A Domain in Search of a Language and a Method of Analysis

In addition to the historical fragmentation, the domain of curating online has also had to deal with the scarcity of clear terminology capable of discussing its

layered nature (see 2.2.1). This scarcity becomes inadequacy when discussing web-based exhibitions that integrate offline formats through migration to

different sites, which is the core of this research. The messiness of definitions pertaining to artistic production online—from net-dot-art and Internet art, to the more recent web-aware and Post-Internet art—often used interchangeably, required combining research from across different fields of practice, from new media to visual arts and museology. Below is an outline of the terminology, methods and frameworks that have been adopted by this study, the aim being to develop a critical position that follows the trajectory suggested by one of the first theorists of curatorial work online, Steve Dietz (1999):

More importantly, rather than trying to assimilate net art into our existing understanding of art history, is there a way that it can be understood to

problematise many of the very assumptions we take to be normal, if not natural?

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review

Curating online has been primarily discussed within the field of new media theory by researchers—also often practitioners—who have worked towards surpassing the ‘digital divide’ by combining art history, visual culture, media studies and a thorough understanding of technology: Inke Arns, Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham, Annet Dekker and Olga Goriunova are the main reference points for this study. Amongst a series of publications in print and online,³ Cook and Graham (2010) have attempted to reinvigorate the field of curatorial studies from the perspective of new media theory, maintaining that the latter is not incompatible with the contemporary art world. Three concepts emerging from their research have been significant for this research, even though they were originally intended in the context of new media artworks:

• “Once you have curated new media art you are unlikely to curate anything else in the same way again” (CRUMB, 2014). Such statement emphasises that the practice of curating evolves in relation to the object of its research, thus to the characteristics of the artwork and its ‘engagement’ with the present moment and socio-cultural discourses.

• “Curators need an adaptable framework in which to investigate and exhibit new media art […] and allow for the behaviours of new media art to be evident” (Cook and Graham, 2010, p.154). This consideration proposes to understand the “behaviour” of the artwork rather than the specificity of its medium or conglomeration of mediums. The focus shifts from a final and fixed display of the art object to the process via which the exhibition has become the “space of art’s dissemination” (2010, p.56).

• “For Internet art, the system that is used in the production of the art—the Web—is the same as that used for its distribution” (2010, p.230). This highlights the distributive properties of the medium and, consequently, the web-based exhibition itself, paving the way for what this study holds: that the web-based exhibition often operates as a platform, as a system-like

structure.

3See the prolific New-Media-Discussion List, accessible at http://www.crumbweb.org

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review

In relation to the latter, Goriunova (2012) proposes a critical framework for discussing the art platform, theoretically and technically, providing a method for analysing a website as a space employed for artistic production, presentation and distribution. Although this research does not focus on the notion of the art platform as intended by Goriunova—she writes that “art platforms focus on a certain kind of cultural practice, as an open-ended and grass-roots process rather than a set of objects” (2012, p.9)—it adopts her notion of “organisational aesthetics” to analyse the case studies presented in chapters 3 and 4.

Organisational aesthetics is a method of research stressing the organising principle of a website, such as its “arrangement” and the “structural devices”

employed within it, “whether a taxonomy (list of categories), or associational classifications (keywords), […] files, […] constellation of contributions, [...]”

(Goriunova, 2012, p.12). This approach is used in this study to investigate the web-based exhibition—and the curatorial process behind it— and its

relationship to other sites of display as a series of structural tensions within a given spatio-temporal environment. These tensions generate different

configurations of material within an exhibition project that is characterised by the reciprocal relationship between the artwork on display and the display

environment, as well as the between the user—the viewer—and the interface.

Josephine Bosma’s research (2011) on net-dot-art artists operating in the

nineties has offered valuable examples for observing and describing web-based artistic production. The reading she proposes looks at the behaviour of the artwork, such as its interaction with the support (i.e. the computer and the interface) and the browsing experience of the viewer resulting from the navigation patterns proposed by such interaction. Bosma’s emphasis on the relationship that the artwork and user have with the interface, and her attention to embedding this relationship in the wider socio-cultural context, have been adopted in this study as a method for understanding the processes of

integrating offline formats into web-based exhibitions. Her contextualisation of Olia Lialina's work, Agata Appears (1997), is an example of connecting the technicism of the medium with the wider socio-cultural context it refers to, creating a historicisation that accounts for technological developments:

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review

It is a protest against the use of a [web] feature that was added in 1998 […]

which allowed web designers to embed content from other sites into frames that did not reveal the original source of location. (Bosma, 2011, p.97)

This study’s discussion of the space of the exhibition online as both a site in itself, and as part of a configuration that encompasses both the web space and offline space, makes references to the research of Berry (2001) and Miranda (2009 and 2013), the former in relation to web site-specificity, and the latter in relation to understanding a site that is actuated in the migration between the online space and the embodied one. The combination of these two seemingly oppositional perspectives is important for this study, which aims to discuss the curation of contemporary art by bringing together the specificity of the web-based exhibition with another specificity that is the integration of online and offline formats of production, display and distribution. Berry’s research into site-specificity online (2001) functions as a point of departure for understanding the features of the site of the web-based exhibition. Although Berry discusses the aesthetic potentials of the Web as a “non-place”, and in this her work differs from this study, she also brings forth the notions of malleability and the loss of fixity inherent in digital representation, along with a reading of the web space as a tactical mode of operation enabled by the mutability of the digital information.

Berry’s highlighting of tactical operations draws upon the definition of space by de Certeau, which is significant in relation to the bringing together of

perspectives mentioned above. For de Certeau (1984) a space is composed of an intersection of mobile elements and is actuated by the ensemble of

movements deployed within it, making it a “practiced place” (1984, p.117) whose relation to the world is determined through operations. An example of this could be the written text: a place constituted by a system of signs that is actualised by one’s practice of it: the act of reading. Following from this, the space of the web-based exhibition can be understood as a practiced place determined by the acts of browsing and clicking to access and experience an artwork—acts that, because of the networked characteristics of the web space, facilitate movement. In this study, movement is not only relegated to the online space but is also located in the embodied space of the everyday—hence the use of the word migration (see 2.41 and 3.8). The work of Miranda (2009) becomes key in that it proposes a reading of the web space that surpasses the

Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review

opposition between online and offline sites of production and display, while maintaining their specific status. Miranda’s research focuses on the practices of media artists whose work “exist[s] across sites and across media and is

networked and connected” (2009, p.9), making use of online technology and space in combination with the public space. By proposing the notion of the

“unsitely”, Miranda talks about practices that are “unsituated”, that “move away from the centre” (2009, p.10) and are actuated in the movement across sites of production and display. What Miranda also describes is how these practices and uses of sites put forward a renegotiation of “the radical practices and aspirations of the 1960s generation” of breaking with the fixed configurations proposed by the art system of the gallery and the museum. The latter resonates with the exhibition models devised by the curators of the case studies analysed in this research, and, combined with Berry’s perspective, bring forth an

understanding of the ‘distributed exhibition’ (see 2.4.2 and 3.8). Such an exhibition simultaneously responds to the specificity of the contexts it

appropriates and is actualised through migrating across sites, creating tensions between them, negotiating different modes of curatorial work and mediating the experience of the artwork to the audience.

As mentioned in the Methodology (see 1.3), the interviews with the curators of the case studies (see A.2) provided first-hand responses to key issues

pertaining to this study, sustaining my search for a clearer terminology and the work of in-filling the historical fragmentation of the domain of curating online.

2.3. Curating Exhibitions Online and the Web-Based Exhibition