curating.online is an evolving archive to navigate exhibition models that challenge the assumptions, mechanisms and logic of the platforms of the digital economy from within. These projects appropriate or mimic platform functions to explore and often subvert their intended use and underlying socio-technical frameworks.
The archive’s categorisation enables multiple interpretations, emphasising how artists and curators engage both the technical infrastructure of online platforms and the behaviours shaped by them.
curating.online combines archival analysis with interviews with curators and researchers active in digital culture to understand how online spaces can be repurposed—not only to create new exhibition formats and audience interactions, but also to transform platforms into active sites of critique and intervention.
These approaches often involve acts of appropriation and adaptation that evolved alongside the corporatisation of internet, from engaging with the socio-technical design of a platform to performative, site-specific interventions transcending the on–offline dichotomy. This trajectory also connects to interface design, particularly the ‘transparent interface’ principle, originally conceived to simplify user interactions but later co-opted to obscure the underlying mechanisms of digital technologies.
In curatorial terms, this resonates with the desire to expose the presumed neutrality of platforms and interfaces, often marketed as frictionless and user-centric. Through this archive, I found that reconfiguring these environments reveals the socio-economic and cultural systems embedded within—a strategy I propose calling ‘curatorial interference’.
SUPPORTED BY
The project was initially supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition 2020) – Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the Exhibition Research Lab (ERL) at the Liverpool John Moores University (UK). It received additional funding by Mobility First! – ASEF Cultural Mobility in 2021.
curating.online has collaborated with: (institutions) D.A.M.S. – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Brescia, IT); MO.CA. – centro per le nuove culture (Brescia, IT); ERL at Liverpool John Moores University (Liverpool, UK); Nation25 (Rome, IT); Walkin Studios (Bangalore, IN); and (people) Vivek Chockalingam, Annet Dekker, Joasia Krysa, Padmini Ray Murray, Vidya Shividas and Gaia Tedone.
CREDITS
Website and programming by Rocío Fatás
With thanks to Silvio Lorusso, developer of the system employed in the Post-Digital Publishing Archive which has been a source of inspiration for this site.