Hi Sarah, all,

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 05:29:12PM +0000, Sarah Cook wrote: 
> 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? 

Nostalgia rush! It's hard enough to recall all that work and treasure it
wistfully in my mind, let alone find any coherent trace of it online.
Mailing list archives link-rotted, and the Uo Wiki got spammed offline
several years ago.

The best I could do without engaging in serious network art conservation
was google up an email exchange on the old delicious-discuss list
someone I didn't know forwarded to an MIT digital librarianship email
list: http://simile.mit.edu/mail/general/0142.html

A few things strike me about the curatorial bogging issue and Michael's
goatskin archiving strategy looking back at the last decade of networked
practices engaging with what we used to call 'social software'.

It was exciting to use wikis and early link-sharing sites to shape
everyday artistic communication-as-readymade, without self-consciously
composing an artistic product for established markets.  There was also a
critical awareness that these practices were prototyping forms of
knowledge production whose value could be easily alienated and harvested
as big data. 

These concerns came together in our discussions at the Uo and in the
Mute crowd equating these networked practices with the way Conceptual
Art practices were being reified as art products through their
documentation and ephemera, and how that process was being emulated as a
style by contemporary artists - I'm thinking of shows like the
Whitechapel's Protest and Survive (2000).

That angst seems pretty funny now. The observations of big-data
harvesting communication-as-product were accurate, but the ephemera of
communication-as-artwork proved to be, well, ephemeral. 

The Uo Wiki was densely interlinked with other sites - with images
cross-embedded and text transcluded into its pages from all over the
net. This may have contributed to it having such insane google-juice
with the PageRank algorithm at the time - it semantically dominated so
many niches that it pulled in interest and contributions from the most
unlikely places. Just mentioning someone's name on the wiki was
guaranteed to show up prominently in their vanity searches - which was a
great way to start a conversation. There's no way to archive that.

Although there's also a record of some versions of the Uo Wiki from
before 2006 on Archive.org, probably the most complete record is the
offline version I wgetted for inclusion on the DVD published with the
catalogue for our residency at Isis Arts. I remember thinking it was a
ridiculous thing to do at the time, but we needed to put something
art-documentation-like on the catalogue DVD.

So my prediction is that the open curatorial conversations that Lindsay
writes about in her blog post will probably rot away - and only the
final productions - shaped to be recognisable as artwork - will remain
in anything other than fragmentary forms of future historical interest.

X

S.

-- 
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