The Artist-Led Web: Curatorial Methods of Para-institutional Platforms

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Milnes, Tom ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5181-2063 (2026) The Artist-Led Web: Curatorial Methods of Para-institutional Platforms. In: xCoAx 2026 - 14th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, 8-10 July 2026, Turin, Italy.

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Abstract / Summary

This paper argues that artist-led web platforms of the 2010s marked a shift in the scope of online artistic activity, from net art materiality and medium-specific experimentation toward a wider arts ecology conducted through the internet. Earlier histories of net art and online curation had already established the web as a site of production, distribution, and curatorial experimentation (Bosma 2011; Graham and Cook 2010; Ghidini 2019). By the mid-2010s, however, a number of artist-led platforms were using the web not only to exhibit work, but to stage residencies, organise dispersed biennial structures, publish criticism, and develop programme formats that mimicked institutions structurally and rhetorically. The paper proposes that the distinctiveness of these formations lies in three interrelated curatorial methods: dispersion, para-institutionality, and parasitism. Through a compressed genealogy of net art and online curation, and through case studies including Furtherfield, The Wrong Biennale, Cosmos Carl, Off Site Project, Digital Artist Residency, and The White Pube, it argues that the artist-led web platforms should be understood as a historically specific development within Web 2.0 culture.

Item Type: Conference Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords: Artist-led Web, Online Curation, Net Art, Para-institutional Practice, Post-digital, Platformisation.
Subjects: Art History & Theory
Computing & Data Science
Creative Art & Design > Fine Art
Department: Academy of Innovation and Research
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Depositing User: Tom Milnes
Date Deposited: 22 Jul 2026 11:03
Last Modified: 22 Jul 2026 11:03
URI: https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/6546
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