MozEx: Web? Arts? Tech? Experience?

We constantly see art and technology intertwined in digital art, net-art, creative coding and current dialogues within visual culture. Fully opening to this relationship, MozEx is an art exhibition with a 21st-century twist. Curated by the digital learning teams at both the Tate and the V&A in 2016 (in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Festival), it included fifty-four dynamic digital artworks that spanned many disciplines and media. In this paper we look at reviewing our co-working approach as MozEx producers and curators, looking at the constructive cross-exchange of art, web and tech that was created and built-up during this project. The paper opens a critical angle on what it means to form a contemporary and collaborative exhibit project, what critical questions are asked and how the cross-connection with art, tech, culture and web can be key to open-up more constructive gallery and also non-gallery setting, in a physical space and/or on a digital platform.


INTRODUCTION
Art and technology are merging more and more, and the open web-community is growing at various levels and directions of cross-disciplinary collaborations and open-participation (Mihailidis 2014) and also different way of seeing and visioning curation (Graham & Cook 2010, Krysa 2006. MozEx (Ex stands for exhibition, experience and exchange) considers the interconnection between artistic practice, technological methodologies and the web-community. It is about art, as it is about technology, as it is about people.
The exhibit explores links between art, society, and the digital world. Created by both individual practitioners and cross-disciplinary collaborations, MozEx navigates the value of art to society. This is done through a combination of diverse artistic practices and approaches, sharing different voices about society and the web, as well as considering and reviewing the concept and politics of the openweb (Soep 2014).
Fifty-four artworks were selected around five key issues that related to the thematic of the Mozilla Festival 2016: web literacy, digital inclusion, open innovation, decentralisation, online privacy and security. These ingredients were already part of digital art arguments and questions that digital learning teams at both Tate and V&A were exploring in their practice-based digital-art programmes. Both teams review the relationship that artistic practice and technology have, and what conversations shape within the cross-disciplinary practice and intervention.
MozEx reflected and emphasised collaboration, open-source practices and the critical thinking around the exploration of new technological worlds (Greengard 2015), big data (Stackowiak et al. 2015) post-humanism approaches (Najar 2003) and public understanding of the topics. The aim of this project was also to investigate and critically explore the impact of technology in society and culture, with the objective to stimulate open discussions between practitioners and audiences. In this paper we consider the open approach that was taken as part of MozEx and we will share the build-up of its open-philosophy.

CROSS-EXCHANGING
Digital media and digital artistic practice is an increasing part of our lives. The exchanging of digital knowledge and practice with Mozilla was already part of the digital learning approach at Tate and V&A. We both have been involved with Mozilla and with MozFest before, running digital art workshops and setting-up open-talks about the topic of digital-art technology. We have also participated in Mozilla's Open IoT Studio research events, looking at the internet of things and reflecting critically on how art can share the various doubts and arguments around it. However, this was always done as separate entities and focusing on project developed respectively or at Tate or at V&A. So, MozEx was the first time that we collaborated closely together as MozFest co-designers, as well as thinking how to cross-connect our professional approaches on digital learning.
During the first phase of planning, with MozEx we aimed to structure an engaging and collaborative work which demystified technology and opened up discussions and exchanges. Digital learning within Tate and V&A have similar aims and similar kinds of practice; MozEx was a great opportunity to connect and work together, questioning commongrounds and shared research interests too. The collaboration with Mozilla opened this possibility, perhaps putting down barriers of institutional competitiveness, and allowing more collaboration and exchange within Tate and V&A.
Part of the work we both do is about cohesion between art and technology: more bridges you can build and more conversations you can start. This was then an anchored key-point of socio-political identity that we wanted to underline with MozEx. The need for discussion, for sharing voices and views, for forming a healthy debate. As part of the Tate Exchange context and philosophy of open and shared experiences, art and knowledge, MozEx was also a platform to exchange digital art practices to new audiences beyond the art gallery context. Also, using art-gallery collections as a starting point for the investigation of how digital technology informs contemporary art and design, the digital learning identity develops through making and technological engagement that empowers people to become creators and not just consumers. The nature of digital participation (Biggs 2012) and digital citizenship (Bearden 2016) is changing and shaping in different ways in our society, and the flow between digital producers and digital consumers is also changing. Within MozEx we looked at that area of investigation too, also examining what the affordances of digital technology are for learning through art and artists, and how these can impact digital making.

