Autonomedia – ISBN 1570271739
Few professions has been directly affected by the digital revolution as the curator. The contemporary art exhibitions’ responsible started to move out of the institutional rigid paths with the healthy proliferation of freelance curators during the last decade. But it was with the net and the real time chance of confronting methods of selection, policies, approaches, construction of ideas and display strategies that curators started to be questioned in their own work. This is the third of the Data Browser book series (including Economising Culture and Engineering Culture, and it investigates the curatorial practice through the daily experience of different well known digital art protagonists. What emerges is that the virtuoso single human filter is probably a concept of the past, and that actually there are “multiple agents of curatorial work”, involving the individual in a mandatory networked practice. The latter exposes the curator to an exciting challenge: embody this cultural exchange in his daily practice, using the different sharing paradigms to reach new peaks of research. Through software (code or paradigm emulation) or human skills, establishing connections and sharing information are more and more needed to extracting sense from an increasing amount of data.