TAGallery, Vienna
(curatorial statement)
Social bookmarking allows for users to easily store lists of resources (websites, for instance) and have them available to the public, allowing people with the same interests (or not) to share and have easy acess to relevant information on a specific subject. But the most important feature of social bookmarking lies in the categorization of these resources by the users themselves. Tagging is the word that comes to mind. Tagging consists basicly in the possibility these social bookmarking services have of allowing the users not only to bookmark something, but to informally assign tags (relevant keywords) to it, thus creating meta-data about the tagged resources in a collective way, rather than individually, something that can be seen as a second layer of meaning, but detremined by the users rather than the original producer of the contenn. This is what is called folksonomy, a user-generated taxonomy used to retrieve and categorize web content.
The departure idea for this project is thinking of tagging as curating. If tagging creates meta-data about pre-existing content, it can be seen as the creation of a discourse about it. And if that content happens to be an online artwork, tagging both allows for a subjective juxtaposition of art works and the elaboration of a critical discourse about it. Curating then. But this isn’t new. This is regular curating done in a schematic way, using a different tool to get the job done. But since tagging is a social activity in its essence, giving birth to folksonomies, it allows for social curating, with social selection of works and social production of discourse about them. This is what this project intends to be. Rather than traditionally curating a show through tagging the projects with the name of the show, we will be asking people to tag some of their favourite Internet art pieces with a few defined tags and some that they can choose freely. The idea is that this device will then create a folksonomic net art exhibition done collectively by a group of people. It can be seen as a social experiment, aiming at finding out what will that second layer of meaning be like, or if it will work at all. A challenge then. I tag you tag me, or a random folksonomy of Internet art. Let the tagging begin.
I would like to ask you to add content to the show. We're using a del.icio.us account, so log on to http://del.icio.us/ . the username is I_tag_you_tag_me and the password is ole166. And then tag as many net art pieces as you like, assigning them with tags you find useful or relevant in any way. I have already tagged a few works. You can use the same tagging system I did, or instead, you can use something different, meaningful to you. The choice is really up to you. You can add content or organize it as you consider best.
If a work you want to tag is already tagged, assign it with other tags so it reflects what you wanted in the first place.
Hope you have fun helping to create this ever evolving, ever changing, unfinished, unfinishable project.
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