Art and Curating as Distributed Form

Southworth, Kate (2013) Art and Curating as Distributed Form. [Website Content]

Abstract / Summary

‘Art and Curating as Distributed Form’ involves: (1) identifying and articulating ways material and conceptual qualities in contemporary art and curatorial practice engage the formal structure of distributed networks such as the Internet; (2) exposing the politics, ethics and aesthetics of relations between local enactment and global protocol as highly significant to artworks/curatorial events referencing the distributed network.

The work follows ‘Cultural Capital’ into ways of trans-scribing aspects of digital, network art, and ‘generative’ artwork to a non-digital realm; early iterations informed the conceptualisation of distributed forms of art and curation and ‘Electronic Village Galleries’. The project proposes a theoretical and conceptual framework for contemporary artworks that consist of discrete elements of disparate media which do not necessarily co-exist in the same location or temporality. These artworks are devised following protocol-as-medium and given recurrent local enactment in distributed locations.

The project positions the distributed network and similar technologies as manifestations of global change on a level unprecedented since the 1970s; the principles of the distributed form are inherently aligned with an intensification of contemporary capitalism, the ‘information society’. To challenge suppositions of distributed form’s identification with phallic logic, Bracha Ettinger’s Matrix Theory proposes expanding the Symbolic to include signifiers of the feminine non-phallic, thus enabling the project’s proposal of non-phallic distributed form.

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