Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation

Abstract

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.

Inscribing Expositions: Curatorial Strategies in Packing Practice into the Journal for Artistic Research

“…They are standard concepts in Informatics and Interaction Design to respectively describe visitors interacting with digital environments and their experience while doing so (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.). I adopt these terms from the respective discourses and integrate them into my curatorial perspective, just as Dekker (2021), Tedone (2019) and Ghidini (2019) did. The point that these terms come from design contexts does not invalidate my strategic choice to cast a curatorial perspective onto the expositions.…”

“…Dekker and Tedone (2019) define online exhibitions as "the result of complex interactions between various differentiated systems of creation and presentation that provide meaning through often invisible, or implicit and interrelated processes" (2). With this definition, Dekker and Tedone (2019) underline the importance of the specific context e.g. how does ebay's algorithm Cassini exactly rank items?…”

“…I understand curating as an "entanglement of actors" (15) -regardless of whether human or non-human (Latour 1999a)-which are embedded in constitutive relations for "becoming-public in art and culture" (Bismarck 2022, 8). I informed this general perspective on curating with the specific approach that is typically required by digital settings -see networked co-curating (Dekker and Tedone 2019) and curating on the web (Ghidini 2019). Finally, in On Circulating Reference.…”

Too Low Motivation, Too High Authority? Digital Media Support for Co-Curation in Local Cultural Heritage Communities

“…The advance of media technologies and of digital collections in the last decades give rise to new forms of media-supported co-curation which evolves within a complex sociotechnical assemblage of curators, users, objects and machines. Media-supported co-curation "is performed in and through human and technical objects, relations and interactions, which are active in and simultaneously become organized through these platforms or the systems in which they operate" [8] (p. 11). In this sense, the design of media technologies becomes a decisive part of the co-curation process, which has the potential not only to support traditional processes of co-curation, but also to go beyond them and to overcome existing barriers for co-curation.…”