In an ongoing discussion taking place via the Curatorial Network – a program of activities, a website and discussion list dedicated to the development of curatorial practice through critical debate, collaborations and exchange – and more specifically found on their Curatorial Digest email bulletin, a few interesting references have been made to the role of technology in curatorial practice. After making comparisons between the roles of new media festivals in the early ?80s and ?90s and the current phenomena of online art/curatorial platforms, Joasia Krysa mentions Runme.org, and its linked festival Readme.org, in and describes it as a “collaborative, semi-open curatorial platform” that involves “software-aided” curating. As Joasia suggests, one of the interesting questions here concerns the degree of openness and ?democratisation’ of such curatorial models and the different ways “software plays part in the curatorial process itself”.

Elsewhere in the lengthy discussions (all of which can be accessed in the archive) references are made by Judit Bodor to notions of ?anti-curation’ (identified here, in reference to correspondence between Mark Hutchinson and Dave Beech, as “transforming the curator by infecting (them) with that which is ?other’ to the curator”) and a 'critically self-aware curation' (one that enters into a mutual and dialogical relationship with artists and therefore has doubts and conflicts). This reference to a ?vaccine strategy’ seemed particularly interesting, and one that Thierry De Duve has seen as a ubiquitous strategy throughout art history. Inoculation through the intravenous application of doubt and otherness in relation to the ?edges’ of what-is-curation may indeed work to strengthen its resolve and capabilities, boosting its immune system via essential infections of uncertainty over its boundaries. Even if Hutchinson goes onto suggest (as Boder reminds us) that a critically self-aware, and unsure curatioral practice “might not be curation at all, it may yet feed back into it in the long term as part of the constitution of a healthy, exploratory ?body’ – one not yet certain what it is, but perhaps more at ease with its indeterminacy.

Much of this material relates strongly to the praxis of Dispatx, and forms one of the reasons for its intriguing potential as an ongoing collective. Of course, the debate as to the role of the curator is long and protracted – whether the debate focuses on whether it is within an institution, allied to an existing creative practice, as that practice itself, debated in terms of the ?curator-figure’ and the ?act’ of curating, etc. – and is full of subtleties and shifting parameters that cannot be dealt with in too much detail here. Even so, though we might acknowledge elements of the curating process that relate to more traditional activities, tracing back to an etymological ?taking care’ and a role of facilitator/mediator, etc. one of the clearest elements of the process seems to be a sense of action and involvement. For those who, (here an attempt, as suggested by Paul O’Neil, to distance the activity from who is acting or the context in which they are doing so) ?work curatorially,’ the process is often, in basic terms, a durational process of working with others. Expressed like this, its perhaps dangerous to oversimplify things, but it seems crucial to recognise such basic terms of the relational process – one that is formed by the fluid exchanges of actions as well as ideas – of what the process does rather than what it means; a practice of active collaboration. As O’Neil also suggests, one of the interesting areas here is the notion of how the establishment of a curatorial approach over the long term can come about, even though it might be based on short-term exchanges and rapid rotation of relationships on a completely different scale.

This question of scale is one that has been mentioned previously in relation to the work of Dispatx. The site’s foregrounding of curatorial processes, emphasising the visibility of the creative method, the curator’s presence is similar to that of the contributor, as well as to that of the users with access to the open forum and the tools within MyDispatx. Rather than straightforward presentation agents, the Dispatx editors aim to be fully involved in every available part of the process – a desire for involvement that we work on passing on to our various contributors (i.e. invited artists, open submitters, and the public). This involvement can then stretch across the construction of individual projects, the broader collections and themes, and the site as an entity in itself – together with the fertile, shifting zones located between these areas and those thrown on the wall from their constant inter-reflections. The prismatic nature of the site does allow the curator and the artist with the multi-role s of presenter, activist, critic, etc. – roles it also offers, inevitably to greater or lesser degrees, to all its audience. It’s also important to stress the importance of Dispatx functioining as a large-scale repository here – though an immediate focus of the site is on shorter-term, theme-led collections, we are consistently building up a body of work that represents our work as a collective on another scale – one based less on specialisation and particularity, but more aligned to expressing broader shifts in method, practice, meaning and affectivity across a wider set of parameters and encompassing a more expansive timescale.



A site that has only recently come to my attention also seems to deal with many of the issues relating to the role of the curator and the use of technology. The Hackable Curator, a collaborative project by Anaisa Franco, Anita Barwacz, Andy Bennett, Lindsey Bedford, Martha Patricia Niño, Richard Wilkes, uses a system of pre-determined tags to trawl through Flickr, gathering images for use in an “imaginary show”. This pool of images is further reduced using algorithms created in relation to the tags, and then through the "use of a robotic arm". The process can be 'hacked' through the intervention of the audience – further images can be added to the pool, or votes cast against a chosen image, thereby influencing future choices. The project developers argue that by "providing a mechanism for 'hacking' the curatorial process, the project asks questions about the subjective role of the curator and suggests a more democratic solution." One of the things that is interesting here is that even though it references automation, generative systems, and opens a space for intervention and exchange in terms of selection, the initial set of tags, selected in advance under an unknown remit or following unknown criteria, remains outside of this process. This area, which surely stands as the locale of a curatorial position, or particular terms of engagement (so to speak), constitutes the foundation for all the subsequent interventions. It consists of the discourse – the shards of language – that determine the formation of the pool before any ?hacking’ is permitted. The remit of this seminal stage in the process is a specific point of interest, again relating curatorial practice and discourse to the language/syntax of technologies, and the dominant role this is assuming in the shaping of creative and interactive processes.

It might be worth speculating on the influence of the ?grammar of tagging' in more detail – metadata as data; adjectival, descriptive terms, space- or comma-separated keywords not only directing the flow of attention, but generating content according to its own terms, etc. Straightforward adjectival tagging – assessing objects and attributing certain word constellations accordingly - does seem a strangely cursory process, full of holes and made up of an indeterminate surface (see below!) that has already been fruitfully exploited by artists and curators, as in projects like TAGallery, Cont3xt, etc. The prevalence of the tag list confirms the importance of its formatting. The stuttering shorthand arrangements of label markers suggests that the word sets form an indexical surface tension for all manner of complex relationships. Reminiscent of O’Hara lists, or stunted and dissolved haiku, it might even be worth considering how such texts – split and lined up, ready to be tokenised – might constitute an attendant ?theory’ to online art works… a theory set in repetition, delicate variation, strange hybrids and neologisms, maddening lists aimed only at resounding with exterior examples and other sets situated elsewhere – it could point to a potential, partial theory space, one that can be dressed in weighted lists and floated in clouds - a theory of lack and intimation.  The manner in which tags attend, or are inserted into, content is also open to continual experimentation. Steven Johnson has described how hyperlinks were quickly being established as "a way of phrasing thought... as modifiers, like punctuation, something hardwired into the sentences themselves.” It could be interesting to consider how tags – operating as unspoken asides in the midst of conversations, gestures that hint at immanent connectivity or shared ideas continually resounding throughout the exposition and re-exposition of creative material – might constitute a virtual layer of discourse… not only a table of contents but the surface intermittent and porous surface texture of a expansive body of material that betrays any obvious correspondence between image and text.

In a last minute reference to some of the posts that have been made this week, particularly Scott’s appropriation of Aiden and his own references to the indeterminacy of surface, it struck me that writing can appear like a Menger Sponge – a heady mix of gap and solid, of openings and obstructions, which continues to fascinate and infuriate in equally enjoyable measure.