YourSearch is a service platform connecting ‘clients’ seeking to accomplish certain tasks with ‘Search Masters’ who collect, reconfigure and visualize information relevant to possible solutions. Anyone can use the service as a client by registering their research tasks and interests, their most commonly used search engine, etc. Anyone registered as a Search Master, having uploaded their qualifications and research samples, can propose solutions as well as quote prices after evaluating the details of each task uploaded on the task board. YourSearch attempts to boost user satisfaction by sending ‘push alarms’ to an optimized Search Master. Once matched, the client receives their results and submits a review based on their satisfaction. At the same time, the Search Master evaluates the level of difficulty and time required to complete the specific task. The user’s activity information, including details regarding their initial proposals, task solution history, research outcomes and satisfaction levels, can be collected with consent. If users agree to reduce the privacy level of their results and submit an evaluation letter, they become eligible for a membership status upgrade, increasing their probability of matching with more suitable counterparts in the future, whether client or Search Master. Anyone who completes a series of steps during the registration process can work as a Search Master. YourSearch has recruited Search Masters from diverse fields through an extensive promotional campaign. YourSearch launching its service with a presentation of research samples of its most valued assets, the Search Masters. The promotional event will be held from January 16 to February 20, 2019.

The era of hunting for information from a search engine has long passed. Major online portals have become sites of silent tension between users tired of exaggerated or fabricated campaigns and suppliers looking to boost the visibility of their content. Meanwhile, the search engines themselves proudly assert that they provide customized results by implementing original algorithms and allowing users to edit their own interface. Social networking services fill up users’ feeds by analyzing account owners’ activity patterns and converting their already-familiar content into promotions and suggested items. Since the emergence of Web 2.0 which brought about the acceleration of interactive digital communications, the clear divide between content providers and consumers has been rendered meaningless, enabling ‘creators’ to reach celebrity-level recognition. In times such as these, information is more likely to be generated through the interaction between different data rather than the development of new knowledge. Not only have methods of searching changed, the norms and functions governing information and its application therein have also become subject to transition from all sides. 

The various search portals, social networking services and new media ‘platforms’ leading this transition have emerged both as basic modules of new creative industries as well as profitable models within the capitalist regime. Instead of producing original information, the service platforms extract and utilize data that has been incidentally or unwittingly stored by users-service providers, consumers, and advertisers-as their primary source of profit. These platforms function as brokers who deal with various data such as relationship status, navigation routes, personal preferences, and spending patterns; they capitalize on such data by negotiating the exchanges of values. Thus today’s information is understood as products reconfigured through a process of selection, accumulation, categorization, interpretation, and visualization, operating as a vehicle for monetizing voluntary activities.

DOOSAN Curator Workshop Exhibition: YourSearch, On-demand Research Service actively adopts the operational structure of the information within the platform economy via the premise proposed in the introduction. YourSearch, acting as a facilitator of transactions among users, straightforwardly emulates platforms that collect users’ personal information to generate profit. The exhibition space is presented as a promotion center endorsing a newly-introduced research service platform. Participating artists are introduced as ‘Search Masters’ who provide research services and are therefore obligated to demonstrate to clients (the audience) their character as well as competence at fulfilling tasks by providing samples (artworks). In line with the altered interpretation of the information, these samples differ from a mere sum total of disparate references regarding a single subject. Rather, they seem to tentatively intensify and put forward one of their multiple working accounts in accordance with the context. Each one's character is not predetermined by a given skill set but is continuously recognized and redefined based on their performance. Here, the ‘differences’ or unique qualities of users result from their competitive performances, subsequently projecting a reality in which individuals are encouraged to incessantly self-manage at the micro level. Despite promoting the Search Masters as their greatest assets, YourSearch pushes them into a trivial yet constant competition without even a minimal safety net. Meanwhile, YourSearch delivers an optimistic message that anyone can become a Search Master if they are confident enough to readily promote themselves; past clients could later become Search Masters, and vice versa. On the other hand, YourSearch encourages its clients to play a leading role in undertaking the entire process of requesting tasks, selecting and reviewing Search Masters and evaluating results, as opposed to remaining isolated from the entire process. As such, clients assume the responsibilities of evaluating the quality of the final product as well as the Search Master, the details of which are thereafter used in building the database to upgrade the service and make profit from the information market.

Furthermore, when brought inside the Doosan Gallery space, YourSearch unfolds an astringent commentary on exhibition making in the age of platform capitalism. The tasks and relations specific to the art industry symptomatically reveal renewed definitions of the information as well as the conditions of such relations. In general, the tasks of a curator consist of gathering information in order to undertake an assignment; delegating and allocating labor; promoting the project; and efficiently producing an exhibition with limited sources. Meanwhile, the artist would conduct research on subjects or materials for the production of artwork; accept or provide part-time jobs; deliberating on the degree of compromise they are willing to make for the proposed projects; and update their online portfolio on a regular basis. As a series of activities oscillates between collaboration and outsourcing, or commissioning and requesting services, the range of unpaid jobs in turn expands without notice. YourSearch, while blatantly borrowing corporate communication methods, considers curators as managers of a platform and artists as users voluntarily interacting within it. In so doing, the project calls for a reassessment of a curatorial model of setting a stage or providing a platform, awaiting spontaneous participation. At the same time, it manifests the anticipated tension between curators and artists. YourSearch impels the viewer, as a potential client or advertiser, to exercise their autonomy in evaluating the exhibited samples according to their own criteria. The modernist doctrine that insists institutions perform their duties to enlighten has been modified to the ‘post-museum’ conditions of publicly accessible institutions. YourSearch further questions whether the initiative expected from the audience, in fact, overlaps with that of consumers.

We live in a flat world where individuals come and go according to irregularly assigned tasks and employ autonomy as currency. Then how should we acknowledge where we stand and connect with others? In the news feed, information is confounded with marketing campaigns and promotion substitutes for discourse; then what would it mean to generate value within the feed? How can we make critical exhibitions in this era of pseudo-initiative? In the networking environment where the user’s ‘initiative’ or ‘autonomy’ has become the new ‘norm’, what sort of subject should the exhibition-as-institution regard the audience? In the field of art, self-starters are perpetually assembled and scattered, along with their projects; perhaps we have been encouraging one another to stay relevant and adapt to the precarious new world.