Criteria of Selection, Method of Analysis and their Presentation

This chapter interrogates the behaviours of six exhibition projects that, in line with the research questions, show how the curatorial work of commission and exhibition of artworks has been been affected by employing the Web as a curatorial medium of production, display, distribution and critique. As well as proposing different types of display and modes of work online, these projects also present the varying strategies that curators have adopted to integrate web-based exhibitions with offline formats of production, highlighting different

approaches to production, working with sites of display and dealing with

audience engagement across the online and offline components that constitute each of the projects. Because the manifestation of each exhibition project occurs at different points in time and sites, the purpose of interrogating them is also to analyse their overall configuration—that is to examine the type of integration of their various components.

The case studies were chosen from an array of independently curated projects organised over the last decade not only to exemplify the tendency identified by this study within the larger landscape of the praxis of curating online, but also to resonate with my own curatorial practice online (see chapter 4), such as being an independent curator or having to choose specific offline formats to be integrated with the web-based exhibition—from the gallery show to the radio broadcast and print publishing. The criteria of selection detailed below reflect this, and also determined the exclusion of many projects that, even if showing

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites

important facets of curatorial work online⁵, were left out to allow a more cohesive comparison and locate differences and similarities:

• The curatorial background: Occurring at the time of the Web as a mass media of communication (see 2.2.1), the six projects were organised by curators already operating, or critically engaged, with web production and technology. Despite this homogeneity, the curators cover various generations and disciplinary backgrounds: new media history, nineties net activism and underground music (Robert Sakrowski of CYT; see 3.2); academic research in the fields of art history and economy (curators of eBayaday; see 3.3);

media-user experience strategies in the corporate world (Kelani Nichole of

>get>put; see 3.5) and contemporary art and curatorial work (curators of Accidentally on Purpose and bubblebyte; see 3.6 and 3.4). In terms of geography, they operated mostly in Europe, from Berlin to London and Derby, and the US, a geographical area which is greater if the location of the participating artists is considered—such as Bangalore and Delhi in India.

Ensuring this variety was intentional to allow a discussion of curating web-based exhibitions from distinctive critical positions and approaches to work (see 5.2 and 5.3), not necessarily generated from within the contemporary art world or the new media one.

• Web-based specificities: While some exhibitions, like my own curatorial work, branched out from the activity of already existing online platforms (Beam Me Up; see 3.7), others were one-off projects related to the research interests of their curators (Accidentally on Purpose). The common denominator is that the online component was primary in all projects and entailed the

commission—or submission—of artists’ works rather than documentation of gallery works or a “digitized display of an object” (Cook and Graham, 2010).

Hence, curators employed a website as an exhibition venue, or a tool for curation and service for distribution (such as CYT and >get>put), and used

5 Some projects are: the live broadcasts of Field Broadcast, 2011, “a project connecting artists, audiences and obscure locations through the portal of the computer desktop”; the online curatorial project Temporary Stedelijk, 2011-2012; the online magazine Triple Canopy, 2007-ongoing; as well as artist projects such as the mobile exhibitions of Aram Bartholl, the series Dead Drops and the Speed Show; and the Wikipedia project of David Horvitz, Public Access, 2011-ongoing.

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites

the offline format of display in direct connection to it, to ‘extend’ or

’complement’ it (see 3.8). This is because the position maintained by this study is that curating web-based exhibitions holds a set of specificities (see 2.2.2 and 4.1.3 for details about their characteristics) even when the

exhibition migrates integrating other formats of production offline (see 3.8).

• Formats of production: Each of the case studies adopts different formats of display and distribution online, and types of integration of online and offline components. They range from the database magazine of site-specific commissions (Beam Me Up) to the visual algorithmic compendium of submitted artworks (Accidentally on Purpose) online; they integrate a live time-based exhibition online with an archival mail catalogue (eBayaday) or the HTML collection of appropriated videos on a blog with a monthly radio broadcast (CYT). Such variety is to ensure that this research interrogates a body of projects that is heterogeneous in scope and functions, proposing different exhibition configurations and patterns of migration, whilst

highlighting other aspects such as the different life-span (from the two years of Beam Me Up to the one month of eBayaday) and resilience (still

browsable exhibitions and projects partially archived online [Beam Me Up and Accidentally on Purpose] or ‘gone’ because dispossessed of their own URL [eBayaday]).

