Independant Study 1 – Research

Tuesday 9th January 2018

Curating the Digital

Increasingly, we use our smart phones and other digital devices to capture and curate day to day life experiences. As a cacophony of digital activity moves to the centre of human life overwhelmed by digital interactions, digital space is the place

where people spend the lion’s share of their time, curating their digitally mediated life. Although, many archivists are still thinking in terms of digital curation as a simulation of existing systems derived from physical archival practice such as the li

fe-cycle of documents, in the digital realm, judging which material is valuable is moving from the institutional domain to that of the individual curating in cyberspace where issues of physical storage become less and less relevant, so that everything captured gets saved. Often digital works are self – curating taking on a life of their own once on the Internet, where they can migrate via emails, tweets

and Facebook posts, and be remix ed and re-used to form new art.

The social impacts of individual curation are great as we all are at once, audience, participants and creators of content. We have moved our banking, shopping (Pin It with Pinterest), communicating, storytelling, and the curation of our lives to the

Internet.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tula_Giannini/publication/305315658_Curating_Digital_Life_and_Culture_Art_and_Information/links/57bdfd3208aed246b0f71e92/Curating-Digital-Life-and-Culture-Art-and-Information.pdf

This paper examines some the changes that digital technology has wrought upon conceptions of space, time and culture, and how ‘new media art’ has historically reflected upon these. It suggests that such art might be better represented in institutions such as Tate, which in turn might help them engage with the question of what their own role might be in the digital age.

The digital culture we now live in was hard to imagine twenty years ago, when the Internet was hardly used outside science departments, interactive multimedia was just becoming possible, CDs were a novelty, mobile phones unwieldy luxuries and the World Wide Web did not exist. The social and cultural transformations made possible by these technologies are immense. During the last twenty years, these technological developments have begun to touch on almost every aspect of our lives. Nowadays most forms of mass media, television, recorded music and film are produced and even distributed digitally; and these media are beginning to converge with digital forms, such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, and video games, to produce a seamless digital mediascape.

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/02/new-media-art-and-the-gallery-in-the-digital-age