INTRODUCTION
Art exhibition has been through major changes since the emergence of the World Wide Web. Galleries and museums have been active players in the forming of new modes of cultural consumption and participation online while technology companies like Google invest in online platforms for digital exhibition (Google Art Project). From virtual exhibitions and online archives to multimedia applications like games and 3D, cultural organizations are learning to utilize the best digital technology has to offer in order to expand their reach and become more competitive. Social media in the beginning of 2000s allowed for new exhibition practices that were no longer associated with art exhibition as an event but rather as a condition. Free and open posting, sharing, curating and publishing has become a reality through these platforms. Entire social networks like pinterest, instagram and flickr are open exhibition spaces available for mass consumption anywhere and anytime. Physical or digital artworks are designed to fit in this online exhibition (photographs, videos etc.) while internet and post-internet art is designed online and for online exhibition (often for both virtual and physical spaces (Vierkant, Image Objects)).
The digitization of art exhibition has resulted in a massive shift on how we evaluate art, since much of today’s art success depends on reach and popularity (Arora and Vermeylen 206). Online, every artwork has an audience to find. Follower culture makes audience engagement easier and interaction between artists and audiences instant. An artist’s follower can have direct access to the artist’s work and progress and either approve or disapprove by altering her social network relationship (ex. Friend/unfriend, follow/unfollow, participate by commenting & sharing/not participating). Artists can have instant feedback on their work and themselves by using network and website analytics, effectively treating themselves and their work as brands. The artist becomes a public persona (famous artist Ai Weiwei has 288K Twitter and 146K Instagram followers), selfies, social updates, commentary are few of the tools used by artists in order to engage with and expand their audience, popularity and status. Exposure means popularity, bigger audiences and more possibilities of financially surviving the hard reality of the art world. The above results to a confusion as to what art exhibition entails today, who is involved and where and when it takes place.
I attempt to examine these phenomena, behaviors and interactions from both a technical and theoretical understanding. Often art research fails to examine the technical and systemic characteristic of the medium through which art is being mediated and the apparatus through which art is being systematized. The internet is not simply “open” or “closed” but above all a form that is modulated. Information does flow but it does so in a highly regulated manner (Thacker xix). As Bowker et al. argue, these embedded technological frames are often invisible to perceive in social systems such as the art world; hence to genuinely comprehend its impact, it involves the unfolding of ‘the political, ethical, and social choices that have been made throughout its development’ (Bowker et al. 99; Arora and Vermeylen 6). This falls under a wider discussion of how the social and the political are not external to technology and of how technological developments (research, design, use, distribution, marketing, naturalization, consumption) affect and/or determine all aspects of social life (Thacker xi).
EXHIBITION AS AN EVENT AND AS A CONDITION
Traditionally art exhibition is understood as an event. It takes time and resources, it requires preparation by the artist/s, venue, and curator/s, it has a lifespan of a set time and it has an afterlife through documentation, evaluation/critique, reflection, impact, publication and archive. Exhibitions can be reproduced or travel yet their spatiotemporal lives are limited by physical and logistical laws. Such art exhibitions constitute some of the major events (Biennale, Documenta etc.) in the art world and produce great revenue for cultural organizations and institutions. The life span of art exhibitions though has been massively affected by Web 2.0. Escaping the limitations of the physical world, art can be exhibited and accessed anywhere, anytime and by anyone. The whole wide web is available for exhibition, it is an open venue for both art and artists, servicing some of the traditional purposes of art exhibition like communication, audience reaching, cultural exchange and discourse, popularity and of course sales. Time, space, accessibility and audience participation are some of the major changes of how art is being exhibited online but in order to understand what makes art exhibition today a constant condition, I will briefly discuss here two specific effects of online interactions, the mixed reality effect and the bandwagon effect.
THE MIXED REALITY EFFECT
As technological innovations continue to extend our notion of the visible experience we now recognize ourselves as both the observer and the observed on a constant basis and we often understand this as a requirement for belonging. At the same time our notion of what is a visible experience has massively changed as visibility now belongs to both physical and virtual realms. These experiences are taking place in very distinct spaces online, that are both controlled public spaces and monitored private spaces – neither public nor private, neither here or there, they are heterotopic as Foucault describes them or interstitial spaces as Paul Virilio describes them. These spaces are what we call non-space. Originally these non-spaces refer to spaces one travels rather than inhabits. These are airports, hotel lobbies, shopping malls etc. Today non-space can describe the public/private, physical/virtual, instant/past and future spaces of online interactions. Heteropic, interstitial and non-spaces theories, fall under the more generic concept of the mixed-reality effect.
