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The transmission of the documentation of changes made in each presentation of an artwork and the motivation behind each display are of importance to the continued preservation, re-exhibition and future understanding of artworks. However, it is generally acknowledged that existing digital archiving and documentation systems used by many museums are not suitable for complex digital artworks. Looking for an approach that can easily be adjusted, shared and adopted by others, this article focusses on opensource alternatives that also enable collaborative working to facilitate the sharing and changing of information. As an interdisciplinary team of conservators, researchers, artists and programmers, the authors set out to explore and compare the functionalities of two systems featuring version control: MediaWiki and Git. We reflect on their technical details, virtues and shortcomings for archiving complex digital artworks, while looking at the potential they offer for collaborative workflows.

Online curation is shaped and defined not merely by its content, but just as much by the nature of the structure and the systems that are used by curators and artists. It could be argued that this applies to any medium, but as this essay will show, the Web profoundly influences the role of the curator in new ways. In this paper we show how curation on the Web is not merely concerned with presenting art, but that curation functions within a wider ecology of social and technical power relations. This shift is characterized by a collision of different interests driven by economic, cultural, and socio-political agendas, and can be framed as a new space of performativity: signaling a move from curating a set of objects to a conceptual and operational process that puts different constellations of human and machinic agents, objects and practices into relation with one another. This means that a curator needs to take into account a complex interrelated network of dependencies and contexts that are often invisible or incomprehensible to most people. In such a scenario online curation becomes ‘networked co-curation’ and shifts the attention from what is produced to how it is performed under the socio-technical conditions and relations that characterize the current state of the Web.