Curation as Research-Creation: Speculating on the Future of Art and Technology Festivals

This paper explores a renewed approach to curation as research-creation (CRC) through its practical application in the annual art and technology festival. CRC envisions a shift in curation from a care for objects to a care for the emerging social relations of the curatorial project in a shared quest of meaning making. We set out with outlining the features of CRC as interdisciplinary, concerned with programmatic boundary objects, and centered around the unfolding event trajectory – the forms and methods that facilitate affective encounters. Following we outline how this approach to curation unfolds in practice through the case study of the Fest-Forward workshop series that speculates on the future of art and technology festivals. Concluding we summarize how this workshop series showcases the potential of CRC’s shift of attention from a mere presentation of artworks towards the facilitation of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural encounters that enroll artists, curators, and audiences.