THE APPROACH
The open-access, open-source and open-data approach within Mozilla creates a dialogue on the web that cross-over topics, methods and philosophies also within digital art. And so "the open" became the key-principle ingredient of our MozEx approach.
All the work part of MozEx was set on various different Creative Commons (CC) licences (https://creativecommons.org).
This opened interesting conversations with the artists and created problems since the outset of the work itself. CC-licenses enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work (Schuber & McClean 2002); they grant 'baseline rights', such as the right to distribute the work worldwide for non-commercial (or also commercial depending from the license) purposes, and with or without edits and modification. Artists choose a license according to the conditions they want to be applied to their artwork, so it changes depending from situation to situation. The details of each of these licenses depend on the version and are made up of a selection of different conditions such SA (Share-Alike), NC (Non-commercial) and ND (No Derivates). Many artists interested in MozEx did not submit their work because they wanted their work to be fully copyrighted. This shaped interesting and critical discussions also with Mozilla, and challenged the limits to what "open" might mean in different scenarios and for different people. This primary difficulty inspired the exhibition even more. We reviewed the importance of open culture philosophy and how that was fundamental to be inserted in contemporary artistic practice on and about the web, within the digital art and techdomain.
Each of the fifty-four components of the installation agreed to a 'CC BY-NC' (non-commercial) license and in their work they examined issues facing a free and open internet. The selection was done through an open call for people to become involved which led to a great diversity of submissions from plenty of artists who hadn't been linked to Mozilla or Tate

CURATION AND PRODUCTION
MozEx needed to reflect the diversity of the web and needed to be open to various methodologies in order to engage a wider spectrum of voices and critical perspectives. We wanted to attract artists as well as coders, opening some arguments of the identity of contemporary artists working with arts and technology. We got academics, creative technologists and artists that in their work are interested in debating art&technology relation, care about learning and interactive participation.
It was a challenge to be able to combine so many different perspectives together in one place, with one project, with one call. But the curatorial choice created a very dynamic collection of artworks: writing, photography, video, audio, mix-media, bots. All these extensive methods are the real nature of digital art practice, and so they were given access to MozEx in order to not only reflect the digital art world itself (with its diverse approach) but to also aiming at including many different audiences who may relate to different kinds/types of work. Diversity of practices meant diversity of audiences.
With the diversity of practices came the diversity of planning. Technical installations were set-up around the festival (at Ravensbourne College in London) and different levels of technical support was needed from the low-key digital screening to more complex installations. The technical challenge was also given by the way we merged MozEx within the Mozilla Festival.
Because the focus of the work was an exploration of the five key issues, the exhibition was spread around the festival venue rather than grouped together in one space. At MozFest there were more than five-hundred activities divided in talks and workshops; these activities were covering many areas of technology and were spread in nine big open-space floors. MozEx connected the festival's thematic elements, visually shaping paths and patterns to its surrounding communities of practitioners. This connectivity between the floors, the topics, the talks and the workshops, was highly reflective of the nature of the festival and its open web community. The curatorial flow underlined the concept of one-web, keeping its multi-facets detailed differences balanced with a unique and positive global connection.
Working in a space that is a non-gallery setting was a challenge and yet, it was an inspiration. We had to be inventive sorting the shape of the exhibit in one day. The MozEx exhibition itself had allocated two spaces dedicated to showing some of the works: fourteen interactive and ten physical pieces. This meant that thirty pieces were set-up throughout the nine floors/levels of the venue, on screens or projections on walls. This shaped the exhibition in a bit of an experience to look&find; it was a challenge but it actually helped the public in navigating the venue and understanding better the various levels of engagement that the festival was proposing.

ARTISTS CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT
In this section, we present and collect ten artworks part of the MozEx experience, underlining their diversity in terms of topic, format, inclusion, and public engagement. More work is available to be seen in the digital publication on the Isseu open platform (https://issuu.com/mozfest/docs/mozex). Instead of writing about each piece from our perspective, here we decided to give voice to the artists, allowing a multi-voice exchange also in this paper. So, following are some of the MozEx works, and their related artists-creators' comments and descriptions.   (Hayles 1999). I further these ideas translating the recording of electrical activity along the scalp into a sculptural responsive surface, that reacts to a change of a human's brain activity -you perform and transmit your own data. The work uncovers themes of mixed reality and augmentation relating to the body." -Artist: Anna Nazo    MozEx engaged the public with the topics of web literacy, digital inclusion and accessibility, privacy, policy and hacking. The diversity or practitioners, from fine artists to coders, from journalists to sound-designers, from human rights organisations to experimental mix-media artists, created a wider frame of visions and voices.
All these different aspects worked together: their differences were their strengths. They created one piece like one web which is not all the same (it keeps its multitude of facets) but it comes together as a whole. Like our society. Perhaps that was the strongest aspect of the installation: the way it reflects the nature of the internet.
In the overall, MozEx was a fundamental curatorial experience to investigate first hand a very open and transparent model of working. Our interest in exploring the use of open tools not only for digital making but also for digital curation and planning, brought us to have different and unexpected (especially for many of the artists) way of working. The use of GitHub, for example, as our main platform for the curatorial practice meant that we were very transparent in the selection process, in the correspondence with the artists, in the exchange between us. All this was accessible to the public in real time, and so it created a very different dynamic from what we (and the public) were accustomed to. This, in a way, can be seen as a further step of freedom of information too, fostering a hub and community for the artists involved, as well as the festival organisers, curators, producers and the public.
As next steps of our digital learning collaboration within Tate, V&A and Mozilla, we are interested in investigating and reflecting on post-humanism, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Looking at the digital arguments for society and community cohesion, we aim to explore the practical application of digital making skills and knowledge to the topics, considering the next generation of practices for designers and artists and how critical voices can be heard and shared for new debates and exchanges.