Networked and Participatory Art

Networked and participatory art is artistic practice that aims to critically engage with relational concepts.

Resources

Fear from Art Institutions: Participatory Art and Its “Hierarchies” (link)
Excerpt:
"The shift from establishing relations to and between objects towards relations between subjects and the public that recently took place in the field of art has been highly influenced by philosophical or sociological theories of democratisation of art and its institutional structures. [1] The main aim of participatory art in great deal overlaps with a kind of deconstruction of the renowned hierarchies between “high” and “low” art. However, I want to point to a certain paradox: that such “participatory shift" in arts simultaneously creates new hierarchies and differentiations, new fears and obstacles."

Control, Alt, Delete? (A review of Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems and Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations) (link)
Excerpt:
"Both sets of contributors indicate – more or less – that what appears to be a socio-political and technological situation which might bring positive democratic change in our social orders (through ‘non-hierarchical’ digital systems or state-funding programmes) actually threatens more authoritarian control and a reduction in possibilities for experimental freedom in the arts, or in ways of organising community, or ways of generating enriched sociality and multiple, ‘agonistic’ public spheres."

Participatory Art: A Paradigm Shift from Objects to Subjects(link)
Excerpt:
"The shift that has been recognised recently in the field of art from establishing relations between objects towards establishing relations between subjects is not the result of an overnight turn, as it may seem at first sight. It has been greatly influenced by philosophical or sociological theories and today is mainly appropriated by post-conceptual, socially and politically engaged art, or by art activism, although some similar art discourses and practices existed before, anticipating contemporary theory and practice."

Digital Terror: New Media Art and Rhizomatic In-Securities (link)
Excerpt:
"A massive machinery of proactive supervision and tactical knowledge, art itself benefits from the transience of the net and interactive installation while also suffering from the entropic condition of (lack of) capital. Internet art, for instance, has provided artists with shareware, appropriated imagery and footage, and global interaction with which to experiment with new multimedia platforms and to represent the vicissitudes of subjective life and the depths of world memory"