Dear Grant and List,
I've been attending the Momentum workshops organised by Digital Arts
Development Agency in Bristol. It is about 'mass and
velocity, impetus and speed', which means it is about how to create a weighty
enough new media art project that when you launch it into the
world it travels with intent -- surely a goal of activist networked practice.
The discussions seem less focussed on institutional curatorial matters as on
the independent, small, artist-led productions that are currently being
developed. In relation to this and in light of some of our discussions, I'd
like to return to Grant's questions, as I think they are exactly the right ones
to be asking.

I would say (with my usual optimism) that, yes, curators are interested in
net-based activist work. However, for different reasons, as no two curators are
alike.
For instance, those curators who call themselves producers or commissioners, or
who have worked on time-based events such as performance art -- and I think
here of Jon Bewley and Simon Herbert of Locus+ (a site-specific art agency run
out of a very messy office in Newcastle, not a gallery: www.locusplus.org.uk)
-- might be interested because of the art's engagement with a time and a place
(the context _is_ the work) not because of the particular technology or medium
it uses (the net). However, on the other hand, a similar argument could be made
for the inclusion of rTMark's etoy project in the last Whitney Biennial --
there the prioritised context was that of the web and business on the web
rather than the context / content of the specific company involved and what
each company did.

My concern is that with the technology involved -- the web -- curators new to
this work might not be able to separate those different contexts, or, more
problematically, separate the medium from the content from the context.

To address each of Grant's points in turn:

> In some ways it seems like the pedagogical,
> conservative/archival, and publicity functions that museum-based curating
> typically performs are made redundant by some net-based projects (e.g.
> RTMark),

Perhaps not so... or at least, i know some museum-based curators are trying to
redefine what they do (pedagogy, conservation, archiving, publicity) in order
not to be out of the loop of contemporary art production in its myriad formats.
As Peter Weibel puts it in his interview (on the crumb site), the net needs
curators because they can a) show you where to find the work and b) put it into
a chronology, or a context of other art work, or into a theoretical framework.
I suspect that rTMark is busy enough just realising their projects to worry
about how they might fit into a history of art activism... that may be why they
have a curator as part of their team. (FYI: be on the lookout for a show about
activism and breaking the law which includes the Barbie Liberation Organisation
at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut).

> to the extent that 1) they often don't assume the same kind of gap
> between the museum-goer and "advanced" art that is the basis for wall-texts,
> explanatory catalog essays, etc.

this question about the assumption of audience is one that I'd like to see more
discussion about. Do museum curators write texts because they assume there is a
gap between the public and the work that needs filling? Probably, but more
likely they write the text to further research and knowledge about the work,
and to justify why they've put it there. And if a museum is a place to go to
learn about art, why shouldn't there be as part of that experience somewhere to
get more information about the art and the artist? That, at least, seems
obvious. Someone had to have written a wall-text about rTMark's presentation in
the biennial. That said, I would be disappointed if an activist artist did
assume their audience to be of one kind or another, and I feel this way about
all artforms -- how boring would art be if each piece was made with a
particular viewer in mind?! This becomes even more problematic with new media,
where artists are forced to consider, as part of their conception of an idea
for a work of art, how long it might last technologically and what to do when
the browser no longer supports it. Perhaps some artists on the list could
respond -- do you consider who you're making a work for, and how long the work
will last when you have an idea for a piece?

> 2) they can be easily "archived" without
> capital-intensive storage space

yes, but who will do or does that? Let's say rTMark's piece gets x number of
articles printed in the popular press - will someone keep a file of them for
future reference? Here a curator's job seems the least unchanged from
traditional practices.

> 3) they can be cheaply publicized on the
> net.

The publicity end of a curator's job is, in my opinion, a new one. In fact it
is one which the marketing department of the museum has put on the curator (see
the conversation with Julie Lazar also on the crumb site about this). A
museum's role is, in part, to bring art to new audiences and what is worth
dicussing is to what degree they do in fact do this and if they do it through
publicity and marketing or through programming.

> Aside from using the accumulated economic resources of a museum to
> commission net-based activist works (bearing in mind the potential problems
> that might raise), what role does the curator play here?

A word that has come up often this weekend in Bristol is "catalyst" as that is
common whether you act as a curator, a producer, an agent or a broker of new
media work. I think the Tate Mongrel commission (which Matthew Gansallo
discusses in his interview on crumb) is a good an interesting example of a
potential curatorial role in regards to net-based activist works. Through
commissioning, curators can open up their institutions to a more vibrant
institutional-critique.

Activist art in particular aside, part of the discussion around
small-organisation models of curating/production in the new media world at
Momentum has focussed on the topic of interactivity and collaboration -- where
partners in the project are "mutually influential" - and it's clear who is the
partner exchanging knowledge and skills, rather than who is the client
providing services.
Perhaps if we think in a more concrete manner about being "mutually
influential" in regards to activist-based art we might get a little further...

Sarah