and scholars refuted the subordinate distinction between new media art and mainstream contemporary art. Yet the discussion mostly reinforced the polemics of the ‘digital divide’, rather than considering the actual meaning of the term ‘digital divide’ (Castells 2001; Ragnedda and Muschert 2017) to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics within networked culture. For more information, see Tedone (2019). |
11 | Our use of the term ‘meta-curator’ diverges from O’Neill (2007) description in so far as it does not refer to the position of the curator in regard to artists, but rather to the curator’s critical awareness of her/his imbrication within a complex network of power relationships, including technical systems. |
12 | Lippard never saw herself as a curator, but her exhibition model broke new ground and has since then been assimilated into the genealogy of curating, shaping both its historical (Obrist 2008; O’Neill 2012) and more recent discourse and practice (Tyzlik-Carver 2016, 2017). |
13 | Interface Studies also developed around the same time; while both give accounts of online platforms their theoretical and conceptual framework are slightly different, yet there are also many similarities in the analysis of cases. For more information see, among others, Plantin et al. (2016). |
14 | See: http://exstrange.com/. |
15 | |
16 | Unlike other ‘image-based platforms’ such as Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr, eBay is not generally recognized as an ‘image-based platform’. However, the functioning of its entire mechanism is precisely based upon the use of images as visual interfaces. Images are the precondition for entering the online marketplace and the discriminator for accruing competitive advantage. For more information on the intricate relationship between representation and computation of the image, see Tedone (2019). |
17 | Interestingly, with the implementation of the new algorithm, it became more difficult to circumvent eBay’s standardized search engine as the new algorithm was targeted to follow eBay’s ‘best practices’: how to boost customer engagement and enhance image quality. For more information, see Tedone (2019). |
18 | While this mimics similar algorithms used by other social platforms, such as Facebook’s Edge Rank and Amazon’s A9, in the case of eBay, Cassini also translates some of its findings into micro-marketing that is reflected in personalized e-mails sent by the platform to its users. For more information, see Tedone (2019). |
19 | |
20 | It is important to note that the service Tedone used, the category ‘Specialty Services > eBay Auction Services > Appraisal & Authentication’, is available only to customers in the US, highlighting the different national regulations that impact access and the use of the platform in different parts of the world, thus affirming the notion of ‘visibility gatekeeping’ (Magalhães and Yu 2017) or ‘censorship’ (Finn 2017a, p. 111), impacting what data—images, information and material goods—is available and to whom. Moreover, it shows how the curatorial capacity of the algorithm is inextricably linked to the wider dynamics of control over user data and the behaviours that eBay enforces. |
21 | Since a few years the word ‘post’ has gained prominence, whether in post-Internet art, posthuman and posthuman curation, or simply post-curation. In most cases this is done to signal the growing abstraction and influence of geopolitics and computation. While we recognize the importance of this term, as it shows how new forms of curation emerge (particularly in relation to a redefinition of geopolitical powers and as a challenge to established or authoritative curatorial models), we also find it problematic since it postulates a temporality that tends to discard the human in favour of technology; in which the latter may be stabilized or normalized instead of critically assessed. We believe it is important to first come to an understanding of the specifics of curation, as a fusion and friction of different elements, rather than discarding the specifics of any of the elements from the beginning, particularly in environments that are continuously evolving. |
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Dekker, A.; Tedone, G. Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation. Arts 2019, 8, 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8030086
Dekker A, Tedone G. Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation. Arts. 2019; 8(3):86. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8030086
Chicago/Turabian StyleDekker, Annet, and Gaia Tedone. 2019. "Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation" Arts 8, no. 3: 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8030086