Curating Online Collections: Towards an Authentically Digital, Online Mediation Protocol for Art Digitizations (final pre-formatted copy) (original) (raw)
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The Future of Creative Work: Creativity and Digital Disruption, 2020
The role of the professional curator progresses as much as the environment in which the curatorial work takes place: from the hoarding of objects judiciously selected to furnish funerary chambers in the ancient world, to the formation of collections of curiosities and rare commodities, methodically gathered by wealthy and learned collectors in the seventeenth century (Ambrose and Paine, 2006), and the virtual and interactive exhibitions created in online platforms (Patel et al., 2003; Sabharwal, 2015; Walczak et al., 2006). The curator is still known as a selector and an interpreter of objects and works of art, as well as a mediator to communicate and establish conceptual or intellectual relations and to engage in a dialogue between the works of art and the audience (George, 2015). With a closer look at the history of exhibiting collections and the responsibilities of those who act as “keepers” of collections, one would conclude that the modus operandi of the curator has been changing as a response to a broader socio-cultural change in the ways the public interacts with the collections (Boylan, 2008). Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, artists increasingly explored new media and technology, leading to an alluring redefinition of the work of art, the emergence of new forms of interpretation, and new exhibition discourses in which the audience is often and increasingly participative (Henning, 2008).
Curating web-based art exhibitions: mapping their integration with offline formats of display
University of Sunderland, 2015
This chapter looks at curating web-based exhibitions on or-bits.com and examine them in the context of translating between online and offline sites of display and distribution. For the whole thesis, please email me. This dissertation investigates the theory and praxis of curating web-based exhibitions from the perspective of a practitioner (the author Marialaura Ghidini). Specifically, it investigates how the web as a medium of production, display, distribution and critique has had an impact on the work and research of independent curators and the way in which they configure their exhibition projects. With a focus on the last decade, curatorial work of production and commission is considered in relation to technological developments, previous theoretical work into the mapping of exhibitions online and the analysis of case studies which are paralleled with the author’s own exhibition projects. What has emerged from this combination of theory, practice and comparison of approaches is the rise of a tendency in contemporary curatorial practices online: the creation of exhibitions that migrate across sites—online and offline—and integrate different components—formats of display and distribution—giving life to exhibition models which this study names as those of the 'extended' and 'expanded'. The figure of the curator as mediating ‘node’ is another characteristic emerging in relation to this tendency. Its features are identified through the observation of six case studies, which include Beam Me Up, CuratingYouTube and eBayaday, and interviews with their curators, and three projects that the author organised with the web curatorial platform or-bits-dot- com, 128kbps objects (2012), (On) Accordance (2012) and On the Upgrade WYSIWG (2013), which experiment with modes of integrating web-based exhibition with other exhibition formats, such as the gallery show and print publishing. Through combining contextual review and curatorial practice, this study names the tensions existing between online and offline sites of display and modes of production and commission, offering critical and practical ground work to discuss the tendency of migrating exhibitions and integrating formats within the larger context of curating contemporary art.
Digital Mediation of Art and Culture. A Database Approach
2019
This PhD thesis analyzes digital and data-based practices of mediation of art and culture, focusing on digital cultural repositories and databases as central mediation tools. It embeds the digital mediation practices discussed in this thesis in the media-theoretical and media-historic context of the transformation processes that have taken place in the digital media ecology, which have resulted in challenges for cultural institutions and museums, both in their role as institutions as well as in their daily mediation work. The thesis also situates digital mediation practices in the context of contemporary, analog practices of cultural learning, since the analog and digital realms can no longer be separated in the contemporary media ecology. One central topic of the analysis is mapping and understanding practices of mediation of art and culture and cultural learning in the digital realm. This is based on the database as a cultural form and repository that defines what can be said and known about a culture or society. The analysis introduces digital and data-based meaning-making processes within databases and database-interfaces themselves as well as cultural learning processes that reuse and contextualize the data in learning resources or by forming new experiences with them. The analysis concentrates mainly on web-based approaches and treats the process of co-creative knowledge generation as a central mode of the mediation of art and culture, using the paradigm of Software Studies developed by Lev Manovich as a lens for analysis. Moreover, the thesis examines what characteristics of contemporary digital media and the digital media ecology are reflected or play an important role in digital, data-based mediation practices. It raises the question as to whether the employment of digital data leads to a changed notion of what mediation of art and culture can accomplish and highlights central directions for museums to react to and take advantage of ongoing digitization.
