[curatorial.net] curating and social technologies

[Joasia]

Many thanks Luis for making start with projects presentations on the List.
There was an interesting point raised in your email in describing the role
of online platforms / galleries presenting net art (broadly speaking). This
reminds me of a point made by someone else elsewhere about the role of new
media festivals in the early 80s-90s introducing and presenting new media at
a time when museums and mainstream arts institutions were failing to turn
their attention to emerging artistic practices, to recognise their
importance and to include new types of works in their programmes. In this
way new media festivals were assuming the role of art institution:

 ŒIn this process of shaping new forms of creativity, new media festivals
had a very special role. Festivals have been vitally important to that
development of art involving electronic and later digital technology, due to
their role in recognising, conceptualising and defining dominant artistic
practices in the process of their development. They emerged in response to a
need for platforms for presenting and disseminating art forms arising from
the development of new tools and technologies, and as a result of a
long-term lack of interest in media art forms on the part of most mainstream
art institutions. In this, the emergence of festivals as cultural phenomena
has a clear alternative, if not countercultural, character in relation to
the already existing traditional art institutions.¹ (Piotr Krajewski ŒAn
inventory of New Media Festivals¹, 2006)

Is there a parallel to the current phenomena of online (art/curatorial)
platforms I wonder? Can the analogy be drawn between the role of media
festivals in the 80s and 90s and online platforms now? At least this is what
Luis suggests in Portugese context.

What instantly comes to mind is an example of an online platform Runme.org
that has also a linked festival Readme.org and that might indicate the
beginning of this shift (from festivals to art platforms)? To my
understanding, the Readme platform was developed, on the one hand, to
address the apparent limitations of the 'new media festival' format in
presenting software art (based on strict and limited categories and thus
eliminating a lot interesting works such as non-art software development)
and, on the other hand, to respond to the format proposed by 'open source
communities'.  Runme.org is an interesting project for another reason too­
it can be considered an example of what is often termed as Œsoftware-aided¹
curating and simultaneously a collaborative semi-open curatorial platform.
To me, the issue here is on one hand about the degree of openness and
Œdemocratisation¹ of such curatorial model and on the other the ways in
which software plays part in the curatorial process.

Joasia

on 17/1/08 16:08, silva.luis at silva.luis at netcabo.pt wrote:

>  
> But besides having traditional media supporting "new" media, we also made
> another political statement, one more idiosyncratic, stemming from a local
> point of view: it is not a gallery's role to comission new work from the
> artists. That is the musem's role. But since the institutional art world in
> Portugal not only is unaware, but very prejudiced towards new media, we
> decided to replace them in the comissioning of art works with little potential
> to makes us earn money.
>  
> LX 2.0 is a thus a very traditional curating project, but one that is
> political in essence. It allows for new modes of financing new media art, and
> also replaces the Big Institutions' role in comissioning new artworks. All
> this from the most unexpected place, a contemporary art gallery, that
> represents traditional artists, has 8 shows every year, and goes to art fairs,
> all this to make a profit.
>  

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