Curating with the Internet

This chapter explores Internet-based and Internet-activated approaches to curating art through both established and non-traditional exhibition circuits. Today, new curatorial approaches are emerging in tandem with digitally-activated modes of presentation and dissemination distinguished by perpetual reproducibility, multiple intersecting temporalities and materializations, and the subsidence of physical space. Accordingly, this chapter will discuss networked, distributed, and modular approaches that variously disrupt, democratize, antagonize, institutionalize—and in some cases altogether bypass—the figure of the curator. Significantly, many of these approaches are no longer necessarily connected to singular events or spaces and are perhaps better understood as omnidirectional movements between modes of conception, production and dissemination connected through the screen as a communal space. This communal space might offer either access to new works, illuminate the existence of works understood to be elsewhere in time and space, or offer multiple or alternative materializations, versions, attributions, interpretations and representations of existing works.