Curating Immateriality: The Work of The Curator in the Age of Network Systems
Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems, Krysa. J., (ed.) New York: Autonomedia. ISBN: 1-57027-173-93. Contributors: 0100101110101101.ORG & [epidemiC], Josephine Berry Slater, Geoff Cox; Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker, Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin, Beryl Graham, Eva Grubinger, Piotr Krajewski, Jacob Lillemose, low-fi, Franziska Nori, Matteo Pasquinelli, Christiane Paul, Trebor Scholz, Grzesiek Sedek, Tiziana Terranova, Marina Vishmidt The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded 'operating system' of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed - even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it. The subtitle of the book makes reference to the essay 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' (1988), in which Bill Nichols considered how cybernetics transformed cultural production. He emphasised the shift from mechanical reproduction (symbolised by the camera) to that of cybernetic systems (symbolised by the computer) in relation to the political economy, and pointed to contradictory tendencies inherent in these systems: 'the negative, currently dominant, tendency toward control, and the positive, more latent potential toward collectivity'. The book continues this general line of inquiry in relation to curating, and extends it by considering how power relations and control are expressed in the context of network systems and immateriality. In relation to network systems, the emphasis remains on the democratic potential of technological change but also the emergence of what appears as more intensive forms of control. Can the same be said of curating in the context of distributed forms? If so, what does this imply for software curating beyond the rhetoric of free software and open systems?
The Museum in the Digital Age. New Media & Novel Methods of Mediation
The Museum in the Digital Age. New media & novel methods of mediation, Bonnefoit Régine and Rérat Melissa, eds, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd, 2017
The current "digital revolution" or "digital era" has affected most of the realms of today's world, particularly the domains of communication and the creation, safeguarding and transmission of knowledge. Museums, whose mission is to be open to the public and to acquire, conserve, research, communicate and exhibit the heritage of humanity, are thus directly concerned by this revolution. This collection highlights the manner in which museums and curators tackle the challenges of digital technology. The contributions are divided into four groups that illustrate the extent of the impact of digital technologies on museums: namely, exhibitions devoted to new media or mounted with the use of new media; the hidden face of the museum and the conservation of digital works of art; cultural mediation and the communication and promotion of museums using digital tools; and the legal aspects of the digitalisation of content, whether for creative purposes or preservation. Hardback and e-book: 2017 Paperback: 2021
The relationship between social roles of contemporary art museums and digitalization
2020
This paper was adapted from the author's PhD dissertation named "The Effects of Digitalization on Contemporary Art Museums and Galleries". The digital age has started with the digitalization of information and information communication. The digitalization processes that accelerated with the rapid developments in information and communication technologies have deeply affected museums. Museums are information-based organizations, their primary functions are to protect and spread information. Digitalized information and information communication have obligated contemporary art museums to follow digitalization processes. In this process, technological convergence is another factor that accelerates digitalization of contemporary art museums. ICOM has defined a contemporary museum as a polyphonic platform including participatory, inclusive and democratizing elements. When all these concepts are considered, the importance of communication between museum-community becomes apparent. Today, contemporary art museums have taken communication to their focal points. Museum-society communication is experienced in contemporary art museums through artistic activities as well as institution's communication-oriented strategies. Contemporary art activities using digital technologies and multimedia technologies generally require audience participation. Global access and various digital platforms provide the society with equal access to museums and art events, as well as making the arts of various countries and identities more visible. In the field of education, contemporary art museums develop projects by cooperating with various institutions. The effective use of digital platforms and institutional pages serves as a catalyst in the realization of these roles that museums undertake. Innovations in information and communication technologies accelerate the digitalization processes and serve as a mediator in maintaining the social roles of museums. For example, it can be said that technological convergence increases the number of museum visitors, therefore, it is the mediator of the social roles of museums. Technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, which are used in exhibition design in museums, require audience interaction. Digital art based on digital technology takes its place in contemporary art museums. In this study, it was aimed to reveal that social roles undertaken by contemporary art museums, such as participatory, inclusive, democratizing and polyphonic roles, are closely related to the digitalization of institutions and that digitalization acts as a catalyst for these roles.
