/ About The Research
This thesis proposes that the digital interface establishes the primary curatorial space for net art, a transformation that actively enables a more democratic exhibition practice. It investigates how independent curators, specifically those operating with limited resources, can leverage contemporary technologies to exhibit, interrogate, and preserve net art. The research is enacted through a Practice as Research (PaR) methodology, where the central creative and critical artefact is the evolving website Curatorial Interface (https://www.curatorialinterface.xyz). This platform was built and updated throughout the research period and beyond, growing in tandem with the written work to embody the temporality and mutable nature of its subject.
Net art, as a digital-native movement, requires an interface not merely to be seen, but to be. Its uniqueness resides not in static visual appearance, but in the interactive encounter it facilitates. As Johanna Drucker argues, “Our consciousness as subjects is integral to use; we are in constant formation in relation to interface” (Drucker, 2013, p. 216). 1 To exhibit net art authentically, therefore, requires an engagement with this formative relationship. Consequently, this thesis moves beyond analysing the interface as a mere visual layer or Graphical User Interface (GUI). It instead investigates the interface as a complete structure of relations, a mediating zone between the user, the artwork, and the machine, examined through the prism of curation.
This perspective is deeply informed by Joasia Krysa, who states that “situating curating in the context of immateriality offers an understanding of it not only as a creative and critical practice but also as a thoroughly political one. It allows discussions to develop about transformations of curatorial process and the structures of control expressed through it” (Krysa, 2006, p. 10).1 From this standpoint, the Curatorial Interface website functions as both a navigational guide and a practical laboratory, helping to define what it means to curate in the network age from an independent position and to interrogate the challenges and advances that technology brings to the field.
This doctoral project began as a theoretical investigation into a question famously posed by Joasia Krysa in Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems: how does one curate the immaterial? (Krysa, 2006). Engaging with foundational texts like Krysa’s and Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook’s Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (Cook & Graham, 2010), it became clear that the nature of new media art inherently demands new curatorial models. As Cook and Graham posit, “new media art projects invite a rethinking of levels of openness in systems of production and distribution” (Cook & Graham, 2010, p. 289). 1 This research builds upon that premise by asking not only how independent curators function, but to what extent new technology, which has advanced tremendously since 2010, makes this practice more accessible.
This inquiry navigates a critical tension highlighted by Paul O’Neill, who warns that “independent curators working without an institutional post can be said to have co-dependency issues. Replacing the term independent with co-dependent merely acknowledges the impossibility of curation beyond institutional mediation and highlights the dysfunctional aspect of these relationships that are often one-sided and emotionally detractive” (O’Neill, 2007, p. 17). 1 In other words, an independent curator still needs a ‘space’ of their own to operate fully.
This thesis tests that proposition by investigating whether the evolution and increased affordability of technology now allow independent curators to establish such a space with greater ease. The Curatorial Interface website is that self-created space, providing a foundational layer upon which exhibition and experimentation can occur.
This practice embodies a more democratic approach, where the independent curator, in this instance, myself, can use new technology to exhibit work with limited resources. This realisation prompted a refinement of focus towards the more precise concept of the interface, which in turn led to the creation of the website as a practical space. What is particularly compelling about the interface, as opposed to the broader term ‘digital space’, is its function as a mediator. As Alexander Galloway theorises, the interface is “the point of transition between different medial layers within any nested system” (Galloway, 2012, p. 25). 1 It is the facilitator of interaction, and as this research came to understand, interaction is the lifeblood of a net artwork’s authentic representation.
However, theoretical analysis alone proved insufficient. A comprehensive understanding of how interfaces shape curatorial practice requires direct engagement with the process of curation. Without this, analysis risks being merely observational, missing the interactivity and distributed logic that are core principles of the network structure. As Sarah Cook argues, “following the practice of the artists presupposes that the way to curate new media art — and any form of process-led art that implicates the viewer in the completion of the work, regardless of media — is to shift the curatorial focus to the work’s production as much as its distribution and exhibition” (Cook in Paul, 2008, p. 45). 1 This necessity prompted the first and most foundational turn in the practical inquiry: the methodological reimagining of the academic thesis itself as a curated net art project. Moving beyond a purely discursive analysis, the research demanded the construction of a space that performed its theories. Consequently, the Curatorial Interface website is developed as both an experimental platform and a critical guide, functioning to democratise net art practice by adding a constitutive, interfacial layer to the academic thesis, thereby theorising structure and medium as active materials for curatorial engagement.
