The web is widely used by museums as a low-barrier platform to inform people on activities in the museum and publish their collections online. It is not uncommon that this publishing consists of an simple web interface connected to a database that holds records with limited information about the artifacts; information that is more relevant for managing the collection than for informing a wider public. It is not uncommon for a description to have no reference at all to that what is visible in the picture. Moreover this situation is hardly a worst-case scenario. In the Netherlands over 20 million artifacts in museums await a description, artifacts that do have a (scanty) description only half of them is available digitally. Four museums in the Netherlands (Naturalis, Museon, University Museum Utrecht, Dutch Institute of Image & Sound) together with three research and knowledge institutes (University of Applied Science Utrecht, Novay, BMC Group) decided in 2008 to explore the potential of user groups tagging collections and the effects of this on the involvement of these people towards the museum. For this purpose a dedicated social tagging tool was developed and implemented: www.ikweetwatditis.nl
Playful Mapping is the result of many years of joint enterprise in which we, as authors, devel-oped a close intellectual collaboration. As a book, it emerged towards the end of the ERC project Charting the Digital that ran from 2011-2016, and during a still-ongoing Erasmus+ project; Go Go Gozo. Over this five year period, members of the Playful Mapping Collective got to know each other as colleagues and friends, participating regularly in diverse academic and social activities, such as conference panels and workshops.1 The authorship of this book therefore reflects an interesting collaborative experiment, enrolling researchers who have been working together in an active way over the past half-decade. This preface explains the genealogy of the emerging and open collaboration through which we developed ideas
In my PD research, I want to focus on how collectivity is practiced in the arts, by learning from the Indonesian multidisciplinary art collective ruangrupa’s use of [the international art exhibition] ‘documenta’ as a tool, and the potential of continuing the experiences outside this group and context. The art practices programmed by ruangrupa can be understood as complex and ambiguous where art is not at the center of attention but part of a larger communal productivity. And where it is not sufficient to be merely critical, and merely voice opposition, but to engage, and create alternatives in everyday life [without being problem-solving or social design]. My research concerns the potential of continuing these practices and experiences outside this particular artist group and exhibition context. Ruangrupa’s work reveals problems of the current Western art system, how it is (hierarchically) organized, the implicit rules, norms and values it is based on. Ruangrupa's practice thus serves as an exercise and point of departure to answer questions about forms of self-organization within the art field. Its collective and multidisciplinary art practice implies the question whether it also can serve as a model for living together on a larger scale (also outside the arts), beyond hierarchies of social and professional structures. There is currently a lack of research on these particular art practices, so that they are not easily accessible for non-participants. For the art field in particular, this concerns the question whether contemporary art can and needs to take place outside established Western gallery/museum, art/curatorial paradigms and what can be learned from ruangrupa's and documenta fifteen's blending of art practice with daily life practice. This is also an urgent practical issue for art schools (including my school Willem de Kooning Academy) that increasingly develop art study programs outside the studio and gallery art paradigm.
