Bilyana Palankasova

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From curatorial methods to institutional transformation: value generation at festivals of art and digital culture
I am a fourth-year doctoral researcher working on a collaborative project between the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and the Dundee-based digital arts organisation NEoN. My research explores curatorial methods and institutional processes in the field of digital arts by considering the histories and practices of two former festivals of digital arts – NEoN and FutureEverything. Ultimately, the study articulates value propositions in the field of digital arts and the strategic role of festivals for the history and presentation of art and digital technology.

My research is shaped and informed by my background in history of art, contemporary art, science and technology studies, and curatorial practice and I am keenly interested in practice-based and practice-led methods in research, which closely engage with knowledge production through and about practice. In the context of my PhD research, I work extensively with documentary research alongside ethnography and curatorial practice to study processes of creating value and instituting experimental practices through the lens of festival activities.

transmediale festival programme 2024

As part of my work, I am particularly interested in discursive and generative curatorial methods, such as workshops or labs, as devices facilitating collaboration and generating discourses around emerging practices. I’ve engaged with a few of these formats and in this showcase, I’ll present a recent research workshop I participated in, hosted by transmediale – one of the oldest and most significant festivals of art and digital culture, which happens annually in Berlin.

During the last days of January and the first week of February 2024, I had the pleasure of participating in the annual research workshop organised by the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London Southbank University, the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre at Aarhus University and hosted and delivered by transmediale. The theme of this year’s workshop was content/form and drew on the larger theme which transmediale was exploring – content. My interest in the workshop was two-fold: as a researcher in the field of art and technology, I was looking forward to working collaboratively with other early career researchers working in adjacent areas; and through my engagement with workshops, I was interested in how they make festivals a para-academic cult.

Content/form workshop presentation at newspaper launch at transmediale 2024. Image credit: CSNI.

One of the workshop’s main objectives was the launch of a collaboratively produced publication exploring methods of working, writing, referencing and publishing which are alternative to traditional academic ones. While looking to challenge conventional research development, we also engaged with the social and technical conditions of sustainable research practices, particularly its mechanisms of sharing, reviewing, and its infrastructure. To this end, our research and resulting publication was based on an experimental platform and publication tool – “wiki4print”. By using Media Wiki software and web-to-print techniques, wiki4print attempts to challenge academic workflows and traditional hierarchical roles within institutional knowledge production.

Wiki4print is part of “ServPub” – a larger infrastructure for research and publishing using free, open-source software. ServePub consists of a feminist server and tools developed and facilitated by grassroot tech collectives In-grid, Systerserver, and Varia/CC. It is a network of servers which uses a VPN with a reverse proxy that makes it accessible on the public internet and wiki4print is one server in this network hosting the wiki from which our publication was produced. ServPub’s wiki4print portable raspberry pi server was plugged into the network at Haus der Kulturen der Welt where the workshop took place.

Server network. Image credit: Mara Karagianni

After three intense days of researching, presenting, thinking and critiquing each other’s work, the participants finalised their contribution in the form of 500 words of research sketches and proposals published on the wiki. Then the wiki was turned into a newspaper via web-to-print techniques by Manetta Berends and Simon Browne. The produced newspaper was printed in 2000 copies and was launched and presented at transmediale festival on 3 February at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The minor tech conditions of the workshop, along with the convivial and non-hierarchical ways of working, created a unique entangled research apparatus of technological infrastructure, cultural systems, human researchers, old and new ideas, html and css, and many cups of coffee. The resulting publication weaves a rich and diverse narrative of content/form exploring “the horror of content” through a trans-disciplinary lens and drawing on science and technology studies, philosophy, art theory, image politics, and multi-species commoning amongst other areas of research, to probe the technological, political and cultural impact, limitations and potentials of our troubled relationship to content. Amongst many fascinating speculations, my research considered art documentation in the context of proliferating visual content on social media. I proposed a reading of art documentation on Instagram feeds as an example of cultural innovation following Boris Groys’ theory of innovation.