Digital Exhibitions as Templates for a New Web
Tags: Digital, Design, Pandemic, Technology, Internet

It seems a bit late to write about digital exhibitions now, seeing as most cultural institutions have been allowed to open again with social distancing in place. But we can still look back and survey the outpouring of digitised exhibitions and previously analogue experiences: symposiums, exhibitions, plays, raves, dining out.

We’re in the trough before the next peak, at least here in Poland and in many other countries across the EU. It feels safer here, although whether it actually is is another thing, as familiarity has bred complacency in many cases. Like a harbour in a storm, we’re protected on two sides by towering peaks of death counts: one real, one speculative. It’s up to us as a collective to make sure the second wave isn’t as destructive as the last. Let’s keep washing our hands, standing two meters apart, wearing masks and enjoying art.

So it’s while speaking slightly louder, with heavily moisturised hands and smelling distantly of high-proof alcohol that we can analyse how art and design were presented during the beginning of the pandemic of 2020. This trough of refection can help us see what worked and want didn’t and how we can push forward with digitising exhibitions and their experiences. The Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology was at the vanguard of digitising not only their student’s work, but educational models too. It was exciting to witness and be part of this move away from physical to platform architecture. Classrooms faded and bedrooms pervaded as the device reigned supreme over our realities.

Whether these digital experiments are deemed effective or not, is not sooo important. Their existence means that they’ve already contributed to the ongoing genealogy of our back-and-forth relationship with the digital. They’ll always be held in suspense on a server somewhere, waiting for an eager internet archeologist to discover them. But when enjoying them now we can ask questions like: what do we lose when interacting with exhibitions online? How will it change our future experiences of exhibitions? What was the previous relationship between the online and offline exhibition world anyway?

For many it’s not immediately obvious, but the digital was already influencing our museums before the virus found its way into the our bloodstreams and newsfeeds. The researcher and curator Delany Boutkan, when discussing the relationship between exhibition displays and digital media, has this to say:

…exhibition designers and architects develop design methods related to a digital vision. Considering that digital devices are updated or reinvented at a rapid speed, studying exhibition design is a means to understand how such technologies frame our vision and show how these current ways of seeing have become a method for museums to capture the ever-fleeting gaze of its visitors.

In Boutkan’s essay Mobile Eyes, the author references the redesign of collections from MOMA (New York), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the United Kingdom Pavilion for XXII International Exhibition of Triennale Milano. The Stedelijk stands out in her analysis as its redesign “aimed to deal with a contemporary way of perception: an ability to take in several different images at the same time.” This analysis of the way we consume images and see through our devices should always be referenced when we talk about digitising collections and exhibitions.

What then can take away from the complete digitisation of experience? Are we even more numbed by the infinite scrolling of artworks, or can these forms of display coax out a new blueprint for a way of interacting with the internet?

My selfie inside the Exhibition

The exhibitions, all available on the Virtual PJAIT portal, are accessible as interactive videos on Vimeo and Youtube or stand alone sites where you can explore entire shows. Take the Cross-Cultural Workshop exhibition for example, the designer Aleksandra Hojszyk has created an entire experience (hosted by Mozilla) where you can select an avatar, cruise past opening night snacks laid out especially for you, chat to other people in the room, take selfies (which you can then Tweet), leave objects in the space; and if all that doesn’t keep you occupied then you can actually see the students’ work. There are too many aspects to this entity to discuss here (they will be written about in subsequent Medium posts) but what PJAIT has done is recreate an analogous experience digitally.

Cross-Cultural Workshop Week Virtual Gallery

While simply trying to recreate the offline online doesn’t enhance the artwork or challenge the viewer, it does make for a bizarre and wholly frustratingly enjoyable experience. Projects like these are just the beginning as we explore the tools we have on offer, and as previously stated, the most exciting aspect of this is what it can offer the broader relationship we have with the internet. What if we could wander into Facebook and look behind all the closed doors (probably we’d find Dominic Cummings hiding in a stationary cupboard); or maybe all the doors would actually be locked and we’d realise the sheer opacity of this digital cartel; or maybe we’d stumble into a room with a cash-cow inside — whose skin is made of the portraits of our loved ones — being milked by slimy advertisers.

This way of traversing the internet could put us in a similarly aware situation of the predatory attention and economic models as Keiichi Matsuda’s video Hyper-Reality does. The infinite scroll would becomes an even more boring trudge as we have to wade our way through the quagmire of images, adverts, articles, videos, games and pop up messages.

Another example of this platform architecture is the Sophomore 2020 interactive virtual exhibition. When downloaded you can travel from space to space; from grand architectures to seemly dank spaces top lit by diffused celestial beams of light appearing from a room with a never ending ceiling. How this effects the “display” of art and design for me, at least, isn’t the juicy part. It provides access at a time when its forbidden, and that’s enough for now.

Sophomore 2020 Student Exhibition

But Delany observes that “The human eye in 2020 however is layered with several digital devices which visitors take with them into the exhibition space, such as their smartphones” and “In order to respond to those new modes of reception and perception, museums often adopt these devices as part of their visitor experience and introduce apps or camera filters in their physical spaces to support this contemporary way of looking at things”. This has become internalised as our analogue experience now influences the way in which our digital sphere is designed.

Maybe we’ve been looking at it from the wrong way, and this pandemic has given us a chance to start walking through the web. We should push to explore these new renders and become rambling digital dilettantes, stopping to take in the view and pondering why there’s a well trodden footpath between a QAnon Facebook group, Olgino and the White House.

As I wrote this I received an email inviting me to “Step into ‘Gauguin and the Impressionists’ online” at the Royal Academy in London. There was no stepping involved. Simply clicking and watching an HD video of the exhibition space with a Star Wars-like animated text travelling across the screen.

This is not where we should be or even thinking about going. So let’s look to the Netherlands and the thinking of Delany Boutkan, and to the Polish-Japanese Academy to wonder and experience what it could be like to be aware in the internet.