Mixed-reality ideas and theories are the results of a greater confusion in post-modern and contemporary years around time, space, public sphere, individuality and community that emerged through the online technologies of WEB 1.0 and WEB 2.0. Physical and digital events have merged into a cluster, while artists, curators and organizations have lost control over the lifespan of exhibitions through the uncontrollable reproduction of posts, photos and information that social media sharing allowed. Originally, mixed reality was used to describe the merging of real and virtual worlds that produce new environments where physical and digital objects co-exist (Ohta and Tamura 6). Today mixed reality theory is used in order to explore various phenomena of co-existing in both physical and virtual spaces. In Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code (139), all reality is mixed reality which means that instead of thinking of our digital identity and our real-space/physical identity as two separate things, today we understand reality as a fluid space of both virtual and physical; both states are equally real and exist as one. This mixed reality condition challenges the spatiotemporal constrains of experiencing art exhibition – amongst other things – as an event. We could argue that as reality is a condition, a state of things, today’s mixed reality is also a condition which escapes the boundaries of the physical world and allows for new understandings of our experiences. These new conditions are the result of the specificity of the digital computer, the internet and the web as a medium, a medium with its own protocols and networks that needs to be examined as such.
THE NETWORK EFFECT
Networked society’s online culture and its compulsory characteristics of exhibiting ones work, actions and value by constantly sharing and participating in an effort to stay relevant, become formal measurements of effectiveness. If everyone is part of the networked society and you are not, how can you form connections, be visible and get noticed? If you can’t form connections, be visible and get noticed how can you affect change? It is a matter of scale. The medium’s ability of reaching massive audiences together with the systemic characteristic of network effectiveness based on popularity creates a network effect and a bandwagon effect. For example, the more people already use a social network the higher is the chance that more people will start using it as well (Bandwagon Effect). This results to social networks becoming extremely valuable to individuals and communities as the more people use them the more valuable they become to each user (Network Effect). Thus, chances of being effective are higher within a medium used by everyone.
Even if someone is targeting a niche audience, audience members are more likely to participate and engage with ones work in a familiar environment (like facebook) where the platform, its looks, feel and functions require no extra effort of environmental adjustment. Consequently, cultural interactions in such environments create a positive first impression since this is where people would expect to come across something relevant to their cultural preferences (by targeted advertisement and curation algorithms). Finally, this is where people can publicly exhibit their action/participation to someone’s work by joining events or by commenting and liking (actions that will later appear on their wall), fulfilling this way their part of exhibiting activity and participation. Other social networks like instagram, flickr, youtube etc. allow for similar behaviors within their systems, structures and environments. This network effect makes acting outside these platforms a very hard choice.
CONCLUSION
Remaining active, sharing and participating become measures of value for sociality, popularity, work and impact to the level of excess. At the same time acts of artistic exhibition online, add to this constant condition of making and receiving information for cultural consumption within mixed reality conditions. Social and behavioral norms along with systemic characteristics of the digital medium like protocols, software, applications and its commercial character become the gatekeepers of how we evaluate and interact with art today.
As more and more artists and cultural organizations become active participants in online environments and as more and more novel art spaces emerge online, we need to examine the conditions under which the art world is changing including the ways of exhibiting art. The art world online is being transformed into a network within a network. Further research is necessary in order to examine the impact and significance of the new technological developments on the art world and the massive changes in its hierarchies, knowledge production and valuation systems, and of course its exhibition practices and conditions.
Above all, our very short experience of life with the internet reveals issues of digital reproduction, digital mediation, digital surveillance and a generalized application of systemization. Our communication practices, our language, our image, our creativity and culture including art, is being mediated and systematized to fit online. This can liberate and/or restrain us at the same time but it certainly won’t leave us the same.
WORKS CITED
Arora, Payal., Vermeylen Filip. “The End of the Art Connoisseur? Experts and Knowledge Production in the Visual Arts in the Digital Age”, p. 6, p.206 Information, Communication & Society, 194-214, Routledge, 2013. Print
Bowker, Geoffrey C., Baker, Karen., Millerand, Florence., Ribes, David., “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment”, International Handbook of Internet Research, pp. 97-117, Springer Netherlands, 2010. Print
Foucault, Michel. ”Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias”, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite Journal, 1984. Print
Google Art Project, 2011 – ongoing https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project
Hansen, Mark B N. Bodies in Code, p.139, Routledge, 2006. Print
Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. City of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication (Print, Web, Film etc.).
