Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 59

Introduction
The domain of art and culture has always been a site of contention and
power struggle. From issues of representation and preservation to issues
of access and democratization, the cultural field remains the subject of
sustained debates regarding its meaning and function in society and its role
in maintaining or challenging existing structures of hierarchy and power.
Questions as to whose narratives and memories are being represented in
museums, who has access to cultural spaces, and who decides on what
counts and qualifies as art and culture, are some of the many recurring
concerns often found in debates about cultural production, preservation,
and transmission. Crucial to these debates is also the concept of curating
which has long been an important and fundamental feature in cultural and
museum processes, given the curator’s active and performative role in the
overall production of meaning, memory, and knowledge, and in animating
the encounter between past, present, and future.
Over the last few years, the function and practice of curating both inside and
outside museums have undergone a number of transformations due to a host
of factors, some of which have to do with the challenges and opportunities
brought about by globalization, while others are directly related to the
advent of digital and Web �.� technologies and their growing deployment
within cultural institutions. As Cairns and Birchall (����) argue, museums
are increasingly required to share “the authority of meaning-making” with
their audiences and other communities. Finding new methods of curating
objects (material and digital) and communicating meaning has thus become
a necessary task for cultural institutions.
The aim of this article is to explore the curatorial potential (and limitations)
of Web �.� in light of its networked affordances and the user-driven
participatory culture it claims to enable. By networked affordances we mean
the possibilities of interaction and creation that are facilitated through the
intersection of technologies, practices, and different publics. Or to borrow
a definition from Cabiddu et al. (����:���), the concept of affordance, in the
context of digital media forms, designates the “symbiotic relationship between
human activities and technological capabilities”, providing a language for
examining the impact of technological tools and platforms on various social
and creative practices. As such, and by examining the affordances of Web
�.� in relation to public art and curatorial practice, this article contributes
to the body of literature engaging with affordance theory and to the fields of
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