A practical toolkit exploring the future possibilities of curation within the digital realm
About The Beta Toolkit
The Beta Toolkit is a guide to aid curators in their journey into the expanding field of online curation, initiated by the students from the MA Culture, Criticism and Curation (MACCC), Computational Arts Department of UAL, Central Saint Martins.
The project has been developed during April - November 2022 as part of arebyte’s yearly university residency which invites students to research new forms of making, curating, displaying and archiving digital art. The project is made in collaboration with Lee Weinberg, MACCC Lecturer, and curating students Andreas Andronikou, Ula Deru, Carolina Buccellati, Amelia Kedge, Jianing Wu, Ping Xue, and Lexian Xu.
The Beta Toolkit aims to develop a digital network of creative practitioners and a support system to accompany each other through the processes and challenges of online curating. The toolkit provides practical and theoretical context for the history, representation and contemporary relevance of net.art. The toolkit also brings together tools deemed necessary by the group members for the process of curating contributing to the complex journey of navigating the possibilities and challenges of curating online.
Taking its name from the term ‘beta’, meaning a trial version of an eventually finished product, the toolkit embraces the fluid process of online curation and the possibilities of its eventual ‘final’ form.
Invited external researchers currently include Elliott Burns and Pita Arreola-Burns (off-site project, curators), Vuk Cosik (artist), Nimrod Vardi (creative director, arebyte), Rebecca Edwards (curator, arebyte), Zach Blas (visual artist), Beryl Graham (scholar), Heath Bunting (visual artist), Tian Xiaolei (new media artist), and Hu Bin (curator).
About the MACCC Curating students
Ula Deru is a designer and curator. Driven by digital practices and their relationship to spatial and visual cultures, she prompts conversation between the virtual and visual with an emphasis on diplomacy and multiculturality in the arts.
Amelia Kedge is a writer and curator. Her writing interrogates and revalues performativity in the dominant social media landscape. She takes an autoethnographic approach to these topics, through the curation and representation of self-image.
Lexian Xu is a writer, researcher and curator. Research of fashion design, communication and collection through the landscape of digital blockchain technology, through a cultural lens.
Andreas Andronikou is a visual artist and curator. He has developed an artistic practice revolving around themes of the human condition in the panorama of digital communication. He tries to find a relationship between fragmented and mediated images, and what this confrontation means.
Carolina Buccellatti is a visual and editorial designer and curator. Her practice aims to articulate and visually communicate spiritual and esoteric assemblages in our culture, through spatial practices. She actively researches and engages with multidisciplinary emerging and contemporary artists.
Jianing Wu is a product designer and curator. She focuses on the challenges faced by museums and the transformation of curatorial identity in the context of the digital age.
Ping Xue is a curator, creative producer and event organiser in the fields of culture, art and business. Her research focuses on alternative exhibition spaces in Chinese and Western contexts, most recently on the topic of field, display and viewing in art exhibition spaces.
