Multimodal Digital Curating

19 – 20 January 2023 | Online Workshop | AG Medien | DGSKA

Outline: 

In recent years, digital practices of curation have found increased interest in the field of (media) anthropology. Anthropologists and ethnographers developed online exhibitions, created web sites, or used social media platforms as research tools and means to produce and present their research in multimodal digital formats, and to a broader audience.

Digital curating not only encompasses a broad variety of curation technologies such as audio-visual media, VR-video, blogs, podcasts/videocasts, design-based web-applications, social media platforms or the critical use of AI technology, but also addresses hybrid formats and offline spaces. Digital exhibitions are inherently multimodal as they often reflect diverse modes of fieldwork, production, and representation and go beyond the often implied online/offline divide.

Digital Curating ideally involves collaborative processes with research partners, but also with designers, programmers, and other institutional actors. As such, digital curating not only transgresses the diverse modalities of production of what is exhibited, but is in itself a mode of knowledge production and social practice. 

Multimodal forms of digital curating allow for a more experimental use of audio-visual media – (moving) images, drawings, designs, and sounds can be (re)combined and presented in novel ways to foster different kinds of experiences. They also relate, reflect, and expand analogue forms of exhibitions, not least due to their reach beyond geographic locations. During the workshop, we want to focus on practical and hands-on perspectives, and at the same time critically engage in the challenges of digital curating, such as economic constraints, bias in digital technologies, sustainability and archiving of digital environments, as well as asymmetries and power dynamics in collaborations between diverse actors and professional spheres.