Framework for the implementation of urban big screens in the public space

In the last decade, big urban screens have appeared in town squares and on building facades across the UK. The use of these screens brings new potentials and challenges for city regulators, artists, architects, urban designers, producers, broadcasters and advertisers. Dynamic moving images form new architectural material, affecting our perception and the experience of the space around us. A new form of urban space is emerging that is fundamentally different from what we have known, and it seems that we are ill-equipped to deal with and analyse it. We are just beginning to understand the opportunities for public information, art and community engagement. Most of screens at present serve mainly commercial purposes, they do not broadcast information aimed at sharing community content nor do they support public social interactions. We need to see more negotiation between commercial, public and cultural interests. The SCREAM project addresses these new challenges by looking at the physical urban spaces and the potential spaces created by the new technologies

Dialogical Skirmishes

Tan was guest editor for 'And Now China?', a special print edition of the Ctrl+P journal, which critically responded to the celebratory rhetoric’s of ‘China Now’ and other celebratory markers of China's global ascent in 2008. As well as the introductory article 'Dialogical Skirmishes', Tan also interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist

Trust, Risk and Public History: A View from the United States

In the public history and museum communities today there is much difference of opinion over the concept of ‘radical trust,’ which basically argues for us to give up control and trust the public to develop content for our websites and exhibitions and provide direction for our work. Most public historians and curators are happy to share authority with the public, but are we now expected to yield all authority? Are we now taking historian Carl Becker’s well-known phrase ‘everyman his own historian’ and updating it to ‘every person his or her own curator’? What is the role of historical knowledge in a world of opinion? Unfortunately, at the same time that many of us are embracing risk online, in a world we have little control or even influence over, we seem to be stepping back from risk taking in our museums, on our own turf. We’ve become risk averse—afraid to make mistakes, afraid of trying new approaches and tackling the historically controversial or the ambiguous. Rather than the ‘safe place for unsafe ideas’ that Elaine Gurian proposed, we have become no more than safe places for safe ideas. We need to push back on both fronts. Public historians should be thought leaders, not followers—not wait to see what the future holds for us but rather try to shape that future

The role of art curators in contemporary art and photography

The following dissertation will focus on the social role of art curators within our society along with the evolution of the concept of “Museum” since the beginning of the 20th century. This research paper is based on my experience as an art curator and production assistant for the company Cinq Etoiles Production on exhibitions such as Pernod Ricard’s art campaign MINDSET, Médecins du Monde’s Mise Au Poing exhibition or Vichy Portrait(s). This internship gave me insights into the organization of a cultural and artistic show, its mission and the skills and the resources required to conduct it successfully. Indeed, evolving in the field of exhibitions’ organization and especially photography made me reflect upon the way people “use” museums and exhibitions and to what extend Art is essential for society. More than presenting the work of artists for their aesthetical values, an exhibition can raise awareness about issues, open debates on different subjects and enables us to project ourselves forwards. Besides, museums serve as vectors of knowledge about our history, or culture and other values and identities. Therefore, I began to realize that the most important changes in society were due to artists and intellectuals who promoted open-mindedness, multiculturalism, and alternative thinking. I wanted to understand how museums that were long reserved for a small fraction of our society became able to address larger audience and educate the public opinion. We will see during this research that just like any significant evolution of society, the democratization of art and culture under all its forms had to overcome many obstacles over the decades. We will also reflect upon the concept of “Museums” as art laboratory and places of social interactions, why it should be politically-engaged and how to involve the community in the process to achieve change within our society

New media art: curating social justice in contemporary art museums and arts organizations

My research project includes case studies in which I interviewed nine new media art curators and directors whose curatorial practices offer historical analyses and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of social justice by using new media art. I investigate the ways in which social justice is presented in museums and arts organizations. Central to this project is an examination of museum practices where the use of new media art becomes a central platform to showcase issues of social justice

Digital transformation in the arts : a case study

This paper considers the interaction between digital technology and cultural organisations and the challenges and opportunities this presents for practice and for policy. The paper is based on one of eight 'digital R&D' projects supported by NESTA, Arts Council England and the AHRC, designed to analyse the effects of digital innovation in UK arts organisations. The paper focuses on a series of residencies in three UK arts organisations. The research aims to identify the cultural conditions which support or prevent short-term digital innovation becoming 'embedded' in the ongoing practice of a cultural organisation. The paper considers differing practices, attitudes and expectations between creative technologists and arts organisations. These differing 'cultures of innovation' may help us to understand why digital innovations often fail to move beyond temporary and pragmatic problem-solving towards more challenging, transformational effects on organisational strategy and culture

