Chapter Six: Examples of User Responses and
Subsequent Changes to the Platform
As this is somewhat of a ‘niche’ experience or interest, there is already a comfort with knowing that people interested in the arts are participating, whether they work with it or not – maybe it is just a hobby. But a moderator of some kind will provide that extra comfort for ‘just in case’ scenarios someone would behave inappropriately.
In its current shape, users are not accountable to each other. I mean you cannot really have a conversation because you are not notified if someone responds to you. There is no agreement or terms of use or contact person to help in case of problems. I do think the roles proposed help guide users towards constructive and imaginative contributions and the chances of people taking a less positive approach are slim.
Maybe a ‘users’ page could be useful, e.g. when you click on your name, you could be directed to a page that gathers all your contributions and you can look at what comments you get
It would be great if you could add images as a response – like if you made a lasagna that reminded you of one of the pictures for example, or saw something on the street that was like a scene or feeling
The themes that came forth from workshop feedback included the fact that there were different impressions that users had of their understanding of what they were doing on the platform (what they were creating) and a wide gamut of the level of comfort users had with using the combination of tools utilised across the workshops and in the designed platform. Digital literacy was a defining factor in the way in which users could situate themselves across the different platforms that were being used. Based on user feedback, the BRCA platform was updated with more information about how the user generated content might be used and in what context. The response function was enabled so that users could directly respond to other users generated reports. My role as moderator was made more explicit in the workshop context to help create a sense of community, as noted in the first user comment. During the workshops there were always two facilitators available across email, chat and video functions to help users who might feel intimidated by the technical requirements of the format and answer any questions that arose. Responding to user feedback helped create an interactive version of both the platform and the form of the workshops.
In reflecting on user feedback and experiences with the platform, it is evident that while there was a sense of comfort within a niche community interested in the arts, additional measures such as moderator support could further enhance user confidence, particularly in scenarios where inappropriate behaviour might arise. Currently, the lack of accountability among users inhibits conversation, suggesting a need for clearer terms of use and a designated contact person for assistance. Suggestions such as incorporating a “users” page and enabling image responses offer opportunities to enrich user engagement and creative expression. The workshops revealed varying levels of digital literacy among participants, influencing their comfort and understanding of the platform’s tools. Responding to this feedback, updates have been made to the platform to provide more guidance and facilitate direct interaction among users. Overall, these adaptations aim to foster a sense of community and enhance the interactive nature of both the platform and the workshop format.
6.1 Shifting Curatorial Position
In the process of opening up the online collection my role as a curator has had to shift in relation to the online collections and demands of an online audience. I have had to relinquish some of my control of the interpretation of the collection and to acknowledge the understanding of others in the co-production of meanings and directions that the digital collection could develop. This move in curatorial control has provoked a new examination of my own curatorial practice and highlighted the relationship between knowledge and experience at the site of the digital collection. With this alteration in my own practice the fragility of the relationship between knowledge, safe keeping, care, and autonomy that is core to the curatorial practice is made more evident (Rito and Balaskas, 2020). Through this new way of working the boundaries of curator, digital object and user are being constantly renegotiated and tested.
In place of the curator as a figure of authority in this current configuration the role of the curator could be reconceived as a host facilitating new forms of interaction between the online artwork and a participatory audience. In this suggested model the curator is not curating an object but instead curating a participative system. For the user to participate in the system the curator must make the form of what and how their participation functions explicit. The visibility of the participation is not fully under the curator’s control but is also a reflection of the system of the larger context that the collection and community is part of (Graham et al., 2010). The role of curator could be reimagined as a host to facilitate the type of communities that develop around the online objects, making the framework that these interactions are subject to explicit to the user.
Working with the digitised collection raised the question of what curatorial commitments do I as the curator of the collection have to these constellations of objects? As described in the process of the shaping of the designed platform this is not a research practise about the conservation or preservation of these digital objects in this form or combination. My role as curator is in the care and facilitation of the community that is created by this temporary configuration of online objects. The reimagining of the curatorial role from authority figure to a facilitator opens new ways in which the user might playfully approach the digital object and determine its future use.
6.2 What Type Of Platform is This? Time and space in the Online Collection:
Through the designed platform I had hoped for users to generate new ideas for the future of the online collection archive. The framing of the speculative fiction questions functions as if the collected digital images have a future across multiple interfaces and platforms. The form of the online exhibition of this particular selection of digital objects presented in relationship with the Internet appears less attached to a particular time or location (there is no mention of the offline gallery or years that the offline work was made), so can be a more porous, atemporal format, open to continual change (Lowry, 2019). The format of the designed platform suggests multiple futures for the online collection archive.
