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Curating Online Exhibitions

Part 1: Performance, variability, objecthood
By Michael Connor
May 13, 2020

Maja Cule, Hanging from the 8th floor of the South side of The Trump Building at 40 Wall

Street, (2013) (featuring: Marlous Borm). From “Performance GIFs,” 2013, curated by Jesse Darling.
Screenshot, 2020, Google Chrome v81 on Mac OS 10.12.

With physical exhibitions around the world now closed as a result of the
COVID-19 pandemic, institutions and artists now face questions about
online exhibition-making with sudden urgency. The task might at first
seem relatively straightforward: to provide a point of access for the Login
general public to programs and information that would otherwise be Search

experienced in person.

For an audience that is sheltering in place, dealing with boredom or

hardship or grief or all three, online exhibitions that are presented as
stand-ins for a “real,” gallery-centric art experience may only serve as a
reminder of a life on hold, inviting direct comparison with the “real”
thing, and drawing attention to what is missing from the experience. But
online exhibition can be more than a space of simulation,
documentation, promotion, and access. While there are legitimate
questions to be asked about what kind of online arts programs are
needed in a moment of crisis like this, institutions that hope to continue
to serve their larger social and cultural mission through online
programming during the long international lockdown and beyond would
do well to engage in a deeper consideration of the specificities and
histories of online exhibition-making.

This can be a challenge, though. The histories are not particularly well
documented, and the specificities not so thoroughly mapped. In recent
weeks, this has begun to change, with online conversations and articles
picking up on the topic from a range of angles. In this series, as part of
Rhizome’s contribution to this broader discussion, I will attempt to
gather some of our in-house approaches to online exhibition-making,
while discussing examples from the wider history of born-digital art.[1] In
this first section, I’ll argue that online exhibition should be considered as
a practice that is distinct from but connected to gallery exhibition, and
that the performative, variable quality of born-digital culture is a key
aspect of this distinctiveness.

What is an Online Exhibition?

“Exhibition Kickstarter,” 2014, curated by Krystal South. Screenshot, 2020, Google Chrome v81 on

Mac OS 10.12.

[2]
A crowd-funding campaign offering artists’ multiples to backers. An
[3]
exhibition in the virtual world of Second Life. A zip file downloaded to a
[4]
user’s computer. An HTML page featuring thumbnails and links to
[5]
artists’ works. A curated app offering selections of smartphone-based
VR works.
This is a small sample of the bewildering array of projects that have Login
circulated online in recent years under the label of “online exhibition.” Search

While gallery exhibitions have a recognizable default in the white cube,

visitors to an online exhibition can expect to encounter any number of
structures and formats. At best, this categorical instability allows
viewers to understand exhibition-making as a variable, context-
dependent cultural practice, and to imagine how it might (or, might not)
outlive the white cube – the specific architectural setting to which it
was, for a time, largely bound. At worst, it’s just bewildering. Given this
gonzo history of experimentation, it is easy to lose one’s grasp on what
an online exhibition even is.

In the museum studies field, exhibitions are traditionally defined along

lines like these: “Exhibition involves imposition of order on objects,
brought into a particular space and a specific set of relations with one
[6]
another.” Contemporary art has mounted its share of challenges to this
kind of definition, but each of these concepts is placed under particular
stress in an online context:

Digital artworks that appear to be coherent objects are rather the

[7]
performance of objecthood. Digital culture is “more about practices
[8]
than objects.” Born-digital artworks and cultural artifacts–works that
depend on the computer for their creation and reception–can be
experienced only when enacted within complex ensembles of
hardware and software, and may also rely on audience participation,
external websites or media, APIs, or other inputs and services. They
are performed, not merely displayed.

Online exhibitions do not take place in a unified, coherent space. For

example, every user has a differently sized screen, so the literal screen
space in which the exhibition is accessed is highly variable. The online
exhibition may be presented in a navigable, pictorial space, but this is
only one organizational rubric among many that may be used to
arrange works. Rather than a mere arrangement of works in space,
online exhibition involves arranging a multifaceted mise-en-scène to
accommodate an unfolding event.

Specific sets of relations that serve a larger curatorial aim may be

often refracted, online, through works that change over time, the input
of audiences, the reshuffling of algorithms. Exhibitions as a whole are
social processes, and online exhibitions are social processes that play
out via computer networks.

With these caveats in mind, the definition could be restated in this way:
online exhibition involves the performance of artworks and their
objecthood in a particular mise-en-scène, brought into dynamic
relationship with one another and a broader network context.

