Tagging as Curation
[TAGallery screen capture]
Over the last several months CONT3XT.NET has become one of my favourite resources for monitoring the pulse of art and discourse on the net. The Vienna based outfit is in the midst of a n ongoing experiment with the TAGallery project, an exploration that embraces social bookmarking (specifically the del.icio.us service) and speculates linkages between tagging and curation.
From the description of the project:
the idea of a 'tagged exhibition' and transfers the main tasks of non-commercial exhibition-spaces to the discourse of an electronic data-space. The method of 'tagging' allows the attribution of artworks to different thematic fields. In TAGallery the act of selecting and recombining -- besides chronologically ordered show-rooms, exhibition-titles in a semantically concentrated form..
Thus far the project has framed dead art, language, curation as conversation, electronic literature, and collections of collections. Like Rhizome (in the past), and Eyebeam, TAGallery has also brought guest curators into the mix (thus far: Ursula Endlicher, Ela Kagel, Scott Rettberg, and LeisureArts).
In my opinion this is one of the most well executed projects I've seen on the web in a while. It both embraces and exploits the idiosyncrasies of social bookmarking. A great example of this is the "conversational" link.of.thought exhibit which uses the comments field of the del.icio.us interface as an arena for dialogue between curators Endlicher and Kagel. The idea of using an informational unstyled interface to present work makes me nostalgic for mid 90s hypertext fiction. I am a huge fan of folksonomy on the worst of days because it forces us to confront and edit the order of things rather than passively consume them (as is implicit in traditional bookmarking). TAGallery is a fantastic example of the latent potential in social bookmarking. [via newmediafix.net]
Interesting experiment
And I agree that it has been executed well. As I wrote here, the danger of crowd-sourcing is that an overarching vision is lacking, and so the end result is lowest common denominator fluff.
The jury is out on how successful the project will be but I applaud the invention and experimentation. The medium needs to be embraced and it is heartening to see people do just that
crowd -> wisdom
Hi Simon,
Vision isn't something that will necessarily emerge when you start tabulating people's collective taste & decision making.. look at Komar and Melamid's work! TAGallery is a reconfiguration of the delicious platform as a curatorial tool, so that bland, featureless interface which is generally used to move links around becomes a display space. In my opinion (which hasn't change in the year since I wrote this post), the project is kind of a "logical conclusion" of taxonomy-systems like delicious.. it puts social bookmarking to a test of sorts, formalizing the everyday process of referencing information. CONT3XT have opened up the TAGallery now and are attempting to crowdsource new submissions, so I'm looking forward to seeing the results.