KURATOR  curating + research

Curating and Social Technologies: New Models of Online Curatorial Practice for the Commons

Magda Tyzlik-Carver PhD project

http://www.magda.thecommonpractice.org/

Date:

2009

This practice-led doctoral research is concerned with new models of curatorial practice in the light of emerging internet platforms that facilitate public interaction and co-production. The specific interest is in how relations of power are reconfigured and how this relates to contemporary descriptions of network power and the wider context of artistic interventions in the public realm. The project explores emerging models of curatorial practice in the context of social technologies (Krysa 2006; CONT3XT.NET et al. 2007) and ‘network society’ (Castells 2009). It asks how the practice of curating changes in the context of network cultures, and wider contemporary discourses in culture and curating globally. The emphasis is on the relationship between curating and social networks as the site for new forms of curatorial practice.

Issues arise as to whether curatorial activity that takes place in a network environment necessarily entails engagement in a social context, and whether the question of the politics of curatorial practice is made more overt. This is articulated by the following questions:

• What new forms of curating emerge from a socio-technological description of the commons?
• How can a new model be articulated that extends discussions of power relations between multiple agencies in the curatorial domain?
• How can existing models of art organisation incorporate and exhibit work that operates within a new framework of autonomous networks of co-production?

Related projects:

• Common practice/ language (2010) Arnolfini, Bristol and Online Projects
• Common practice/ code (2010) Arnolfini, Bristol and Online Projects
• playing practice (2009) Falmouth
• turning language into object (2009)

Conferences & symposia:

01/2011 ‘Interfacing the Common: curatorial event as a system of production on the edge’, conference paper at Public Interfaces, Center for Digital Urban Living and DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University [FORTHCOMING], see abstract here

07/2010 ‘Utopia or Dystopia – Immaterial and Digital Commons’, conference paper at Spectres of Utopia, 11th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society Europe, Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin (PL).

06/2010, ‘Sustainability of Labour in Organised Networks’, conference paper at Textures, 6th European Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and Art, Stockholm School of Economics, Riga (LV)

05/2010 respondent to a keynote paper by Prof. Malcolm Miles, symposium Aesthetics in Time of Emergency, University of Plymouth, Plymouth (UK)