From Physical to Digital

Before unpacking this further, there is an important discussion to be had

about the relationship between online and offline exhibition—and
likewise, between online exhibition of artwork that is created and
experienced via the user’s own computer, versus online exhibition of
documentation that refers back to gallery-based work. There is Login
considerable crossover among these practices, and it is not particularly Search

beneficial to worry too much about establishing clear boundaries.

Online culture is often framed as an exceptional world of its own,

inherently different from everyday life. It is also sometimes framed as
entirely unexceptional, contiguous with “offline” social reality. As scholar
Julie E. Cohen has argued, both approaches are limited:

...it is possible to assert that cyberspace is “just like” real space only
if one ignores that cyberspace is peopled by real users who
experience cyberspace and real space as different but connected,
with acts taken in one having consequences in the other. In all cases,
theories of cyberspace as separate space give short shrift to
cyberspace as both extension and evolution of everyday spatial
practice—as a space neither separate from real space nor simply a
continuation of it. That is to say, they ignore both the embodied,
situated experience of cyberspace users and the complex interplay
[9]
between real and digital geographies.

Along these lines, the online exhibition is best understood as distinct

from and connected to the embodied and situated experience of
practitioners, the public, and even the gallery world.

Audiences have long been conditioned to experience physical

exhibitions online. In the years before the launch of Instagram, blogs
such as Vvork (2006–2012) and Contemporary Art Daily (2008–) built
enormous followings for their curated image feeds. While Vvork focused
largely on individual artworks, Contemporary Art Daily featured
exhibitions, often presenting work from fledgling artist-run spaces from
places like Portland and Mexico City alongside established museums.
Through these blogs, and the platforms that followed them, users grew
increasingly accustomed to experiencing physical work via a screen.
 Login
Search

VVORK, 2006–2012. Screenshot, 2020, Google Chrome v81 on Mac OS 10.12.

As gallery visitors increasingly began to make their own photographs of

exhibitions for online sharing, gallery architecture shifted in response.
Fifteen years ago in New York City, it was still common for a fashionable
commercial gallery to use track lighting fixtures or other focused lighting
arrangements, allowing the artworks to be brightly lit while keeping the
gallery as a whole relatively dim, like a cocktail bar, suitable for a
glamorous evening crowd. When photographed by untrained visitors,
though, track lighting often resulted in yellowish, murky images, and as
the public increasingly began to publish their own exhibition
photographs, fluorescent strips offering even, flat light throughout a
space became the go-to option.
 Login
Search

Ryan McGinley, “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” Team Gallery, 2008 / Ryan McGinley, “Animals,”
Team Gallery, 2012.

In this light, even traditional institutions are already engaged in some

level of online exhibition-making. Likewise, art audiences are already
engaged in online viewership and discourse. On an institutional level,
though, online engagement is often formally separated from curatorial
work, relegated to a supporting role, and measured according to
concrete metrics. This tends to limit the potential for curatorial and
artistic investigation of online exhibition in institutional contexts. It’s not
surprising, then, that some of the most interesting experiments with the
slippage and connection between the gallery and the internet come
from artists.

Artie Vierkant’s Image Objects, for example, is a series of panels printed

with colorful abstractions. When the objects are photographed for
online circulation, Vierkant alters the documentation, creating distinct
digital works for online circulation.
 Login
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Image Object Sunday 17 June 2012, installation view at Higher Pictures, New York.

Generation Works, curated by Jasper Spicero, was an artist-run space in

a condo in downtown Tacoma, Washington, that admitted no visitors,
only making exhibitions available through documentation on an
evocative handmade website.
 “Generation Works,” curated by Jasper Spicero, 2012. Screenshot, Google Chrome for Mac OS
Login
10.2, 2020, featuring Bunny Rogers, chairs (after Brigid Mason), 2012. Search

Both of these projects embraced the open-ended meaning-making of

the internet, and contrasted it with the authority and fixity of the
traditional exhibition space—a tension that is kept alive through
organizational structures that delineate online engagement from
curation. A full consideration of online exhibition-making as both
“extension and evolution” of traditional exhibition practice will have
implications for these kinds of divisions, and for curatorial practice as a
whole.
[10]
If a “rarefied and incontrovertible lingua franca” has been built up
over time around museum and gallery architecture, the internet can
make that language seem commonplace and open for questioning.
Rather than striving to preserve their authority intact in a new context,
curators and institutions shifting to online exhibition would do well to
[11]
begin with an acknowledgement of the “history and wholeness” of the
context in which they now work.

