Curating on the Web: Blog Shorts Series
2020 is a truly remarkable year. Amongst the hate, pain and loss brought upon by the devastation of Covid-19, and the police brutality that caused and followed George Floyd’s death, there are also flurries of change, creativity and community that speak of renewal. In the arts, there has been an abundance of innovative practice responding to the need for transformation in how we connect with audiences, present artistic content and deliver public engagement activity.
I have witnessed arts practice in the form of collective hypnosis (1), drum improvisation in response to an activist brain hacking workshop (2), and a film controlled by the attention waves of the artist’s live neural activity (3). As well as breaking the physical boundaries of place, the online sphere opens up the opportunity to deliver public programmes in the comfort of an audience member’s home. I’m interested in how this shifts curatorial and artistic practice.
This winter I’m expanding my discipline with Tina Madsen in her NODE course ‘Curating on the Web: Exhibiting Internet-based Art’. This is a natural step having spent the past year commissioning online art, and fits with my ambitious curatorial goals for the upcoming year. Upon meeting the other students during our first session last week, it became clear that the majority of members were participating in a response to Covid. Many of the art professionals taking part had never before considered the internet as a component of their practice. But through the events of this year it has become a method of survival.
Through this series of blog posts I will share my thoughts and responses to the course, speculating how the internet can be utilised as a medium in the arts.