The designed platform addresses the spatio-temporal condition of being online through the suggestion of possible futures and places that the collection might live outside of the institution. The critique of the institution as the best repository of the contemporary is embedded in the original deeded collection. David Bomberg's participation in the vorticist movement was in part inspired by the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Although he never signed the Vorticist Manifesto Bomberg participated in vorticist exhibitions (Vorticism – Art Term). The vorticists, like the futurists, looked to sweep away old structures as they asserted that art institutions are badly designed to deal with change because of their relationship with time (backward looking) and are trapped by their veneration and desire to preserve the past (Barranha and Simões Henriques, 2021). The format of the designed platform aims to address the format of the art institution as focused on the past by creating placeless, mutating forms of display and interaction that look to the future, not jewel boxes dedicated to the past.
The contents of the archive move backward and forward in time; some objects could be viewed as documented emissaries in the past, while others suggest where the online collection might go. In the online configuration, the obligations of care for the digital objects are present in a different form than the conservation of the offline collection. Online projects can be seen as more ephemeral, without the same preservation standards applied to them as the offline collection. There is an acceptance of link rot and platforms no longer being hosted, with past online configurations being erased with new websites and moves to new social media platforms. The research practise challenges the stability and longevity of this combination of objects. There are reminders throughout the designed platform that the users are dealing with technical artefacts, with a date of interaction noted below the object, reminding the user that these objects are fragile and living entities. In this understanding there is a move away from Walter Benjamin’s conception of the reproduced image, as each digital is not a copy; each digital object is unique, and these unique digital objects alter with each new interaction and context the move through.
Instead of archives being seen as tools to educate everyone with neatly organised information, the idea of ‘radical archives’ suggests that knowledge is influenced by power structures and specific connections between objects, institutions, and visitors (Bennett, 1995). It is not only visibility of the material that dictates the configuration of these relationships. Instead, it underscores the importance of understanding the underlying power structures and context that shape archival knowledge. Such an approach recognises that archival collections are not neutral repositories but are shaped by the interests and perspectives of those who create and maintain them. By acknowledging the inherent power structures within archives, we can better understand how knowledge is constructed, disseminated, and interpreted within these systems.
The digitised collection archive cannot be returned to a previous offline state. The function of the designed platform is to collectively imagine what the new use of the digital images outside of the museum context might be and what they could participate in the future. Through playfulness and speculative fiction methods I am inviting users to engage with questions and strategies of what the digital object might be. This is not meant to display the digital items as a fixed collection. Returning to Ursula K. Le Guin’s concept of the carrier bag of fiction, the narratives generated through the platform are meant to inform possibilities, not reinforce a singular history or trajectory for the digital collection archive. The digital objects have been gathered in the format of the designed platform to create a means for users to consider how they might disperse across the network.
The form of speculative fiction and embodied looking questions encourages users to question and use the digitised in ways that cannot be facilitated by the offline museum. The use of embodied looking questions in this context is meant to invoke a sense of immediacy in the way users begin to understand the digital object, highlighting the physical, sensorial, or emotional engagement that could proceed any conceptual experience with the digital object. In addition to these felt response the use of speculative fiction prompts in this context could provide a lesson in media literacy, allowing users to see that the categories of fact and fiction, as put forth by the museum, have always been conditioned by the materials used to craft, frame, and distribute the collected objects (Shaw et al., 2017) with the proliferation of different embodied responses as opposed to one authoritative interpretation. In reframing the online collection and opening to this form of user interaction, visitors can challenge the museum’s neutral voice, helping us to rethink who is talking about what the objects mean and what their future might be. The designed platform is a site for gathering up users’ varied knowledges and experiences to reconfigure what narratives are possible for the digested collection archive.
Alongside how the knowledge is generated with and through the objects, the form of the designed platform reframes how much time a user might spend with the digital object. The user first encounters the digital object in the context of the homepage scroll; once clicked on the digital object is then framed with information about the file size and name and then the file is shown again with the questions or audio prompts. Finally the digital object is included in a designed report with the user’s responses or audio file. The shifting context of the digital object illustrates the many possible contexts that the object could be encountered or participate in.
The designed platform was built with change and provisionality as the basis of the research practise. The larger networks it participates within are constantly changing. The online collection itself will never be complete as new works and archival material will continue to be generated. The form of the designed platform has the potential to reflect this process of change and re-evaluation because it can easily be updated and modified. A physical exhibition takes months and years to organise and present, subject to the demands of physical space, environmental concerns, and institutional protocols. In contrast information on the web can be changed in a few minutes, digital items can be edited, reinterpreted and presented in real time.
