The School of Art & Design welcomes Dr Annet Dekker, University of Amsterdam to discuss critical questions concerning the curation and conservation of digital art online and in wider culture.

Refiguring the Digital Future: Navigating the Temporal-Spatial Web of Online Exhibitions
Potentially, online space can be continuously refigured in which networked interactions form a complex assemblage of computer-based times, spatial configurations and traces of human intervention. This generates potentially unlimited experiences of temporality without a clear trajectory, either in the past or toward the future. Hence, the unstable qualities of space and time problematize narrative as an expanding space in which ideas unfold through time. Drawing on a series of examples of online exhibitions and interviews with curators and artists who organized them, I will show how the relationship between online space and time affects and creates alternative narrative potentials. Subsequently, I want to discuss how these insights may guide the development of resilient and sustainable futures for past and present online exhibitions. In this process, it will become clear how an entangled space-time relationship between humans and non-humans impacts issues of value, trust, ownership, and authorship in relation to the art and exhibitions presented.

Dr Annet Dekker (http://aaaan.net) is Associate Professor Comparative Cultural Analysis, and Archival and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She has curated numerous exhibitions, written various essays, and published several edited volumes, among others, Documentation as Art (co-edited with Gabriella Giannachi, Routledge 2023), Curating Digital Art. From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curating (Valiz 2021), and Lost and Living [in] Archives. Collectively Shaping New Memories (Valiz 2017). Her monograph, Collecting and Conserving Net Art (Routledge 2018) is a seminal work in the field of digital art conservation.

This event is organised by the Computational Culture Lab, ANU School of Art & Design.

This event will be held both in-person and online.