Art & Culture of the Web
Mozilla Festival, London
2014

Role: 
Curator

Methods:
Social practice art
Digital curation
Co-design

In the autumn of 2014, Paula le Dieu, Erik Nelson and I curated Mozilla Festival’s first-ever Art and Culture track, to explore the opportunities and tensions experienced by creative practitioners working with networked art forms. We hypothesized that, on a 2014 Internet, given the right tools, context and encouragement, everyone could feel creative. We released a call for submissions on Tumblr which went viral, with over 10,000 views in its first 24 hours, proposing the concept of a “living gallery” as a form of social practice art, each of its artworks built by artists and publics working together over 48 hours. We funded 10 artists from around the world to join the gallery as its residents, and set up 12 creative workshops facilitated by cultural organisations including Creative Commons, Rhizome, Internet Archive, Tate Britain and Europeana. In its 48 hours of life, the gallery saw 1,000 visitors enter its doors, resulting in 30 public domain gifs, 10 generative artworks, a Minecraft fontface, 600 copies of a guerilla zine in the spirit of 1990s hacker and rave cultures, and 10 paintings co-created with a troupe of drawing bots. From an excerpt by Brazilian bot-creators Meemo: “The festival ended up with a demo party, where the most revealing feelings of collaboration and aesthetics experimentation took their place. Surrounded by curtains, music and projections, people and robots joined again to draw together.”