Ohta, Yuichi.,Tamura, Hideyuki. Mixed Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds, p.6, Springer, 1999. Print
Thacker, Eugene.”Protocol Is as Protocol Does”, p. xi, p. xix, Galloway, Alexander R., Protocol, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. Print
Vierkant, Artie. Image Objects, 2011 – ongoing.,http://artievierkant.com/imageobjects.php
Virilio, Paul. Negative Horizon An Essay in Dromoscopy, Continuum, 2005. Print
Excessive research 
October 26, 2015 at 10:09 am
Dear Elisavet,
I found your text very intersting. It highlights some crucial aspects, and I hope you will elaborate on these at the workshop. I am very interested in what kinds of implications this have for the artworks. Of course this is a big question, and it might manifest itself in all sorts of ways. I am especially thinking about the recent Ai Weiwei “social media project” about the LEGO group’s refusal to let him use their bricks for a ‘political’ artwork. Would in be possible to analyze this ‘happening’ in the light of your theoretical framework? As you mentioned the mixed reality and the artist as having a ‘public’ role I though this would be an interesting case.
See you soon,
Marie Louise
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October 26, 2015 at 5:49 pm
Hi Elisavet
There are several aspects of your research I find engaging. I am particularly interested in your point about recognising ourselves as both observer and observed and this as a requirement for belonging. Elizabeth Grosz describes, ‘To see, then, is also, by implication, to be seen. Seeing entails having a body that is itself capable of being seen, that is visible’. Belonging and embodiment being so closely connected I have explored these ideas in tandem, most recently in relation to hearing and ‘being heard’. The experience of being heard I would describe as an experience of belonging. I look forward to hearing more about notions of the visible in your research, how this might shifts when it does not directly related to the bodily, and of belonging in the context of the digital. Non-spaces or interstitial spaces seem to occupy many of the papers here, and it will be good to discuss the art world online as a network within a network, whether inhabiting this structure is overly problematic or productive, or perhaps, very likely, both.
Look forward to meeting you, thanks and best, Lyndsay
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October 27, 2015 at 10:15 am
Hi Elisavet
A really interesting area.
would be useful to identify some examples of the key concepts – internet and post-internet art in particular, to give us a feeling of the kinds of work being made and how it has changes how we think of the art exhibition. something like: http://mon3y.us/ for example…
It seems like this article is primarily about the internet and art exhibitions – which is a narrower (and perhaps more manageable) category than the general evolution of exhibitions, which would have to take in interaction design and suchlike. Perhaps would be useful to think of web-based exhibitions/works – including those that have taken place on a social media platform, those that are self-contained websites, and those that take place in Second Life etc. and use the theoretical categories you have there to unpack them?
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October 27, 2015 at 2:15 pm
I just came across this review also, which might be of interest: http://www.furtherfield.org/features/reviews/plantoid-blockchain-based-art-makes-itself
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October 28, 2015 at 2:49 pm
this looks very interesting also… http://accessions.org/article/saga-v1-0/
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October 31, 2015 at 12:48 pm
Dear Elisavet, thx for sharing!
I find the mixed reality effect very interesting to analyze online-offline circuit of subjectivity and to tackle the very meaning of the interaction reality/ virtuality. For some years now, I’ve been getting the impression that Google and the net are paradoxically becoming the conditions of existence of the real word, and not vice versa. The way Google operates affirms this new principle of existence: I exist if I am googable, that is, if the algorithms which operate Google indexing are able to trace me, thus turning me into a thing other than the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa, and converting me, one might say, in a res googable. Being a res googable has interesting implications from the point of view of my own experience of the world, for Google, thus, becomes synonymous with reality and new grund (ground).
I’m interested in discussing more this framework in relation to your understanding of the consequence of the mixed reality effect.
Looking forward to meet you!
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November 3, 2015 at 3:18 pm
Your reference to the webpage with the Broken Net Art reminds me of Tobias Revell’s blog/Tumblr on Internet of Things (IoT) without functioning servers: “only if they resulted in bricked iot devices” and “The Thing is there, but the Internet has gone. A blog of Things.” (Tobias Revell): http://formerinternetofthings.tumblr.com
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November 5, 2015 at 7:45 am
Thanks Elisavet for your presentation. It was really interesting to see your ideas illustrated so well by examples, and your articulation of internet searches shifting a user’s idea of what they thought they were looking for.
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November 5, 2015 at 10:50 am
ehy elisabeth, here few more things from the notes i took during group conversation
– rhizome in nyc
– further field in london
– comments over “not found”, what’s now visible online is not just a place holder of the art piece but the art piece itself, an autonomous digital object
– comments about need to precise terminology what type of exhibition and artwork
– kristoff mentioning post net and net art as very different domains and reminds of net art pieces exhibited offline (check documenta 10). he also problematize presenting jodi beside image of one of his work in relation to is iconological attitude.
– comments about making history of exhibition online
– cornelia proposes to settle confusion about exhibition format thinking of their “being on display”
– pablo reflects over archive, real artwork, online exhibition space and passivity of classic art fruition opening to some previous comments about how much you want to deal with the spectators side of the story.
