The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents, including technological networks and software. This upgraded 'operating system' of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed - even to the extreme of a self-organising system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it.
The subtitle of the book makes reference to the essay 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' (1988), in which Bill Nichols considered how cybernetics transformed cultural production. He emphasised the shift from mechanical reproduction (symbolised by the camera) to that of cybernetic systems (symbolised by the computer) in relation to the political economy, and pointed to contradictory tendencies inherent in these systems: 'the negative, currently dominant, tendency toward control, and the positive, more latent potential toward collectivity'. The book continues this general line of inquiry in relation to curating, and extends it by considering how power relations and control are expressed in the context of network systems and immateriality. In relation to network systems, the emphasis remains on the democratic potential of technological change but also the emergence of what appears as more intensive forms of control. Can the same be said of curating in the context of distributed forms? If so, what does this imply for software curating beyond the rhetoric of free software and open systems?

Introduction to The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems

The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents including technological networks and software. This book reflects on these changes and asserts that the practice of curating cannot be dissociated from social and technological developments.1 It is therefore concerned with the politics of curating - with how power relations and control are expressed in the contemporary forms that curating takes and offers in the context of network technologies. Consequently, the book intends to examine the work of the curator, and the inherent structures of curatorial control in relation to the current socio-political and technological formations. The issue, however, is not simply to engage with online curating in terms of modes of display or new objects to select, but to consider how the practice itself has been transformed by distributed networks. This evokes the statement made by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’ of 1936: ‘Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question - whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the nature of art - was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to film.’ (1999: 220)