Curator Machine is a contemporary group exhibition presented in a snack machine. The artworks are offered for sale blind. Thus, you are deliberately at the mercy of a dictating system that won't let you see the work until you pay for it. This satirical approach seeks the intersection between art and product. It is a critique of online culture dominated by financial centralism. By designing a DIY project centered on social issues and progressiveness, Curator Machine experiments with an alternative to boring marketplace-centric sales situations.
Curator Machine focuses on cooperativity, autonomy and shared possession. It emphasizes the importance of digital art in an ever-growing corporate digital world and translates it into the physical world using new media techniques such as 3D animation, 3D printing and other media techniques. The machine in itself is an artistic experiment that questions the position of the artist and the artwork. Thus, as the title suggests, you can see this project as a critical analysis between artistry and curatorship.
For this edition, six media artists active within the new media arts in Belgium were selected. They designed 3D artworks, each limited to 18 pieces per artist.
Curator Machine stems from the curatorial research project, C U R A T O R. Artist-run exhibitions are hereby developed into a cooperative project: Curator Machine. You purchase a work for €50 euros, 70 percent of which goes to the artist. Curator Machine provides the full production this per module is at €42. Thus, the project is nonprofit. The public is encouraged to invest in an original work of art at a democratic price. You can think of it as a public space hack, where the consumer is inspired rather than exploited.
Artists:
Courtesy of:
Curator Machine was made possible by the support of City of Ghent. 3D product design development and production support by Elias Heuninck, Formlab Gent and 3D printing by Arne Cattoir of 3D4ALL.BE. In collaboration with artist Jerry Galle. A concept by Bjornus Van der Borght.