• Independence: The projects were all curated independently, mostly outside the programme of museums and galleries—in only one instance was the project organised in response to an institution’s invitation to freelance curators (Accidentally on Purpose). Favouring independently curated exhibitions mirrored the nature of my own practice, but moreover put an emphasis on the fact that independent projects are often a reaction—direct or not—to an ongoing phenomenon: the scarcity of experimentation by institutions with exhibition models and modes of work engaged in web

technology. As already mentioned in the previous chapter (see 2.3.2), Lichty (2002) discussed the ‘power’ of independent curatorial endeavours over a decade ago; the ‘power’ in creating “alternative configurations of the gallery space” through adopting the Web medium in contrast to museums. Lichty’s observation still resonates with the current scenario in which museums are

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites

still primarily adopting the Web as a tool for expanding their activities in the form of documentation. Groys (2013) recently stated that the twenty-first century museum largely uses the Web as a blog, and in doing so, it “does not present universal art history, but rather its own history—as a chain of events staged by the museum itself.” Groys’ observation is shared by researchers in the field who state that, “the museum tends not to support the emergence of new art forms as much as to consolidate a history” (Cook and Graham, 2010), and is also encountered in the practice of contemporary curators. The Temporary Stedelijk project (2011-2012) was organised by Amber van den Eeden and Mattsson Kallew in response to their frustration at the lack of interest that the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam showed in using the web space as an exhibition venue during its refurbishment. They proposed an alternative to housing exhibitions in a physical space.

The question of how to analyse the case studies required assimilating these similarities and differences and understanding them as the sum of different components in a system of display in which the web exhibition—or tool and service—was the nucleus. Hence, the method of analysis combined a process of deconstruction, via which the online and offline components were analysed as two almost separate entities (see Analysis tables in A.1), with one of reconstruction, which focused on the migration of content and the tensions existing between different sites of display and modes of production. Seemingly a contradiction in terms, the choice of working with the binary and rather

abstract division between online and offline aided the process of qualitative comparison. The analysis was polarised around four topics, chosen because they are seen as the main concerns inherent in the praxis of curating

exhibitions,⁶ which assess the following:

• Curatorial, that is, the intents and approaches of the curators in creating a narrative and commissioning works.

6 According to experts in the field, and to paraphrase Paul O’Neill (2012, p.7), the act of curating is based on processes of “researching, selecting, planning, organizing, structuring, framing, and curating group exhibitions” acts that determine “how art is mediated to an audience” and thus

“construct ideas about art”.

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites

• Organisational Structure that, indebted to Goriunova’s research (2012), focused on the structure of the exhibition, technically and aesthetically, as elements informed by the site and medium adopted.

• Artistic Content, that is the type of artistic production in relation to the context of display and the curator’s intent, also proposing some exemplary artworks to visualise this.

• Engagement, which evaluated how the work was mediated for audience’s consumption and experience.

The Analysis tables (see A.1) accompanying each project are based on the interviews with their curators (see A.2). They provide details such as a comprehensive list of the included artists, giving a sense of the type of art supported and promoted by their curators, and the workings of the website, proposing a ‘structural’ overview of the “interaction of the artwork with its support” (Bosma, 2011).

The presentation of the case studies has inherited the structure of the method of analysis, paralleling the deconstruction and reconstruction processes.

Divided into two sections, the first, Context and Main Characteristics, describes the overall project, concentrating on the curatorial whys and hows and the online component with its workings and functions. The second one, Migration:

Structure, Patterns and Function, focuses on the migration and integration, highlighting the tensions existing between the online and offline components in relation to the curatorial intents, the process of commission and the

engagement with the artwork. The latter closes with a proposed trajectory of analysis within the larger domain of curating online, mentioning analogous projects or tendencies arising in similar fields of work. A three-column Summary table introduces each project, proposing the keywords used to evaluate them in the first column; the curators’ understanding of the online space, its relationship with offline sites, and the migration in the second column; and the naming of the curatorial roles arising as a consequence of creating new exhibition models in the third column, which builds upon the “curator as...” of Cook and Graham’s (2010) discussion of the changing figure of the curator in relation to new media.

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites

The comparison between the case studies (see 3.8) evaluates the tensions between the online and offline components of the projects and the way they are experienced in relation to the curatorial intents and processes of exhibition production. Through this, renewed curatorial roles and approaches to commission emerge, along with the identification of the exhibition models generated by the migration and also as a direct consequence of the types of integration created by their curators. While also expanding on the notion of the

‘distributed exhibition’ presented in 2.4.2, this section highlights how such findings have informed my own curatorial work.

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites

3.2. CuratingYoutube: An Acoustic Journey through YouTube