Exhibition as Performance

Variability is perhaps the most fundamental and confounding concept

involved in working digitally. As articulated in Lev Manovich’s 2001 book
The Language of New Media, variability suggests that the same set of
data can be accessed in numerous ways, depending on factors like
[12]
hardware and software environment. Whether an online exhibition
consists of documentation of physical work or born-digital work,
variability makes the question of what the exhibited work actually is,
and how to present it in a stable and coherent way, rather vexing.

Boris Groys approached this topic in his 2008 book Art Power by framing
digital exhibition as a form of performance: “The digital image is a copy
—but the event of its visualization is an original event, because the
digital copy is a copy that has no visible original. That further means: A
digital image, to be seen, should not be merely exhibited but staged,
performed.”[13] While Groys’s primary focus in this text is gallery
exhibition of digital imagery, the same holds true online. Online
exhibition involves making certain choices regarding a work’s
performance.

Groys places great emphasis on the technical apparatus in which the

work performs. In particular, he highlights the curatorial decision as to
whether to perform a digital artwork consistently within its original
technical apparatus. If the work is shown in its original format, the
format itself can begin to overshadow the work. If it is translated into a
new format, it may change the work in significant ways. He goes so far
as to question whether it is appropriate to include technical apparatus
within an artwork’s object boundary:
 ... to preserve the original technology shifts the perception of a Login
specific image from the image itself to the technical conditions Search

under which it was produced. What we primarily react to is the old-

fashioned photographic or video recording technology that becomes
apparent when we look at old photographs or videos. The artist did
not originally intend to produce this effect, however, as he lacked the
possibility of comparing his work with the products of later
technological developments.[14]

Groys suggests that overemphasis on technical apparatus can cloud an

audience’s understanding of an artist’s original intent. At the same time,
though, understanding an artist’s relationship with a given technological
context, even down to something as mundane as a specific software
interface, might be crucial to any understanding of their intent.

At Rhizome, we use the metaphor of the object boundary to help guide

conversations about the role that a given software or network context
might play in relation to a given work. In the context of networked
software, objecthood is only the performance of objecthood, and the
object boundary is not a given, but a variable.

Rhizome’s preservation director, Dragan Espenschied, articulates this as

follows. The artifact—the resources such as files that make up the work,
which are there even when the computer is turned off—are performed
with other resources (usually ones that were not created by the artist)
to perform the object. The object boundary includes whatever is
considered to be the artifact, plus whatever other resources are brought
into the performance.

Decisions about setting an object boundary for exhibition are, at best,

subjective and unbound by convention. Should the work be presented in
Netscape Navigator 3 running on the cloud, or should we read the source
code aloud in a 24-hour YouTube performance?

As part of Rhizome’s online exhibition Net Art Anthology, which focused

on historical works of net art, object boundary was drawn in a range of
ways:

In some cases, works were presented in a legacy software

environment. In other words, the exhibited “object” included both
artist-made files and a period-appropriate web browser or operating
system. One example of this was Alexei Shulgin’s Form Art, a body of
work made up of compositions created using default HTML buttons
and menus. A good number of the compositions still render in modern
browsers, but the aesthetics of these elements has changed radically
from the 1990s to the present day. Thus, Form Art was presented via
emulation—visitors to Net Art Anthology can open it in Netscape
Navigator 3, running in the cloud.
 Login
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Alexei Shulgin, Form Art, 1997. Screenshot, 2017, Netscape Navigator 3.04 Gold for Windows.

In other cases, legacy websites were presented in a modern software

environment. Life Sharing by Eva and Franco Mattes
(0100101110101101.org, 2001–2003) was a long-running performance
project in which the artists made the contents of their personal
computer accessible online, to the public. During the work’s original
life, it changed daily as the artists used their computer. Visitors could
check the artist’s email, browse their system files, and view saved
images and documents through a web interface. For Net Art
Anthology, the original system files were made available as a static
archive. If what lent the work its feeling of transgression was the
immediacy of accessing a personal computer through the browser;
offering access to this work in emulation would add layers of
mediation and make this raw personal data more remote. Thus,
although there were some aesthetic elements that rendered
differently in a modern browser, the work was not shown in a legacy
environment.

Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG), Life Sharing, 2000–2003. Screenshot, 2020,

Google Chrome v81 on Mac OS 10.12.

In other cases, a work could not be presented without some sort of

external resource. Electronic Disturbance Theater’s FloodNet was
 designed as an online protest in support of the Zapatista movement Login
in Chiapas, Mexico, designed as a “sit in” against target websites that Search

represented interests that were opposing Zapatistas. FloodNet used a

java applet – a software application embedded in a website – to allow
visitors to reload the target pages, thereby slowing them down. The
inclusion of this work in Net Art Anthology involved not only offering
access to the original work in a legacy browser that allowed it to
function, it also involved reconstructing the target websites from
saved material on the Wayback Machine.

