[curatorial.net] tagging as curating

[Joasia]

on 9/2/08 09:16, Franz Thalmair at franz.thalmair at cont3xt.net wrote:

>> >  ‘[...] However, the once clear line between curator, artist and theorist
>> is now blurred. Jon Ippolito writes: 'While art professors typically divide
>> clearly into critical (Art History) and creative (Studio Art) faculties, new
>> media¹s brief history often requires its practitioners to develop a critical
>> context for their own creative work. This is why so many pre-eminent new
>> media artists are also critics or curators.’
> 
> Was your project designed as art or is it curating? Where are the limits of
> the two concepts? <
> 

To me, this (‘Hackable curator’) and other examples mentioned thus far on
the List appear to be symptomatic of a practice that increasingly confuses
the firm distinctions not only between artistic and curatorial practice but
also computer programming (understood as culturally significant practice).
Although in a general sense it is not new for artists to work like curators
in organising public presentations of their and other artists’ works (and
there are countless examples of this both historically and more
contemporary), the interesting aspect of these examples is in that they
present ‘an artwork’ that at the same time possess some attributes of a
‘curatorial system’ that also - in addition to the point made in the quote
above about developing critical context which conventionally would be
considered curatorial role -
relies on public contributions.

The reverse of this holds too in that curators work increasingly like
artists and like programmers constructing (online) curatorial platforms and
‘software systems’ that often can be described in terms of ‘software art’  -
like some of the more overtly curatorial projects that not only provide
platforms for displaying software art works but themselves can be considered
software artworks such as (to stick to examples discussed ont he List)
runme, TagGallery, or briefly mentioned by Birgitte in her recent posting
‘S-OS’ project (that just opened last night at the Plymouth Arts Centre).

I am also wondering about another speculative idea that, to me, also tests
conventional definitions of curating  - that is Luis’ concept of ‘blogging’
as a participatory curatorial activity in the broadest sense. On what terms
blogging can be thought of as curating?

Just few thoughts as I have been also thinking about these issues for some
time.
joasia





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