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November 5, 2015 at 11:59 am
It occurs to me that it would be useful to describe what conditions refer to more specifically, and then perhaps how the logic of network applies, how curators are gatekeepers who apply certain sets of protocols and procedures that are machinic in character. Galloway and Thacker’s writing connects to this, and their idea of networked-sovereignty that might be applied to curating. If you use the term exhibition, it might be useful to define this more carefully as was suggested by Joasia – and then how this is transformed. And concerning Al Wei Wei, and other high profile artists, how they operate as exhibitionists (in a Freudian sense).
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November 5, 2015 at 12:23 pm
Hi Elisavet, and thank you for a rich text, full of ideas and questions. A comment that perhaps relates to your research project as such – rather than this text that focuses on the context of this workshop.
You hint to some of the organizational challenges that the ‘art world’ is currently faced with. This is not my home pitch, but some thoughts anyway. What is “the art world? Is there one art world? I wonder what the purpose of an exhibition is, and do the art worlds perceive this differently? Museums, and Art spaces (to my awareness) have different views on their role in democracy – one being more educational/providing knowledge – the other being concerned with the democratization of art. These different perspectives seem to have quite an influence on the organization of the institution (their politics, audiences, funding, leadership, etc.) How do the online exhibition platforms position themselves in this? And how does their view on the exhibition affect the inner operations as institutions (e.g. who they include/exclude etc.)?
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November 5, 2015 at 2:04 pm
A potential reference to weigh against the example of Ai Weiei
http://hyperallergic.com/251034/why-im-amassing-an-army-of-fake-facebook-followers/
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November 5, 2015 at 2:39 pm
Hi Elizavet, I have plenty of thoughts to share with you. I think our research converges on a lot of points, and the idea of the ‘mixed reality’ principle seems (to my mind) analogous in a lot of ways to Hito Steyerl’s ‘Internet Condition,’ which I write extensively about in my thesis. I think the essay I refer to here is Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? in which Steyerl writes of how the Internet now persists as ‘a mode of life’ more than a technology or media: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/
‘Exhibition as condition’ is a very interesting concept: it suggests a form of visuality that expresses the dominant social imaginary of its time. I’m suggesting that the ‘exhibition form’ has absorbed/is reflecting a more generalised social condition alike to Hito Steyerl’s ‘Internet Condition’: in which the Internet is no longer an interface but an environment, wherein images have become “nodes of energy and matter.” Steyerl writes that the Internet has now acquired a spatial dimension, that online images and data are “transitioning beyond screens into a different state of matter,” matter that manifests in the material world with real social, political and economic effects. From this point of view the Internet/online life directly influences the trajectory of events in the material world. An ‘Internet condition’ is a condition that normalises mass surveillance, data capture and other forms of social control through technological means and life is lived under conditions of “maximum control coupled with intense conformism.”. Where a industrial social order was shaped by the liner temporality and clear hierarchies of the factory assembly line, a social order based on an ‘Internet condition’ is characterised by fractured and dispersed temporalities, and by the activity of networking.
Your description of ‘artist as brand,’ with the example of Ai Weiwei, fits into this projective model of an ‘Internet condition’ shaping exhibition practices and forms of artistic expression. I relate this to what Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski have called ‘the new spirit of capitalism,’ a networked spirit of capitalism that prioritizes constant activity, projects and the extension of the network: the proliferation of connections. Activity generates projects, transient forms of action that go on to extend the network through the proliferating connections that it creates. Those not attached to projects, who are ‘inactive,’ or who fail to forge new links and proliferate connections across the network are threatened with exclusion. Informational advantages equate to social and economic privileges, and are not distributed equally along the network.
I also suggest that it is not just the life-span of exhibitions that has been effected by Web 2.0, but also the temporalities governing art production and reception. Network time is instantaneous, on-demand, just-in-time: what McLuhan has termed an “all inclusive now-ness” (in Understanding Media). This particular temporality is modeled shaped by the rhythms of the network mode of production that operates in ‘real-time,’ using big data and market analytics to respond and adapt dynamically to changing demands and market conditions, which has a knock-on effect of accelerating the cycles of production. Silicon-Valley business guru Kevin Kelly, in his ’new rules for the new economy,’ writes that “If you’re not in real time, you’re dead…in the network economy, only signals in real time (or close to it) are truly meaningful.”
Brian Holmes writes about ‘The Flexible Personality’ of the network world, a particular type of subjectivity that’s privileged by the network form. http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en
Productivity is dissolved into activity in general, and becomes as much about the production and development of oneself as the production of commodities/artworks/commodity artworks. The logic of the network becomes “an internalised vocation,” a calling to self-fulfillment on the part of the worker, who is “becomes the manager of his or her own self-gratifying activity,” the activity of creating the self-as-brand. Linking back to my own paper, I think we can construct an argument that one possible ‘escape route’ from this alienating activity of self-production and self-marketing may be the exhibition of exhaustion, or ‘exhaustion as condition’ ..?
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