New media art, redefining the role of curators and artists [Research & Theory]

This blog post has been published in the context of the Computational Art-based Research and Theory module, part of the MA in Computational Arts I am currently doing at Goldsmiths.

This week’s reflection is based on discussions with our guest lecturer Rachel Falconer and the following readings:

• New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art (2008) by Christiane Paul, 2008
• Curating in the Post-Internet Age (2018) by Boris Groys, E-Flux Journal, October 2018
• Alternative Curatorial Approaches: Disruption Network Lab: Art as Investigating Misconduct & Wrongdoing, Interview with Tatiana Bazzichelli, Furtherfield, 2018

New media art in galleries — Image source

New media art and the way it’s challenging digital culture invites new forms of collaborations between artists and curators. It makes us think about new models, new ways of exposing or distributing the works and new exhibiting spaces, physical and virtual, challenging the notion of the white cube.

Artists as curators of their own work

“Art forms and movements are embedded in larger cultural contexts, but new media could never be understood from a strictly art-historical perspective: the history of technology and media sciences plays an equally important role in this art’s formation and reception. New media art requires media literacy.”
Christiane Paul

Curating New media artworks requires specific skill sets and background knowledge to understand the context behind the pieces. We could question the existing understanding of some curators around digital culture when the art industry is still stuck in old models.

In this context, we could also look at artists as curators of their own work. They have some responsibility in communicating and documenting the social and technological challenges behind their piece. It’s their role to accompany the curator and help create links between the themes of the exhibition and their work, or between their work and other works.

Curators as conceptual artists

“The curatorial methodology is based on a montage of practices, as well as of fieldwork, to create a conceptual network of multiple points of view.”
Tatiana Bazzichelli

Aggregating works and positioning them is a political act. By doing so, curators are already on a mission the communicate certain ideas, concepts and messages.

Selecting works and positioning them in the space (physical or virtual) is also designing an experience.

When it comes to New media art, curators have a larger role of findings ways to exhibit the process behind a piece, or think about how to expose the context, or design the surroundings to encourage people to engage and interact with the piece. Computational arts sometimes requires facilitation, shifting the role of the curator from pure curation to being designers and artists themselves.

Collaboration and dependency

For years artists have been dependent on galleries and curators to distribute their work, gain credibility amongst their peers and sell their work.

In our current digital world, we could challenge the need for artists to work with curators. There are other models available. Artists can be self-distributed and use online platforms to make themselves visible.

We could also argue that some art forms, like Net Art or Software Art, are not always very relevant to the gallery space. Other pieces, challenging our current society, are also best to stay outside of the norms of the art industry.

Some New Media artists are creating collectives to independently co-distribute, sharing skillset amongst the group, in a community that is able to talk, understand and promote the work in a relevant manner.

But distributing one’s own work takes time and requires very different skillset for artists. Is it better to step away completely from an existing industry or should we try to explore new ways to collaborate and define new models?