ONLINE PLATFORM AS > DATABASE WEB
3.8. Reflection on Case Studies: Changes in Curatorial Work and Exhibition Models Emerging in the Migration
This reflection examines the way in which types of production and combination of sites—online/offline (see also definition in 1.5)—have been approached and configured by the curators of the case studies. The exhibition projects are here compared according to how the curators have dealt critically, practically and technically, with the integration of different formats of production, the
commission of artworks across sites and the type of the engagement the audience would have with the exhibitions and artworks on display. Such
comparison, also conducted in the light of my own experience of curating online and integrating formats of production, has brought to light a series of changes in curatorial work: from the predominance of their role of mediators in the
exhibition process, to their approach towards creating exhibition configurations for producing, displaying and commissioning artistic content across online and offline sites. The investigation of types of integration of the projects’
components has also brought to light two exhibition models emerging from curatorial processes of migration and integration of formats, the ‘extended’ and the ‘complementary’ exhibition.
The type of work of the case study curators is “other” (Cook and Graham, 2010) in that it can hardly be associated with the traditional tasks of selecting, organising, framing and promoting a group exhibition, either online or offline.
Because these projects integrate different formats of production and sites, their curators have to acquire expertise coming from different fields of work. They deal at once with different architectural environments, mediums of production, forms of interactivity between the artwork and its context and modes of
audience engagement with the artist’s work. Hence, these curators perform a combination of different functions (see 2.2.2): they are platform builders, service providers, DJs and editors as in the instance of Sakrowski and An Acoustic Journey, or they are also platform providers and producers in the case of Storz and Beam Me Up (see the “AS…” in the Summary tables). The emerging figure
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites
is that of the curator as a “node” to adopt a definition suggested by Cook and Graham (2010, p.156), a mediator of processes of artistic production and display in the migration of the exhibition from site to site. For it emerges that
“what is distributed is not just the art, but the process of curating itself” (Cook and Graham 2010, p.158).
Within this, and through analysing how the curators have worked with the online interface, it is possible to locate two overarching approaches to the site of production: ‘appropriation’ and ‘construction’. The production and delivery of eBayaday, >get >put and Casa del Divertimento relied on appropriating an existing website: the commercial platform, the not-for-profit distribution channel, and the gallery website, respectively. Whereas Accidentally on Purpose, An Acoustic Journey and Beam Me Up were based on newly-built exhibition
environments: the algorithmic compendium, the tool for software-based curation and blog, and the database exhibition, respectively. This distinction is not as neat as the binary division suggests, in fact, some projects show simultaneous acts of curatorial ‘appropriation’ and ‘construction’ of environments. The project An Acoustic Journey would not exist without adopting the video sharing platform YouTube as source material, as much as eBayaday could have not been
experienced in its entirety if a bespoke placeholder website had not been built.
However, making such a distinction aids the discussion of the evolution of curatorial practices online in relation to the development of web technology;
many web-based exhibitions that occurred after 2000 rely on adopting existing web technology and tools.18 The act of appropriation impacts not only curatorial modes of work but also the structure of the exhibition projects in the present and their legacy—exemplary are the disappearance of eBayaday website and the inaccessibility of some of the video content of CTY’s HTML soundbanks (3.3 and 3.2, respectively).
18 During the course of this study I analysed a series of artistic and curatorial practices
appropriating already existing web services in a paper titled Appropriating Web Interfaces: From the Artist As DJ to the artist As Externalizer (Ghidini, 2012) which paved the way from this distinction between construction and appropriation.
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites
The modes of commissioning artworks emerging through comparing the case studies shows two tendencies, especially with regards to the online
component of the exhibition projects: the ‘overriding’ and ‘facilitating’ approach.
