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Hi Lindsay and all

thanks for this timely question and the trickle of memories it has unleashed - I hope people on the list keep chiming in.
Way back when (2003?) Saul Albert and I and others cofounded the Faculty of Taxonomy in what was then the University of Openess (sic) - a wiki - so that we could 'socialise' our joint research into taxonomical systems. I was co-curating a show about databases (http://www.databaseimaginary.org/) and Saul was developing the distributed library project. I wrote about it (I think) in my essay in Network Art: Practices and Positions, the Routledge book edited by Tom Corby, and in the small publication documenting  the residency Saul and I undertook at Isis Arts here in Newcastle. I too remember being excited about del.icio.us at the time and have lost track of my account since then. Saul - any thoughts about our conversations about curatorial transparency which we had back then? 

I've used wikis in my curatorial research ever since, though rarely completely openly/publicly, more as a tool of collaboration between co-curators. Steve Dietz and I also made a point of using flickr to upload install-pre-opening installation shots of the exhibitions we curated together, as we felt it was important to show the process which went in to displaying/exhibiting the work. Our use of flickr at times contravened the installation documentation policies/agreements of the galleries we were working with but we rarely had complaints from the artists. I tried to make those infrastructures more explicit when I curated 'My Own Private Reality' at the Edith Russ Haus with Sabine Himmelsbach in 2007 - but it still felt quite early days for that particular institution to work with a guest curator and put everything which went in to making the show online - I recall it was Edith Russ Haus' first flickr account at the time and we deliberately chose to host the blog on wordpress rather than on the gallery's server. http://myownprivatereality.wordpress.com/

I also think this very mailing list is something which has gone a long way to making more transparent curatorial practice, whether in advance of projects or after the fact. And in this, our work at CRUMB has been influenced by the great curators we have interviewed whose own practices have been social and open -- Barbara London and Kathy Rae Huffman key amongst those.

more later,
Sarah