[curatorial.net] tagging as curating

[Martha Patricia Nino]

Dear all,

This is a very interesting discussion. If you are tagging, giving names as a
curatorial practice is fine and useful. A good example is the
runme.orgplatform that uses the tags "category" and "keyword". It does
not mean that
everything is curating.  Tagging is important, implies to give a name, to
organize information, to give form to thought and even culture. Curators are
probably tagging all the time without being conscious of that fact.

Carl Linnaeus spent many hours wondering the varied landscapes and jungles
of America drawing plants. Although it can be seem rather meaningless.
Through giving names to his findings, he invented a powerful system that
made possible to name all the species of animals, plants and minerals over
the earth.

He wrote in "*Philosophia **Botanica*" "If you do not know the names of
things, the knowledge of them is lost too"

It is possible to say that our  "modern" science cannot exist without
Linnaeus' notation system. We still tag things for specie and genre. His
tagging practices made possible to know and apprehend "the new world" and
with thus he modified our way of thought. Can you imagine yourself without
your genre? There are worms, mollusks, crustaceans and fish that do not fit
in any genre because they are Hermaphrodite. They haven't complain in such a
long time… To think about what and why we tag is very important also in the
context of web 2.0 and its folksonomies or social tagging, delicious,
facebook, subject indexing, wikis and all the paradigm of dynamic, indexable
and semantic information.

Perhaps on of the works that to my view is relevant to tagging in the art
context is David Rokeby's the giver of names.

http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/gon.html

As for us we developed a robot arm that connects to flickr and search the
tags "Slow" and "Plymouth". The photos that are selected by the computer
that act as a totalitarian curator. The computer's choice can be "hacked" by
the gallery visitors who can vote for they favourite pictures.

http://www.hackablecurator.org.uk/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOgwE_CRTaM

More information about Linnaeus can be found at

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html


P.s thank you Joasia for inviting me to the discussion!
-- 
Martha Patricia Niño M
http://x2.i-dat.org/~pcmm/


On Feb 1, 2008 3:58 AM, Franz Thalmair <franz.thalmair at cont3xt.net> wrote:

> Hi list + Olga,
>
> thx for the statement!
>
> >
> > > --- And more general: Can tagging be considered curating without
> > > lapsing into generalist statements as "everything is curating"?
> > >
>
> > sorry, it's a bit messy stream of thought. i would be very interested
> > too in seeing working taxonomies in 'curating'. i don't see why a
> > taxonomy of someone can't be considered a show, or a collection of
> > taxonomies can't be seen as establishing a canon and a history of a
> > particular field, but the question is what are the power relations
> > within these processes, what are their centrifugal dynamics, how things
> > get distilled and seen, and how it all relates to what we know about art
> > and its modes.
>
> Thinking about your questions and realting them to TAGallery general
> power realtions are easy to explain: CONT3XT.NET is the owner of the
> platform and the filtering institution as well. We invited people to
> participate in and to reflect upon curatorial practices and processes
> within the system of del.icio.us. Those invitations were used to
> experiment with tagging, with dialogical situations and with user
> participation, for example. Now it is used by us as a kind of personal
> public archive and platform for the dissemination of art (we like and
> we find worth being published this way). Accordingly the mechanisms do
> not differ from the traditional offline-art-scene, where you can find
> many examples for experimental curating that works against traditional
> modes of curation. Still, the crucial point is about filtering.
> Quoting you, Olga:
>
> "Every platform has a filtering mechanism, filtering works invisibly
> at the backend but always present. Filtering is a key to success: it
> can make the resource desirable to be a part of, and therefore
> accepted by the users. Filtering is carried out in a strict manner by
> a few people with consistent judgment of taste and decisions. The way
> filtering is organised decides the destiny of the project: filtering
> is usually absolutist to keep up the quality of the resource, and also
> democratic to allow for a variety of works and approaches."
>
> I think the most "political" points about TAGallery, if you want to
> call it this way, are on the one hand the appropriative and parasitic
> use of something, a system, that isn't designed for curating per se;
> on the other hand it is the curatorial attempt to keep Internet-based
> art in the medium of its own, the Internet. All this is combined with
> the intention to create taxonomies for a particular art-field that has
> only a few established taxonomies yet.
>
> Best, Franz
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