The curators of Accidentally on Purpose, Secondo Anniversario and, to some extent, An Acoustic Journey overrode artistic production, they often manipulated or limited the production of artworks to have them fit the organisational structure of the exhibition and its architectural framework. The approaches of the curators of Beam Me Up, eBayaday and >get >put instead facilitated the formulation of artists’ ideas aware of the nature of their practices. The curators’ approaches to the commission of artworks are influenced by their background and expertise, not just by the type of display appropriated or constructed for the exhibition. The first group of curators are mainly artists-curators, although Franchini of Secondo Anniversario and Sakrowski of CYT are a curator and a new media historian, respectively, whereas the second group includes primarily exhibition organisers and producers, such as Storz who continued the activity of the platform Xcult and Nichole of >get> put who set up her own commercial gallery link afterwards (see A.1.1. and A.4.1). All this said, it is worth stressing that the tendency of
‘overriding’ artistic content often happened in correlation to the appropriation of an existing website. This is because curators and artists had to respond to the characteristics and limitations imposed by the existing architectural environment and its structure.
As already mentioned above, the comparison of the case studies has located two models of web-based exhibitions emerging from integrating online and offline formats of production and display: the ‘extended’ and the
‘complementary’ exhibitions, which are generated by the type of mediation operated by their curators. The ‘extended’ exhibition is a web-based show that is integrated with offline formats of production and sites of display to re-present the online component for a different exhibition context, be it the gallery space or the print publication. Such re-presentation is aimed at proposing diverse
manifestations of web-based content, primarily without entailing further artists’
commissions but rather a curatorially-driven re-contextualisation. The term
“extension” was firstly used by curator and critic Dietz (1998) as part of his
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites
observations on the online exhibition activities of museums in the nineties. Dietz used the term to qualify an exhibition that migrated from the gallery space to a website, that is, an online version of an offline exhibition “reformatted for the best possible experience in the medium” (Dietz, 1998). In this study the
extended exhibition migrates in reverse—from the online to the offline site (see also 5.3)—and it can be located in the models proposed by the An Acoustic Journey, eBayaday and Beam Me Up projects. This is because their curators stretch the online component to the offline site while maintaining that the web-based exhibition is the real core of the project. The function of the migration differs from project to project, according to the curatorial intents and approaches to commission, production and mediation. In An Acoustic Journey it “tells more about the works and highlights new aspects of them” (Sakrowski, A.2.1); in eBayaday it documented the process-based auction-exhibition, its artworks and the transactions between the artists and buyers, because they could only
emerge in the aftermath of the very-same auction and in the case of Beam Me Up it was conceived as “a second stage” to facilitate “different embodiments” of web-based content. The model of the extended exhibition allows for a deeper understanding of the workings of web-based exhibitions and artworks,
facilitating comparison and different types of engagement with the same content, as well as reaching different audiences. It is worth noting that An Acoustic Journey and eBayaday necessitated this migration in order to clarify the curatorial narrative; both projects required a placeholder website to
contextualise the artworks and mediate them for the audience. The
‘complementary’ exhibition instead reaches completeness in the migration, in the integration of the online component with offline formats of production and sites of display. This exhibition model often sees the curators working with the same artists across sites of display, online and offline, and the curatorial
narrative is actualised in the tensions created between modes of production and presentation. The concept of complementarity was developed from the research carried out by the artist and academic Maria Miranda (2009). When discussing the relationship between online and offline sites in contemporary artists’
networked practices, Miranda puts forward the concept of the “unsitely work”
occurring in an “expanded site”, that is, a site that exists across the online and
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites
the offline and “disrupts our common notions of place and being in one place at one time” (2009, p.12). In this study, the term “expanded” has been replaced with that of ‘complementary’ to put an emphasis on the strategies and
processes of bridging online and offline components, rather than on the network. Accidentally on Purpose, >get >put and Secondo Anniversario are models of the complementary exhibition in which the migration, as outlined for the above group of projects, had different functions. In the case of Accidentally on Purpose it aided the curatorial strategy of creating a disruptive exhibition framework by “combining exhibition platforms and strategies” of incidental display (Jacobs, A.2.5). In >get >put it placed the artworks’ digital and physical forms “in conversation” (Nichole, A.2.4) according to the nature of the artists’
practices. Lastly, in Secondo Anniversario the migration validated the curators’
statement that a website is the same as an exhibition site with the same value as that of a gallery. Another characteristic of the complementary exhibition is the fact that their curators understand the website as an “equal playing field”
(Flannery, A.2.3) to that of the gallery space while being aware of the differing modes of production and engagement online and offline. Nichole of >get >put aptly describes this difference when introducing the idea of a “friction between online and offline spaces” and discussing her work as a negotiation between
“the digital space which is mediated” and the physical one which is “rigid”
(Nichole, A.2.4).