The form of speculative fiction questions invites users to act as if a change had already taken place. For example, asking the users to imagine the next action in a still digital image, as if it were to become a film or animation. The posing of speculative fiction questions frames the digital objects in a way that proposes a possible utopian future, rather than demanding change in the future; the questions suggest that change has already occurred (Garcia, 2017). The future framing of the online archive is not to suggest that it is a tool of preservation of the digital objects but rather a proposition of a method for thinking of the types of questions that could be asked of any digital objects that allow new understanding and engagement.
The platform, designed to interact with the online collection, provided a space where users can imagine the future paths and possibilities of digital archives. By framing speculative fiction questions and embodying interactive prompts, users are invited to explore the digital objects beyond the constraints of traditional museum narratives and conservation practices. Embracing the fluidity of online platforms, the research practise challenges notions of permanence and stability, instead fostering a collective imagination of the digital objects’ roles and meanings. Through open-ended engagement and speculative inquiry, the designed platform encourages users to rethink established frameworks of interpretation and consider alternative narratives and possibilities for the digital collection.
6.3 Evaluating
The work and care needed to sustain this type of designed platform suggest that this research practise is a prototype that might prove challenging to expand and replicate across all types of institutions but could encourage small communities of interaction with facilitation. These small communities of attention are not attempts to restore the display value of the work but to create a network that could generate possible futures for the digitised objects outside of the boundaries of the museum collection. Through the users’ interactions, collective imaginaries are formed of what might be possible for the online collection now and in the future.
Through these small-scale communities of interaction there could be a reconfiguring of the potential transfer and reception of knowledge and information through networked systems of communication that take place around and through the digital objects. The suggestion of this form of designed platform as a curatorial prototype is based on the form of an exhibition that is centred on discussion and interaction and not object-oriented (Rito and Balaskas, 2020). Users are gathered around discussions and forms of collaborative knowledge rather than a particular set of objects. The foundation of the platform is a consideration of what would be generative for the collaborators/users and not to tell a particular or singular narrative about the digital objects. The forms of knowledge being produced by the online archive platform are ones that address the circulation of knowledge through entangled processes. The research practise considers the building relationships between things and participants as a form of authorship in its own right.
This form of online exhibition and community might distance itself from the museum as institution, as the curatorial loss of control could lead to narratives that cannot or will not be folded back into the museum’s objectives. The model could be a suggestion of a para-museum, a parallel and separate organisation. The form of the traditional art institution prevents real intervention into the interpretation and circulation of the object, so the suggested prototype is something that runs alongside it but does not intersect with the museum’s activities. By experimenting with new forms of instituting the designed platform could create a conceptual space from which to contemplate the possible other desires and forms that the digitised objects could be aligned with (Shaw et al., 2017). This could also be a model for curator/users outside of the institution to take the digital objects and use this form of speculative questions to enact the speculative futures now, adding them to their own platforms and spaces, where they can comment and re-work the online collections, thus generating many para-institutions with overlapping online materials. Art institutions cannot maintain and support multiple narratives as they are focused on consolidating disciplines and existing modes of production and dissemination (Rito and Balaskas, 2020). The potential of the designed platform and use of the online archive format is to allow for contradicting realities that could link and travel outside the bounds of the institution.
A challenge to this method of working is the huge amount of effort it takes to sustain and support the users in the platform. One of the most frequent themes in the User Manifesto and early workshops with the platform exploring the terms and conditions of use was a desire for a visible or contactable moderator that could sustain the online community. The platform, once live, needed maintenance to function as a site of collaboration. The conditions for entering are a barrier for some participants but may increase the quality of interaction that participants have on the platform (Barranha and Simões Henriques, 2021). Once signed up and engaged in the platform through self-exploration or a workshop, the user has invested into this particular online community and therefore will continue to add and build to the platform. As users and workshops slow down on the platform, it stops being a repository of traces and instead becomes a reconstruction of historical processes and not a live site of discussion (Rosengarten, 2012). The designed platform requires a lot of attention from the user and the curator as host to support and maintain the environment if it is to continue to be a lively interaction tool and not a repository of past interactions.
The envisioned prototype of curating the online collection represents an exploration into reconfiguring the traditional paradigms of museum curation and user engagement. While its expansion and replication across diverse institutions may present challenges, its potential to foster small communities of interaction is promising. These communities, centred around discussion and collaboration rather than object display, have the capacity to generate novel futures for digitised objects beyond the confines of museum collections. By embracing collaborative knowledge production and user-driven narratives, this curated platform transcends the boundaries of traditional institutions, potentially changing into para-museums or parallel organisations. However, sustaining such platforms requires significant effort, particularly in facilitating user engagement and providing ongoing maintenance. Despite these challenges, the model offers a glimpse into a future where digital collections inspire diverse interpretations and interactions, enriching the online archives beyond the confines of physical institutions.