Curating on the Web: Exhibiting Internet-based Art

Duration: Apr 05 – May 3, 2021

Fee: 172€

Max seats: 32

Enroll before: Apr 1, 2021

Dedication: 3 hrs/week

Since its beginning, the internet has been used for practices that take the web as an artistic medium in itself. In that sense, Internet art is a site-specific art form, dependent on its being online – and connected to other entities in the network.

This course gives you an insight into the processes and methods of curating ephemeral, internet-based art and the challenges these can pose to you as curator. It introduces the platforms and websites where these exhibitions are shown, in both institutional as well as independent contexts.

The course aims to give you theoretical and practical tools to curate the web, how to manage your curatorial projects as well as how to launch your online exhibition. It also touches upon how to document your exhibition and artworks for archival use and how to promote it. Included in the course is a practical assignment, where the participants conceptualize and develop an internet-based curatorial proposal and are given feedback and advice for future project development.

Week 1. Introduction

• Introduction to the program and course overview.
• This is a one-hour-only welcome session. The lecturer will introduce the program and participants will introduce themselves. No prior preparation is necessary.

Week 2. Introduction to the field of internet art

• Introduction to the internet as medium and internet-based art practices
• Important characteristics of the web to be considered inrelation to curating
• Physical space vs. online space
• Discussion of how internet art can be exhibited online with relevant case studies

Week 3. The curatorial process

• Curatorial theory and organization of dynamic and immaterial projects
• Curatorial tools – how and / or if they differ in the online-sphere
• Different formats of and approaches to the online exhibition space
• Combining online and physical space – why this can be an interesting factor
• Launching the project (events, marketing and mediation program)

Week 4. Developing the exhibition: getting technical

• Further technical characteristics of the web
• Dynamic structures, variability and virality
• The distributional nature of the web and how this can be used as a force in your project
• Different formats for curating in (websites, blogs, YouTube/Vimeo and social networks as exhibition spaces)
• Practical aspects of the curatorial process, the steps you need to take – and when to take them
• Creating a design brief for your online project

Week 5. Steps to take after the exhibition is launched

• How to continue to work and promote your project once it’s out there
• Interactivity: how does the audience engage with an online exhibition and how to develop this
• After the exhibition: Documenting your exhibition
• Institutions and initiatives that supports internet based art
• The ephemerality of code and considerations of “conservation” of internet art

Tina Madsen is an independent curator, researcher and artist based in Berlin. She holds a MA in Art History from Aarhus University (Denmark). Her primary research is in the field of digital media and performance art with a special focus on curating and preserving ephemeral and internet-based art. She has been main curator and developer of the internet art exhibition platform Net.Specific for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark and has done various talks and presentations on the topics of internet art e.g. at The Danish Association of Art Historians, The Remote Encounters Conference in Wales, Social Media Week Berlin and for The Transmediale Vorspiel, among others.