The ‘complementary’ (web-based) exhibition shows three key characteristics:
the curatorial intent and artistic production take place through the integration of formats of production; the sites of display are combined to build reciprocally upon each other and the engagement with the artwork is achieved thanks to the tensions created by the curator, for whom neither the web-based exhibition nor the offline format of display are experienced as redundant. The complementary exhibition becomes ‘distributed’ when it achieves the status of a “space of art’s dissemination” (Cook and Graham, 2010, p.56), that is, when it functions as system-like structures of display and distribution, where the artistic and
curatorial production undergo processes of transformation in the migration from one site to the other (see 2.4.2 for a detailed definition). The >get >put project is
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites
exemplary of this: the formats of production and modes of work of the HTML display and gallery components are integrated according to the curator’s deep understanding of the web and physical mediums and sites, a curatorial
approach highly engaged with the artistic practices of the participating artists.
The audience is also engaged throughout the migration of the exhibition,
experiencing the artists’ works in their entering in conversation with the contexts of display often via morphing and re-iterating (see 2.3.2). The role of the curator of >get >put is fundamentally that of a mediator, akin to that of the “node” (Cook and Graham, 2010, p.156), between online and offline production and
distribution.
As a corollary to this reflection, it is worth stressing that besides the above categorisations, all curators worked experimentally with the online component of their exhibition projects, even with varying purposes: for Dang of Beam Me Up (see A.2.6), the online site offered the opportunity to devise “an expanded curating project”, for Nichole of >get >put it permitted the chance to “tease people” before “they were invited to see the gallery show” (see A.2.4) and for Jacobs of Accidentally on Purpose “it allowed [her] to collaborate with artists in a way that they would not normally work” (see A.2.5) and evaluate the quality of audience engagement, such as the fact that a general audience “might not see the distinction from an artists’ work and the google image”. It also emerged that the exhibition projects of the case studies are historically connected to the outside-the-institution exhibitions organised by independent curators, such as Lippard or Siegelaub (see 2.4.1). What they share is the fact that the artworks enter different contexts of display, generating system-like structures of
presentation for not-discrete objects. If both approaches seem to propel an evolution of curatorial functions and artistic production, the case studies take this further by proposing exhibitions whose configuration is based on the integration of different formats of production and sites of display altogether, configurations that are often generated with the intent to give life to
complementary displays. And this hints at the possibility of creating new
ecologies within the art system of the museum, gallery and art fair that are more akin to the format and process-based nature of festivals.
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 3: Case Studies: Six Web-Based Exhibitions Integrating Offline Formats of Production and Sites
Another type of experimentation with integration and migration in the curation of web-based exhibitions is offered by the projects I organised with the curatorial platform or-bits-dot-com (see Chapter 4). Differently to the case studies, my projects were tailored at creating a comparison between modes of curatorial production online and offline since their inception. Even though this comparison was part of the curatorial intent that guided the development of offline projects, the changes in my curatorial work and overall understanding of the tensions between online and offline exhibition sites were still not formulated. Such formulation was made possible through locating my practice in relation to the work of the curators of the case studies and the exhibition projects they created, in that they highlighted the correspondences and differences between various types of independent curatorial work online. This became an anchor to validate each other’s exhibition models and approaches, and allowed me to discuss my own practice, and theirs, in correlation with the larger context of the theory and history of curating contemporary art (see 5.4 and 5.5).
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 4: Curatorial Practice: Curating Web-based Exhibitions and Offsite Projects with or-bits-dot-com