The Art of Digital Curation

Artists have long engaged with digital and networked technologies in critical and creative ways to explore both new art forms and novel ways of disseminating artworks. Net-based artworks are often created with the intent to circulate outside traditional institutional spaces, and many are shared via artist-run platforms that involve curatorial practices distinct from those of museums or commercial galleries. This article focuses on a particular artist-run platform called Paper-Thin, characterizing the activities involved in managing the platform as digital curation in a polysemous sense – as both the curation of digital artworks and the stewardship of digital information in a complex technological ecosystem. While scholars and cultural heritage professionals have developed innovative preservation strategies for digital and new media artworks housed in institutional collections, the ongoing care of artworks shared through networked alternative spaces is largely carried out co-operatively by the artists and curators of these platforms. Drawing on Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds as networks of co-operative actors, this article describes the patterns of co-operative work involved in creating, exhibiting, and then caring for Net-based art. The article outlines the importance, for cultural heritage professionals, of understanding the digital-curation practices of artists, as these artist-run networked platforms demonstrate emergent approaches to the stewardship of digital culture that move beyond a custodial paradigm.

A geopolítica dos mundos da arte ocidental: reflexão e metodologia

Em uma reflexão sobre as origens e a metodologia do seu livro The Rise and Fall of American Art, 19840s-1980s: A Geopolitics of the Western Art Worlds (2015), Catherine Dossin reposiciona seu trabalho em um contexto de crescente atenção às múltiplas histórias da arte, no qual se faz necessário confrontar tal desafio metodológico. A autora então discute a geopolítica como um modelo útil para se pensar a complexa historiografia da arte do pós-guerra, abordar a polifonia de discursos desse período e analisar as dinâmicas de poder e os mecanismos históricos que garantem a alguns de seus capítulos o estatuto de história.

Ignored works

This essay interrogates ignored works of art as a special kind of object that can shed some light on the nature of contemporary art worlds, as well as on wider social processes regarding our relationship with things and with our past. It provides a materialist perspective focused on discarded objects as an alternative to a mystifying view of the artworld that takes artistic autonomy for granted and obliterates the social conditions of creativity and success. Ignored works are normally outside the reach of art history and the sociology of art, yet the increasingly bigger realm of unrecognized and unvalued art provides, after the failure of the historical avant-garde, a space where critical autonomy can still develop. This essay attempts to illuminate this mostly invisible realm by relating it to other similar categories such as waste and forgetting. Finally, ignored works’ connection to notions of authenticity is pointed out.

Two Paradigms – Two Art Worlds: On Constructing the Difference as a Strategy for Validating the Concept of the Artist and Art

The subject of the article is two art worlds in the field of visual arts which currently exist side by side in Poland. These worlds operate as part of two different paradigms of art, which is why two different definitions of the art and artist apply to them, and, in consequence, also different models of operation. What is important in the case of both communities is the process of constructing the difference and separating out their own communities of meanings, being a strategy to lend credence to their own concept of the art and artist, as well as their position in the art world. The aim of the article is to describe the process of constructing internal boundaries in the Polish art world and its division into two separate worlds, what means have been used in that process, as well as what are the consequences of belonging to the two separate art worlds for their participants.

In context : an examination of Larry Towell's work No man's land from the twin perspectives of maker and user

Photojournalist Larry Towell is the only Canadian member of the prestigious Magnum Photos Agency. Over the span of his career he has concerned himself primarily with issues of land and landlessness and has engaged in a number of long-term projects documenting the human stories amid political and religious conflict in Central America and the Middle East; he has also chronicled the migrant Mennonite workers of Mexico. This thesis focuses specifically on Towell's work photographing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in No Man's Land, a book project that was accompanied by newspaper and magazine publications, exhibitions, a video, audio CDs, public performances and multi-media projects. The extensive dissemination and documentation of Towell's work from No Man's Land offers an opportunity to examine a cohesive body of work in a number of forums and see how the context in which photojournalistic images appear can subsequently affect their meaning. This thesis undertakes a thorough examination of the photographs from No Man's Land in the context of the book, the printed press and exhibitions, considering the intent of the photographer in relation to audience perception of the work. With the new direction in photojournalism leading toward more subjective and self-reflexive projects and with expanding opportunities in digital and art worlds, it is essential that context and presentation be thoroughly understood to ensure the integrity of the issues and the photographer's intent.

In context : an examination of Larry Towell's work No man's land from the twin perspectives of maker and user

Photojournalist Larry Towell is the only Canadian member of the prestigious Magnum Photos Agency. Over the span of his career he has concerned himself primarily with issues of land and landlessness and has engaged in a number of long-term projects documenting the human stories amid political and religious conflict in Central America and the Middle East; he has also chronicled the migrant Mennonite workers of Mexico. This thesis focuses specifically on Towell's work photographing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in No Man's Land, a book project that was accompanied by newspaper and magazine publications, exhibitions, a video, audio CDs, public performances and multi-media projects. The extensive dissemination and documentation of Towell's work from No Man's Land offers an opportunity to examine a cohesive body of work in a number of forums and see how the context in which photojournalistic images appear can subsequently affect their meaning. This thesis undertakes a thorough examination of the photographs from No Man's Land in the context of the book, the printed press and exhibitions, considering the intent of the photographer in relation to audience perception of the work. With the new direction in photojournalism leading toward more subjective and self-reflexive projects and with expanding opportunities in digital and art worlds, it is essential that context and presentation be thoroughly understood to ensure the integrity of the issues and the photographer's intent.