CURATING, IMMATERIALITY, SYSTEMS: towards redistributed curating
introduction to CURATING, IMMATERIALITY, SYSTEMS conference, Tate Modern, 4 June 2005
about the conference
The intention behind this conference is to consider practice of curating in relation to recent critical ideas around the transformation of cultural production. The first part of the conference introduces a critical context for current debates wheres the second part presents examples of curatorial projects that respond to these debates. The emphasis is not on 'new media' and the whole range of curatorial practices dealing with works such as video, VR works, (networked) installations, wireless or mobile media, etc, but specifically on online curating and on works that display transformative properties and are distributed over networks such as databases, generative media, net art and software art, computer viruses and source code; on works that sit rather uncomfortably within institutional context. Clearly this ellicits new set of challenges for curating and the expression of curatorial control in particular. The conference intends to offer critical responses to these developments.
key terms: immateriality and systems in the context of curating
In considering these ideas the conference draws upon two key terms - immateriality and systems - that will be explored in more detail in presentations by subsequent speakers. I wish to refer to these terms in only in so far as they relate directly to curating and the question of control.
The concept of
immateriality, introduced by Italian autonomists (Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri in particular) is important in this context as it describes recent changes in the mode of production that can be also applied to creative work including curating. It is in a recognition of the fact that production is increasingly dealing with immaterial forms of social relations, communication networks and information systems. Following Maurizio Lazzarato's definition it describes production of new types of 'immaterial goods' resulting from 'immaterial labour' - labour that produces the informational, cultural and affective content of the commodity. This can partly be recognized in relation to computer technologies, which have contributed to redefinition of social practices and relations of production. The new qualities of labor and its organization described by Lazzarato also imply a redistributing of power. This is of particular importance in relation to curating where the traditional curatorial process is based on an almost exclusive operation of 'elevating' objects to a higher cultural status, ascribing value to them and exerting control over the production of meaning in the wider art-culture system including institutions. I would like to suggest that this is very centralized position and one - that is out of step with contemporary thinking and technological systems.
The idea of the
system is important too in that it not only refers to the physical site of curatorial production - the computer and the network - but also to the technical and conceptual properties of what constitutes the curatorial object (works distributed over the network), and it also applies to the whole art-culture system, or the 'operating system' of art. The curator is part of this entire system - but not central to it.
collectivity / control
Thus what these ideas - immateriality and system - highlight is a contradictory tension between increased collectivity against the struggle to preserve control.
'... a tension can be seen to exist between the liberating potential of the cybernetic imagination and the ideological tendency to preserve the existing form of social relations.' (Nichols 1988)
Bill Nichols, in 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' (1988) sees cybernetic systems as a metaphor in this respect, for the processing of information and execution of actions. If computer systems are indeed indicative of a change in the mode of cultural production, they also indicate contradictory tendencies inherent in these systems themselves: the 'negative, currently dominant, towards control, and the positive, more latent potential towards collectivity', as Nichols puts it. If we extend this argument to also include the more recent embodiment of networked computational systems - the Internet - the site of production still remains crucial to an understanding of the production of culture at large, but it is constituted in new ways. Nichols is explicitly referring to Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936) to emphasise the democratic potential of technological change, but extending this to understand the ways in which control is exerted in new formations.
Perhaps it would be productive at this stage to ask the following question:
If the assumption is made that traditional curating follows a centralised network model, then what is the position of the curator within a distributed network model? In other words, how distributed networks changed the nature of curating?
The conference aims to begin to answer this question � not looking for an answer as such but using this question for critical inquiry.
KURATOR software
These ideas are not only theorised but also tested through practice. The
KURATOR, a free software application designed as a tool for curating source code which I would like to introduce at this conference and which is in early stages of technical development, again does not offer a solution but perhaps it offers one way of approaching the question by developing a model of curating that is open source and open for collective development.
There is an analogy between the use of the term 'programming' here - both in the curatorial work of programming events (traditionally in a museum or exhibition but also clearly in organising something like a conference) and in programming of the technical system that facilitates the work. It might be useful to think about the work of curator as analogous to the work of programmer: from artist-programmer or software artist to curator-programmer or software curator (akin to what Lazzarato would describe as an 'animator'). Indeed curating source code is standard practice in this field of software production and so is a collective production process involving various agencies including a programmer and a curator.
On a conceptual level the KURATOR software proposes a model of curating in which the curatorial task of making sense of the indexed material, setting up relationships between works, and presenting them in some form of 'coherent' and fixed display is fundamentally deferred to a generative and machinic aspect of organising and assembling data displays. In this sense, the idea of curatorial control over the final product or 'exhibition', the power of ascribing value to particular 'objects', and the control over production of meaning is somewhat surrendered to the software, the users, and the system in general. Compared to a more traditional curatorial process, this system operates a quite different set of productive relations. It is in this sense term 'redistributed curating' could apply.
