Page 156 - The Black Box Book

artists and curators operating online took a pause for a reflection, and
other researchers pondered about the state of being online while locked
up inside their homes, the art world often responded uncritically to
the limitations resulting from the pandemic by hurrying to be online, as if
the online sphere was the only way to confront a present devoid of inter-
actions in physical spaces, both public and private ones.
The words of ethnographer Massimo Canevacci in his book Minima
Viralia (2020) are a reminder of the complexities inherent to a day-to-day
life mediated by online channels of communication, as well as a testimony
of the difficulty in dealing with them:
“The dramatic experience that we are living because of the virus is
favouring even more the penetration of the ubiquitous identity into
everyday life. Paradoxically, staying at home, everything that hap-
pens outside involves me and overwhelms me.” (Canevacci, 2020)
The hurry of the institutional art world to be online often fuelled
a sense of bewilderment during that period, both for the sheer number of
different initiatives and for the choices about how to relate to an audience.
While live talks, conferences and seminars fulfilled some of the educa-
tional needs of professionals, researchers as well as artists and students,
a prevailing tendency in exhibition formats was that of replacing what was
Figure 8: Greencube.gallery — Index page
(2017-). Founded by Guido Segni and Matìas Ezequiel
Reyes. Retrieved from https://greencube.gallery/.
Screenshot of index page from 2021.
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unreacheable — the gallery — so that the white cube experience made its
appearance on people’s screen in numerous variations. The temptation of
replicating the experience of viewing art in isolation, instilling a sense of
contemplation without interference from the outside world, gave form to
viewing rooms, 3D rooms and sound-filled navigable spaces. An example
amongst many others is AORA (2020), which, tellingly, was presented
as “a virtual platform that instills a sense of calm and wellbeing through
the curated meeting of art, architecture and music.” (AORA, 2020); or
In Touch (2020–), a collaboration between 13 galleries in India, that was
promoted as “a unique platform […] that enables the art community to con-
nect with each other through organized and synergistic exhibition-making
that challenges traditional formats of engaging with art” (In Touch, 2020)
— during my presentation for the Curating Online symposium I showed
a screenshot of myself sat in a row of white seats in a cinema-like setting;
a feature offered to the audience when browsing the exhibition.
Another trend that came forward quite visibly was live broadcasting,
and not only for educational programmes. Earlier experimentations with live
streams, and the concept of disrupting people’s behaviours and routines
while on their computers, returned in manifold ways. But this time it was
mostly artist’s commissions on platforms like Instagram or artist’s per-
formances streamed on proprietary video platforms, which added little
to the day-to-day lives of audiences whose routines had already been
greatly disrupted by something that was beyond their understanding, and
outside their computers. Following this thread, there was the new exhibi-
tion trend of offering virtual ‘experiences’. This was usually presented in
the form of 3-D worlds for audiences to wonder about while searching for
artworks. Only rarely such projects presented renewed experiences, as in
the instance of the project Screen Walks (2020–), whose curators, Jon
Uriarte and Marco De Mutiis (in a collaboration between the Fotomuseum
Winterthur and The Photographers’ Gallery) presented a programme of
thematic live web journeys by artists and curators.
Although the resilience showed by such initiatives is laudable,
the year 2020 felt more like the end of curatorial experimentation on
the web because the values and ideas that first accompanied operating
in the online environment were rarely taken into consideration — shock
and need most likely played a substantial role in it.
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