Curating Data: care, commons, networks

Digital Methods Summer School 2020, 29 June – 3 July 2020

with: Annet Dekker, Marialaura Ghidini, Asen Ivanov, Theresa Kneppers, Eva Krumm, Kelly Rappleye, Gaia Tedone, Magda Tyzlik-Carver, Marina Valle Noronha

 

It is clear that digital networks for a long time have been much more than just communication channels and today they are the very heart of public life. In the context of climate change, world-wide pandemic, increasing commercialisation of network infrastructures and diminishing funding for art and cultural practices, there is a need to establish a framework for understanding current developments in the field of digital curation.

In this project we focused on digital curation, which we regarded not as an act in the silo of the art world and its institutions but as a networked practice performed daily by social media users, programmers and algorithms (Tedone 2018; Tyzlik-Carver 2016; Goriunova 2013). In this sense, the meaning of curating has expanded beyond the usual space of the gallery and art institutions and is part of scientific practices of data collection, storing and presentation. It is a practice of curating content for commerce, and function in search optimisation algorithms. Rather than lamenting over the fact that today ‘everyone is a curator’ (Kasprzak 2008) or that we are in the midst of ‘curationism’ (Balzer 2015), which supposedly diminishes the value of the practice, we made an in-depth analysis of digital curation to re-address the necessity for care and collaboration (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, Agostinho 2019, Galloway and Thacker 2006, Tyzlik-Carver forthcoming) in these practices.

At the same time, the development of online environments, with their own histories, grammars, aesthetics and ethics of technical, cultural and social changes, calls for a recognition of the fact that digital curatorial discourse moved beyond the field of art and within a wider terrain of networked art and its media and visual cultures. To account for this shift requires a radical rethinking of the notion of aesthetics as simultaneously a major mode of operation for contemporary society and a practice in a constant process of becoming whose very constitution is being changed by networked technologies (Goriunova 2012). Therefor in this project we also wanted to address the changes characteristic to digital curatorial practices by starting with the shared recognition that the curatorial function in digital curating has shifted from its focus on the curator as an exhibition maker and a ‘meta curator’ (O’Neill 2007) to a practice embedded in and influenced by socio-technological constructions of networks and their ir/rational processes. Such forms of curating have been defined as ‘immaterial’ (Krysa 2008), ‘posthuman’ (Tyżlik-Carver 2016 and 2018) and as a set of networked relations (Dekker 2018, Tedone 2019), and they constitute the basis for this project that aims to identify how care manifests in contemporary forms of digital curating, and how commons making is part of this process. Moreover, and coming back to the notion of ‘care’, since curation has always had a close relationship with ‘care and caring for’, in this new constellation a rethinking of care as a practice involving political, economic and institutional power relations (Mol 2008) that has the potential to disrupt existing values (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), could bring forth new perspectives on digital curation.

By exploring and analysing several practices of digital and data curation we unpacked the concepts of care and commons and by assessing their functions within digital curation consider how they may help to rethink curatorial practice to address various structures of control, authority and accountability within these practices. As such, in this project we wanted to critically evaluate the concepts of care and common(ing)s from the perspective of curating data in digital environments.