DIGITAL CURATION: THEORISING THE DIGITAL OBJECT
2008
Digital cultural heritage collections can provide information about, and access to, material culture(s), but as culturally specific products themselves, they also illuminate the contextual relationships inherent in those productions. The nexus of the issues in these cultural heritage productions (e.g. the nature of the object that forms the basis of the digital object, namely the analogue photograph, and the nature of the relationship between the photograph and the digital object curated from the photograph, as well as issues like the development of the museums object record database, the thesauri, copyright, etc.) creates a framework and forms a system of governance related to representation and accessibility, which has huge implications for end- users. This paper will explore ideas and possibilities for reflexivity on the part of such digital collections by examining the relationship that digital curation has to cultural heritage institutions as places of remembering, forgetting and, in this instance, re-remembering.
Curating Web-Based Art Exhibitions: Mapping Online and Offline Formats of Display
2015
This dissertation investigates the theory and praxis of curating web-based exhibitions from the perspective of a practitioner (the author Marialaura Ghidini). Specifically, it investigates how the web as a medium of production, display, distribution and critique has had an impact on the work and research of independent curators and the way in which they configure their exhibition projects. With a focus on the last decade, curatorial work of production and commission is considered in relation to technological developments, previous theoretical work into the mapping of exhibitions online and the analysis of case studies which are paralleled with the author's own exhibition projects. What has emerged from this combination of theory, practice and comparison of approaches is the rise of a tendency in contemporary curatorial practices online: the creation of exhibitions that migrate across sites-online and offline-and integrate different components-formats of display and distribution-giving life to exhibition models which this study names as those of the 'extended' and 'expanded'. The figure of the curator as mediating 'node' is another characteristic emerging in relation to this tendency. Its features are identified through the observation of six case studies, which include Beam Me Up, CuratingYouTube and eBayaday, and interviews with their curators, and three projects that the author organised with the web curatorial platform orbits -dotcom, 128kbps objects (2012), (On) Accordance (2012) and On the Upgrade WYSIWG (2013), which experiment with modes of integrating web-based exhibition with other exhibition formats, such as the gallery show and print publishing. Through combining contextual review and curatorial practice, this study names the tensions existing between online and offline sites of display and modes of production and commission, offering critical and practical ground work to discuss the tendency of migrating exhibitions and integrating formats within the larger context of curating contemporary art. Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Acknowledgements
Curatorial discourse on new media has been developing over the last fifteen years with a focus on the shift in aesthetic thinking from the ‘object’ to ‘process’. This discourse has been also concerned with positioning art processes in the context of the Web 2.0 culture revolving around the principle of openness and collaborative networks. While the critical literature on this topic mainly investigates new media through online and offline exhibition practices, this thesis investigates new media practices as a process of communication methods focusing on digital publishing and broadcasting and uses this perspective to examine how curatorial concepts derived from the Web 2.0 culture impact audiences. The thesis discusses examples of projects in which the use of digital publishing and broadcasting is related to creating collaborative discourse (curatorial projects), as well as projects where it involves creating art experiences such as artists’ projects. The thesis argues that discursive projects that promote openness reflect an organisation around common interests thus excluding a proactive engagement of general audiences. It contends that the efficiency in benefiting audiences via new media methods in discursive projects depends on providing facilitation and documentation of the input from audiences, but the lack of such practices has been due to the challenges related to the unpredictability and uncertainty of the outcome. The thesis also argues that new media methods are effective in creating complex art experiences which are embedded in real life situations. As part of these experiences the level of open discourse is shaped by the artistic concept.