Curatorial Interface deliberately resists the linear form of the traditional dissertation. This aligns with a tradition of critical inquiry into form, from Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967), which performs its argument through fragmented design, to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), which rejects hierarchy in favour of a rhizomatic model where “there are no points or positions… only lines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8). 1 The method was to build the website not as a supplementary portfolio, but as the core of the research practice. The design process involved creating an interface that resisted standard navigation hierarchies, implementing instead an interactive, hyperlinked indexing system and a navigational map to allow for multiple, user-driven entry points into the theoretical material, thereby transforming the thesis into a curated digital space
For this project, adopting the perspective of a curator rather than a programmer, the Wix platform was selected for its visual builder. This choice allowed for experimentation within the digital space without requiring deep coding knowledge, maintaining a focus on curatorial rather than purely technical problem-solving. The platform, chosen for its accessibility, constantly pushed back against non-hierarchical ambitions, forcing creative workarounds and compromises. This frustrating but illuminating process gave rise to a second, pragmatic line of inquiry concerning the essential level of technological literacy for a curator working authentically with net art. It became clear that to understand how to exhibit net art within its native environment required grappling with that environment’s technical constraints from the inside out.
This tension was thrown into sharp relief during the development of The Wrong Archives—a project dedicated to preserving the pavilions of The Wrong Biennale (2021-2022). Proper analysis pushed the work beyond screenshots and into the realms of servers, file structures, and emulation. This archival work operationalised a mode of “software curation” that involves “an engagement with instructions (program) and the writing of these instructions (programming) but also the other processes upon which the programme relies to run” (Krysa, 2006, p. 10). 2 It also confronted the core preservation paradox of net art: how to assign value and authenticate an artwork that can be perfectly copied without degradation. For the independent curator, understanding the full infrastructure is essential for efficiency. This phase saw the application of the interfacial stack informed by Benjamin H. Bratton's The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015), where every layer of the computational system functions as an interface. The use of dynamic pages through a CMS allowed for the creation of a vast archive with limited resources, framing the machine itself as a co-curator. The chosen archival method, based on subjective screen recordings, underscored this paradox; while capturing a temporal slice, these recordings remained ghostly traces, lacking the interactivity and liveness of the original experience. Yet, they formed a crucial dataset. Their analysis yielded a simple observation that shaped the project’s final phase: game-like, metaverse galleries consistently held the most sustained engagement.
It ignited the third and final line of inquiry: an investigation into whether net art can thrive solely within immersive digital environments, or if it inevitably demands a hybrid existence. To explore this, the research shifted from archivist to producer, culminating in the curation of the exhibition Alternative Realities Illustrated (2025) within a 3D online environment. This served as the ultimate test of the Curatorial Interface. Net art often functions as “platforms of exchange where collaboration and exchange are also inherent to the broader culture of the networked digital medium” (Paul, 2008, p. 65), 2 frequently existing in constant collaboration between artist and curator. Reflecting this, a digital framework was provided, after which agency was distributed to a group of first-year animation students from the University of Greenwich, who built their own virtual rooms. Using an intuitive platform, they created a hybrid exhibition linked to physical space via AR within a month, demonstrating how accessible technology enables grassroots projects.
As Christiane Paul notes, “participation and collaboration are inherent to the networked digital medium” (Paul in Krysa, 2006, p. 84). 3 The exhibition became a living experiment in distributed curation, probing the point at which the artist or curator becomes a ‘user’ from the system’s standpoint, with the interface as the primary site of negotiation.
Overall, this research, from a theoretical question about immateriality through the practical realities of building, archiving, and exhibiting, demonstrates that digital space is not a neutral container but an active agent. As Yuk Hui writes, it is “another world, a strange world, one that is simultaneously artificial and natural” (Hui, 2016, p. 48). 1 By analysing net art through its exhibition practices via the Curatorial Interface, this thesis uncovers how the digital environment is constantly reconfigured. As Steve Dietz argues, “curating net art need not be medium-specific ( that is, it can establish connections to other media such as painting), need not involve value-based taxonomies, need not kill the subject to become the object.
That net artists can reach their audiences directly does not mean mediation is always noise corrupting the signal” (Dietz in Paul, 2008, p. 82). 3 From this perspective, the Curatorial Interface is a mediator that allows engagement with net art practice from multiple, intertwined perspectives: as a theoretical text displayed through an interface that enacts a rhizomatic network structure; as an archival practice engaging in software curation where the machine is a co-curator; and as a collaborative exhibition where the line between artist and curator is productively blurred. This work traces new technological advances to expose the strengths and limitations of independent curatorial practice. The Curatorial Interface project is the chronicle of this reconfiguration—a living laboratory where theory and practice collide, demonstrating definitively that for net art, the curation of the interface is ultimately inseparable from the curation through it.