What makes a curator? An insight into how to archive digital creativity

The role of the art curator can mean a lot of different things: today’s world is not one defined by the white walls of a gallery. One platform exemplifying the non-traditional curatorial role is Rhizome, the online archive of digital media-based art founded in 1999 and Michael Connor is the artistic director. In a new book published by Laurence King and designed by Bibliotheque, The New Curator, its authors speak to today’s curators from around the world about what their role means and how its changing. The publisher has kindly let us publish an extract from the Rhizome interview below.

How do you define your practice?

Michael Connor: My practice at Rhizome is both curatorial and editorial. A lot of what we do is about connecting with emerging practices and artists, and elevating their work, which might take the form of programmes or of writing something. The two things are quite closely linked. I have a very artist-centred approach to curating.

At the same time, though, I see a lot of my work as being remedial. There are all these problems with net art being poorly understood, historicised badly and forgotten. Now those problems are coming up in discussions around Post-Internet Art. I try and address some of these issues in a remedial sense by bringing in historical perspectives. I am very interested in cultivating a broad popular understanding of net-art history in all its diversity, and that is something
of a long-term project.

I think that I am a traditional curator in a way. My interest in history is about what kind of future we can produce through it.

How are the archival activities of Rhizome structured?

MC: The Rhizome Artbase is a collection of around 2,000 digital artworks that were mostly archived between 1999 and 2008, with comparatively few added since. It used to be structured through the open submission of work. Since around 2008, we have focused more of our energies on highlighting and addressing serious issues with digital archiving. Basically, it became clear that the Artbase, while valuable as a database of information on works that artists had generally written themselves, was not serving the purpose of keeping actual artworks accessible over time. As such, it wasn’t going far enough to address the broader problems of cultural memory of net art. At that point, Rhizome shifted into a research phase. Since then, we’ve worked on developing new metadata standards for net art, as well as new tools and approaches to digital preservation.

Since 2011 a lot of artists have been working in a way that is very embedded in social media, and that has posed a lot of problems. Whereas before, artists might have made discrete digital objects that we can archive, now there might be Javascript that creates an animation within Google Maps, or there might be a performance that took place on Facebook. So Dragan has worked with Ilja Kremer to come up with a concept of recording the web rather than saving the file. It’s not a video but a recording of the code of, say, Instagram or Yelp, and a framework for replaying it, so you can revisit the experience
of seeing the work in its original environment in a web browser. This tool is currently available for public use at webrecorder.io.

Why is it important to archive media projects? Isn’t their instability and rapid effacement on feeds part of their medium? How does the archive respond to this?

MC: What we often see is that the decision to take something offline is made by entities like Google (in the case of YouTube), or whatever large corporation controls a site where the content existed. People are already self-documenting, but that documentation exists only as long as that platform allows it to be in existence.
So our intent is to take the power of pulling the plug away from corporations and give more control over the legacy of their work back to artists and communities.

As a whole, digital culture is a huge part of our life experience, and it deserves to be remembered. When it is poorly historicized, less visible stories are erased, conversations are repeated, inspirations lost.

How can you embed temporality in, for instance, performance works that unfold on Facebook?

MC: One of the interesting examples of this is when we archived a series of performances as part of Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections, where she played a character in her social-media profiles over the course of several months. She would post manipulated selfies and other images with scripted captions, telling the story of an extreme makeover. As she posted, people would react; some would want to connect with her, others would criticize. There was an ongoing discussion. Dragan archived Amalia’s Instagram feed; the archive is a separate website that looks exactly like her Instagram, with all the photos and interactions. The content is there, but the temporality of it feels very different to how it would feel in your feed day to day. It feels like it could be possible to re-perform it in the future, and use the timestamp in each photo and put them up at the same pace, because the temporality of it was really important, watching the photos come up over time. But in a way the moment of it has really gone now, and what we have is only a high-fidelity form of documentation.

I think that question of temporality is very central to the web. You have to approach the archive with an understanding of it being a documentation of something now over.

If net art can be uploaded and distributed by the artists, what is the role of the curator today? Is it a redundant position?

MC: I think that role of the curator has changed, but the thing about networks is that they don’t flatten power structures; power is aggregated or accumulated in slightly different ways. We’re living in a world where a person with a lot of Twitter followers may have power and a curator might have power, and these kinds
of power exist in a certain relationship to each other.

There are definitely different ways to have your art reach an audience than through institutional curators today. That doesn’t mean that the role of caring for and championing artists’ work is obsolete, and it doesn’t mean that role is now or has ever been played only by people working in museums. I mean, art institutions have always existed within networks of power and attention economies, they’re just playing a longer game, with more of a sense of public accountability than
your average Tumblr – even if they reach a smaller audience.