Sarah Cook in New York in JulyCuratorial Masterclass

Date: Five sessions | Tuesdays + Thursdays, 3–5PM | July 7 – July 21
Location: Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st St., NYC
Cost: Advance: $10/session | At door: $15/session
Limited advance registration:
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/528/t/9265/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=664

An initiative of Eyebeam’s Summer School program, the Curatorial Masterclass will be led by Eyebeam research partner Sarah Cook from CRUMB, the online resource for curators working with media art. The series will be an opportunity for emerging and established curators of art to get together within a focused period of time to learn from each other’s practice, and to develop a greater understanding of curating, open source methods, and working in the public domain.

The first hour of each day will be a formal conversation modeled on CRUMB’s tea-time chats, and will feature established curators and artists. The second hour will be a rigorous participant driven discussion, building upon the first hours of themes and insights. Following each presentation and workshop, participants will have the opportunity to stick around for beer o’clock and conversation with presenters and fellow masterclass participants, as well as participants from other Eyebeam Summer School programs.

Eyebeam’s Summer School will also be offering Summer School @ Night a series of related public events, on Thursday evenings during the month of July. Please visit the event web page for details and speakers: http://eyebeam.org/events/eyebeam-summer-school-night

SCHEDULE:
Day 1: Tues., July 7, 3–5PM
What open source is and what it means for art
How do practices prevalent in the open source community match up against curatorial paradigms in the visual arts? What is the difference between curatorial openness, working in the public domain or releasing work under a public license? How can we learn about curating and commissioning via platforms which engage audiences or encourage participation? Defining useful metaphors and discarding hyperbolic buzzwords will be encouraged.
Guests: Curator, Scott Burnham (Creative Director, Montreal Biennial 2009); Dominic Smith (co-founder, Polytechnic, UK).
Eyebeam respondant: Fred Beneson (Research Associate, Eyebeam; Product Manager, Creative Commons).

Day 2: Thur., July 9, 3–5PM
Publication and Documentation
As part of Fair Use Day, we will consider some of the practical and legal issues concerning reproduction, particularly as it applies to issues of curating participatory and time-based art forms or art which takes place in the public domain. Can publishing be a documentation strategy for creating and curating ephemeral work, or work that is based on conversations or actions? What happens when the art and its documentation are the same thing, as in the case of maps? Release strategies used by curators working with emergent new media forms will be rigorously compared.
Guests: Lize Mogel (Artist/Curator).
Eyebeam respondant: Rebecca Cittadini (Communications and Marketing Manager, Eyebeam).

Day 3: Tues., July 14, 3–5PM
Networking and Collaboration
New media tools seem to make remote working and networking easier, but do they facilitate curating? How is the time-frame of collaboration­—between artists and curators or producers, or between the art and its audience—different when adopting open source methodologies (such as iterative or modular methods, sometimes called bootstrapping)? Discussions of the different shapes of collaboration and the tried and tested “rules” of good collaboration will be ascertained.
Guests: Amanda McDonald Crowley (Executive Director, Eyebeam) ; Patrick Lichty (Curator, Artist).
Eyebeam respondent: Jeff Crouse (Senior Fellow, Eyebeam).

Day 4: Thur., July 16, 3–5PM
Curating in the public domain
Curating is often a private activity with a very public outcome, but recent hype about the term in relation to “filtering” online content (from videos and photos to tweets and urls) have made “curating” something people now think of as a very public process. What can we learn from public art models of curatorial practice? How do we cater for passerby audiences? What are the lessons to be learned from open submission projects online and offline? The ideal conditions for creating a platform for participation will be dreamt up.
Guest: Steve Dietz (Curator).
Eyebeam respondent: TBA.

Day 5: Tues., July 21, 3–5PM
Evaluation and Audience Engagement
The last session of the curatorial masterclass series will ask, who is participating in open curatorial projects? Why? How do we know what they’re getting out of it? What can be learned from the revisions/lifelines used in open source software generation and how can that way of thinking be applied to consideration of the “lifeline” of a curatorial project? What are other evaluation strategies that can be applied to curating, such as comment boxes or feedback forms? Obvious and proposed benchmarks of success will be interrogated.
Guests: Anne Barlow (Executive Director, Art in General); Hans Bernhard (Artist, Ubermorgen.com).
Eyebeam respondent: Stephen Duncombe (Research Associate, Eyebeam)