Electronic Disturbance Theater, FloodNet, website for April 10, 1998 action. Screenshot, 2016,
Netscape Communicator 4.8 for Windows. The bottom frame displays a reconstruction of the
website of the President of Mexico circa 1998, which was reloaded repeatedly as part of the

FloodNet action.

Thus, in Net Art Anthology, some artworks were presented with restored
or even recreated elements of their original technological context, but
others weren’t. The decision about where to draw the object boundary
was made according to the affordances of a given work and what were
assumed would be the environments in which the audience would
encounter it. This decision sometimes involved input from the artists
and curators and preservation expertise, as well as decisions about how
best to use limited staff time, and about what artifacts and resources
were available.

Regardless of how the boundary is drawn, what results is not a stable

object, but the performance of objecthood. As Groys would put it, “each
presentation of a digitalized image becomes a recreation of the
image.”[15] Each re-staging of an artwork in online exhibition will be new
and different and shaped by its participation in a real-time network.

Time to Bang the Bricks

The language of performance turns out to offer a range of concepts that

are quite useful for online exhibition-making. In my next installment in
this series, I’ll build on this concept to discuss how online exhibition-
making can involve mise-en-scène. The concept has its roots in the
embodied space of theater, but it has luckily been expanded through its
adoption in cinema studies, so that now we can use it without feeling
restricted to traditional spatial thinking.

Applying imagery too directly from the physical world to the digital may
be hazardous, as my colleague Dragan has pointed out. Such concepts:
 …popularize a conservative view on digital culture. When computers Login
are continuously explained with cars, networks with highways, Search

search engines with the human brain, even Email with classical
postal service, the actual properties and possibilities of the
computer are lost.[16]

Dragan has made a number of suggestions for metaphors that derive

from digital culture, but may be used in a wide range of circumstances.
For example, he suggests that one can say “I'm gonna bang the bricks”
when it’s time to go to the ATM, inspired by the way that Super Mario
finds coins by smashing bricks.

I want to expand this metaphor, and to suggest that “banging the

bricks” might serve as a useful metaphor for finding value in a seemingly
obdurate situation.

When making online exhibitions, it is important to be wary of the

conservative tendency to rely on traditional gallery exhibition as sole
point of reference. Attempting to replace “real” exhibitions
online only remind audiences that they are confined to their homes,
deprived of the “real thing.” Replacements invite direct comparison with
some now-inaccessible experience of seeing artwork alongside other
flesh-and-blood humans. Rather, the task is to explore the online
exhibition as a distinctive practice that is still connected to a broader
field and history of exhibition-making, a real experience in its own right.
To do this, one must bang the bricks.

Notes:

[1] As a whole this text rests especially heavily on the work of Rhizome’s
preservation team under the direction of Dragan Espenschied.

[2] “Exhibition Kickstarter,” curated by Krystal South, 2014.

[3] Examples abound, but two notable efforts are the Temporäre
Kunsthalle Berlin Second Life, 2007, and Manetas Desert in Second Life,
2008.

[4] The Download was initially a Rhizome program offering artists’ works
for download, initiated by Zoë Salditch, and was relaunched and
rearticulated as an online exhibition series by Paul Soulellis (2015–2018).

[5] Examples abound, but “Miniatures of the Heroic Period” curated by

Olia Lialina in 1998 is a favorite.

[6] Liz Wells, “Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention: The Genius of

Facing East,” from Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, Issues in Curating
Contemporary Art and Performance, 29.
[7] Rhizome, “Preserving Digital Art with Rhizome and Google Arts & Login
Culture,” meeting agenda, April 2017. Search

[8] Trevor Owens, “‘Digital Culture is Mass Culture’: An interview with

Digital Conservator Dragan Espenschied,” Library of Congress, 2014.

[9] Julie E. Cohen, Cyberspace As/And Space, Georgetown Public Law

and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 898260, 2007.

[10] Jimmie Tiptree Jr, “Post Whatever: on Ethics, Historicity, & the
#usermilitia,” Rhizome, 2014.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press,
2001.

[13] Boris Groys, Art Power, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 84.

[14] Ibid., 90.

[15] Ibid., 91.

[16] Dragan Espenschied, “I gonna bang the bricks!” — I will draw money
from an ATM,” Contemporary Home Computing, February 8, 2007.

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