Net curators are described as »cultural context providers«¹, »meta-artists«², »power users«³, »filter feeders«⁴ or simply as »proactive consumers«⁵. The activity that Steve Dietz, founder of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), described back in 1998 as »curating (on) the Web«⁶, moves beyond creating a public arena for players on the Internet art scene to include them in modelling their own public arena, often in discursive models. Handling technological innovations and being conversant with existing communication channels are integral components in the remit of online curators, and are just as important as providing resources, initiating cooperation projects and maintaining contacts in internationally active networks.
Extending the curatorial sphere of action beyond supporting, contextualising and exhibiting art works in museums, galleries or alternative spaces is directly related to the specific mediality of art produced in the Internet: these artworks do not necessarily have to be presented in conventional exhibition spaces but can be downloaded anywhere and at any time provided a computer with Internet access is available. Often net art only comes into being through the involvement of an audience, comprised of users with a broad range of different tactics in dealing with Internet content, commenting on the art, transforming it, as well as multiplying it in many directions. In addition, in some cases the communicative mechanisms underpinning the artworks are simultaneously one of the themes of those works, thus generating a reciprocal »feedback loop«⁷ between creators and users of the artworks. In the wake of the disintegration of authorship and the work so often posited in the 20th century, a discourse constituted by the process of its own genesis and reception has gained ground instead, and this goes hand-in-hand with fostering precisely these processes and rendering them visible. As a consequence, curators are the ones »who set up contexts for artists who provide contexts«⁸.
The e-mail art project »Do It With Others (DIWO)«⁹ and the curatorial platform »LX 2.0«¹⁰ can serve as examples of current discussions on curating participatory and activist forms of Internet art. The projects, which went online at the start of the year, sketch out a wide arc ranging from active community participation to institutionalised Internet curating. »Do It With Others«, the title of the project initiated by Furtherfield.org, a London Internet culture initiative, anticipates the topics of collaboration and cooperation. Here »DIWO« refers back to mail-art projects from the 1960s and 1970s, which drew on roots in the Fluxus movement to attempt inter alia to circumvent the existing art system through decentralised self-organisation.
»DIWO«’s goal was to highlight the processes in Internet social networks, and at the same time to utilise these as a form of dissemination of art on the web. To that end an Open Call for Participation invited subscribers to the NetBehaviour mailing list to submit texts, images, projections, sound files or other net artworks or to continue work on pieces that had already been submitted. For a specific limited period from early February to late March, the list thus assumed the functions of a curatorial platform on which all the materials submitted simultaneously contributed to a larger artwork created in a collaborative process. The highlight of »DIWO« was what was known as the Collaborative Curation Event in London’s HTTP Gallery (House of Technology Termed Praxis), where all participants had the opportunity via chats and webcams to participate in the actual curatorial activities, in other words, in viewing, categorising and selecting the material submitted and preparing it for presentation in the gallery.
A fundamentally different but not necessarily conflicting form of curating net art was the website »LX 2.0«, launched in March 2007. Anchored in the structures of the commercial Portuguese gallery »Lisboa 20 – Arte Contemporânea« and thus embedded in the art business beyond virtual space, »LX 2.0« functions as a platform to present and disseminate selected artworks. In the Internet context the way that this form of curating functions has already been tested several times: »LX 2.0« works more or less in the same way as the organisations »Rhizome.org« and »Turbulence.org«, which have commissioned works regularly for over ten years, thereby fostering artistic creativity on the Internet.
Artist Santiago Ortiz, who lives in Lisbon and Barcelona, presents »NeuroZappingFolks« as the first work in a series of four annual commissioned pieces. The project draws on the social bookmarking platform »del.icio.us«¹¹ and extracts the information compiled there by Internet users to produce a non-linear zapping through the web. »NeuroZappingFolks« is based on a particular algorithm, which produces a (random) selection and presentation of data material, which in turn proves to be linked to curatorial activities. Further projects for 2007 are expected from Vienna-based media artist Carlos Katastrofsky¹² and the artists’ collective Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES¹³, both also reflecting on the topic of communication on the Internet.
Although in »LX 2.0« the works are not selected by the community itself as was the case in »DIWO«, but picked instead by a curator, the two projects nonetheless have a great deal of fundamental points in common: on the one hand the requisite infrastructure (such as storage capacity, a presentation space and archive facilities) is made available. On the other hand, both initiatives aim to establish a connection between Internet art and physical space – both »LX 2.0« and »DIWO« are working towards institutionalising Internet art in a framework that moves beyond short-term hype. Whilst the London initiative is taking the easier option, simply »printing out« the work submitting and setting this in a real gallery space, in the Lisbon project an interfaces enables Internet art to remain in the sphere where it was originally produced.
Both projects are remarkable and not just because of the exhibitions produced. The process-oriented exploration of the numerous options offered by curating is ground-breaking, particularly against the backdrop of a »virtualised understanding of art«.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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