Radicalizing Care

What happens when feminist and queer care ethics are put into curating practice? What happens when the notion of care based on the politics of relatedness, interdependence, reciprocity, and response-ability informs the practices of curating? Delivered through critical theoretical essays, practice-informed case studies, and manifestos, the essays in this book offer insights from diverse contexts and geographies. These texts examine a year-long program at the Schwules Museum Berlin focused on the perspectives of women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, and trans people at the Schwules Museum; the formation of the Queer Trans Intersex People of Colour Narratives Collective in Brighton; Métis Kitchen Table Talks, organized around indigenous knowledge practices in Canada; complex navigations of motherhood and censorship in China; the rethinking of institutions together with First Nations artists in Melbourne; the reanimation of collectivity in immigrant and diasporic contexts in welfare state spaces in Vienna and Stockholm; struggles against Japanese vagina censorship; and an imagined museum of care for Rojava. Strategies include cripping and decolonizing as well as emergent forms of digital caring labor, including curating, hacking, and organizing online drag parties for pandemic times. With contributions by Edna Bonhomme, Birgit Bosold, Imayna Caceres, Pêdra Costa, COVEN BERLIN, Nika Dubrovsky, Lena Fritsch, Vanessa Gravenor, Julia Hartmann, Hitomi Hasegawa, Vera Hofmann, Hana Janečková, k\are (Agnieszka Habraschka and Mia von Matt), Gilly Karjevsky, Elke Krasny, Chantal Küng, Sophie Lingg, Claudia Lomoschitz, Cathy Mattes, Elizaveta Mhaili, Jelena Micić, Carlota Mir, Fabio Otti, Ven Paldano, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Nina Prader, Lesia Prokopenko, Patricia J. Reis, Elif Sarican, Rosario Talevi, Amelia Wallin, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Stefanie Wuschitz

The document/book as a form of curatorial creativity

This thesis discusses the document/book as an act of recording that can serve as a form for curatorial creativity. Firstly, it explores the document as a space in a hybrid analog and digital era. Then, it introduces concrete examples of how curating the gallery and the book has changed in the 20th and 21st centuries. It follows a critical analysis of society as one big accumulation of documents. It proposes the invention of writing as the base of our current digital spaces and the space of the book as architecture. In respect to the curatorial discourse, it focuses on Springer's proposition of engaging with the library in order to develop new ways of organizing, collecting, and reassembling information. The first chapter introduces Benjamin Bratton's diagram of "The Stack", which serves to explore the physical spaces of information, describing how the infrastructure of books has come to expand significantly from clay to paper, and now to the Cloud. It proposes the codex-book, a stack of paper sheets as an analogy of the stack through the example of artist Irfan Hendrian "Some Other Matter" exhibition. It also proposes the page—a place of inventory and invention— as the first virtual space of humanity. The second chapter discusses the library's primary functions of storage and retrievability —proposing the Library of Alexandria as the first information organization. Then comes back to an example of how the old model of the library can be used for creating a new display for the gallery as well as giving value to its collection through physical activation. Finally, it explores some of the invisible systems (covers, algorithms, tags) that are now building our digital libraries. The third chapter focuses on copy and print as essential tools for recording, preservation, and building collections. It introduces the history of mass digitization and the changes it has brought to analog documents. It also explores the space of digital and print through Kenneth Goldsmith's curatorial project that called out to print out all the internet. This example leads us to discuss the history of the A4-size paper sheet as the first completely standardize product. The fourth chapter presents the "neutral" containers —starting from the concept of the "gallery-book" proposed by Bernard Teyssendier as a place of movement, pleasure, and learning. It also explores architecture and design as curatorial infrastructure for exhibitions happening both in a gallery space and on a blank document. Finally, it creates a parallel between the white paper page and the white gallery wall as places of artistic intervention, which far from being invisible follow specific predefined structures. The fifth chapter focuses on presenting projects that propose new curated writing and reading contexts between the print and digital. Here, Brian O'Doherty's issue for "Aspen" magazine is proposed as proto-hypertext or as a premonition of the website. Then, the website-as-gallery concept is explored through the example of Kadist's "One Sentence Exhibition" project. This example leads to exploring the fragility and impermanence of the hyperlink, in contrast to its printed counterparts. The final chapter presents three projects that use the infrastructure of the book and the library as a curatorial agency —proposing new methods for curating information through collection, organization, and research. "Intercalations", a paginated exhibition series by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin; "MAP", a folded encyclopedia by the David A. Garcia architecture studio; and "Carte(s) Mémoire(s)" by ExposerPublier that proposes the exhibition as a moment of activation

Makers' Tale

Makers’ Tale was a research collaborative project between UCA and Salisbury Arts Centre in association with Salisbury Cathedral. The curatorial intention was to highlight the persistence of craft knowledge as well as innovation and experimentation within the context of modern creative practice and investigates co-operation and disciplinary crossovers. In the face of the global pandemic, the delivery of the physical exhibition was postponed, however, Makers’ Tale will be delivered in a virtual format, in May 2020, and will be part of Salisbury 2020 City on the Move digital celebrations. This move to a digital adaptation of the initial program, allowed a triple theme of movement in ideas, movement in engineering/technology and physical movement. Following the digital adaptation, the exhibition was installed at Salisbury Arts Centre in October 2021