[curatorial.net] taxonomies (categories, keywords, tagging)

[Franz Thalmair]

Dear list-members,

(Dear Joasia, thank you for the invitation to discuss at this list.)

I am part of the Vienna-based collective CONT3XT.NET which was founded by
Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl (a.k.a. carlos katastrofsky) and me, Franz
Thalmair at the beginning of 2006. Our - general - aim is to discuss and
present issues related to (New) Media and Internet-based Art. In the course
of our different activities we installed an online-gallery called TAGallery
(which is a word contamination between "tag" and "gallery"). Olga Gurinova
wrote in her e-mail, that:

runme.org has come up with two kinds of
> taxonomies (categories and keywords), and invited artists to upload
> projects as well as linked projects it considered to be relevant to the
> foundation of the field (somewhat of objet trouves strategy).



With TAGallery CONT3XT.NET extendes this idea of taxonomies in general and
applies this method of categorising art to the online medium; the main tasks
of non-commercial exhibition-spaces are, so to say, transferred to the
discourse of an electronic data-space. At the beginning of 2007 the
TAGAllery was set up as a del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us is a social
tagging platform, a simple Web 2.0 tool with limited functions for
administrating Internet sites using links. These personal yet often publicly
accessible link lists are interlinked among the network of users, who
provide keywords and short summaries for the links. To post a link and thus
to relate two or more contents is a basic method to create a freely
accessible and modular network of personal associations on the World Wide
Web. Yet, what if a link turns into the representative of the artefact, the
context and the exhibition at once?

In general, the TAGallery understands itself and the possibilities it offers
as a laboratory and workshop for visualising 'artistic processes—initiated
by the curator—that take place in the form of interactions between the work
and the viewer'. Therefore, the online gallery simultaneously alludes to the
altered conditions for art production and reception and to the role of the
museum within this process: "The museum is no longer a static archive. It is
a dynamic and socially powerful institution. The museum's fundamental change
from a static presentational space to a dynamic production space has had a
further, decisive consequence on the museum as an institution, addressed
within the context of Beuys' idea of the museum in motion, i.e. that it
loses its permanent space" (*)

The structure of the medium Internet not only provides a space for the
production and presentation of art, it also contributes to blurring the
boundaries between production and presentation. 'The discursivity of
multimedia and how it can be associated with a dialectical aesthetic is
characterised by the ways in which montage-like spatial
juxtaposition—achieved through hyperlink structures and search-ability—is
drawn upon for narrative effect. The functionality of links and databases
extends upon already existing tabular, classificatory forms, such as the
collection archive, catalogue, and methods of spatial arrangement in
galleries--all technologies intimately associated with the historical
evolution of the museum. Adopting a museological aesthetic that understands,
and is more effectively calibrated to digital communication technologies,
will see the museum emphasised as a machine for creating juxtaposition, a
generator of conditions for dialogical encounters with the unforeseen
(enabling, even privileging, the experience of surprise, the unexpected and
perhaps the random)'" (**)

(*) Tobias Wall: Das unmögliche Museum. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und
Kunstmuseeum der Gegenwart, transcript, Bielefeld 2006, p. 264. (**) Vince
Dziekan: Beyond the Museum Walls: Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic
Overlay and Three Movements),
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue7_ver2_Beyond%20the%20Museum%20Walls.pdf
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