Artists use flexible portfolios to explore identity through self-curation
Mylar: Exploring Self-Curation as a Reflexive Creative Practice
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Artists often show their work in different ways, but the way they present it can be just as meaningful as the art itself. The authors studied how artists design their own presentations to express who they are. They created a tool called Mylar that lets artists quickly make and compare different collections of their work to see it in new ways. Using Mylar, artists reflected on their creative identity by shaping how their art is displayed.
What this means in practice
- •For platform designers: Design online art platforms that allow artists to customize how their work is showcased for richer self-expression.
- •For creative tools developers: Build tools enabling rapid prototyping of art portfolios to support artists in experimenting with self-curation.
Authors
Kate Chier, Shm Garanganao Almeda, Bjoern Hartmann
Abstract
The container holding an artist's work can itself be just as expressive as the work it presents. We investigate self-curation as a creative practice, asking how artists explore and express their identity through the design of their own artwork presentations. Drawing on a study of artists' existing presentation practices, we developed Mylar, a malleable art presentation system that lets artists rapidly generate and compare provisional portfolios, seeing their work anew through different montages. We observed how 12 artists articulated, probed, negotiated, and foraged in Mylar, using rapidly generated portfolios as epistemic artifacts for reflection. We characterize self-curation as a reflexive and plural practice, in which artists use presentation design to shape the legibility of their self and their work and reflexively correspond with provisional presentations to reshape their curatorial intentions. We share design implications for expressivity in online art platforms and for malleable prototyping as a formative design method.