Page 159 - The Black Box Book

W HA T R E AL L Y HA S
HAPPENED AND WHAT TO DO NOW?

At the time of writing this text, I kept going back to the questions: What
do we mean when we talk about public space today? And how can
connectivity and sustainability play a role in a world that has drastically,
although temporarily, shifted online?
I then started to look at the approaches of several independent
curators that had already been operating online and came across strate-
gies that helped me to think through these questions, and the feel-
ing of doom I felt towards the future of the field of curatorial work on
the web. Beside Greencube.gallery, whose stance I found refreshing, in
that they suspended their activities online under the banner “URL is not
enough” during the lockdown, I looked at the work of Emotional Interfaces
(2019–). Curated by Virginie Tan and Astrid Lours-Riou, the platform
was born from the following question: How do digital interfaces shape
emotional behaviours? If pre-pandemic, their focus was on creating web-
based exhibitions that could act as a “world where one can get lost”
(Lours-Riou & Tan, 2021) and moved away from the seamlessness and
user-friendliness of the ubiquitous digital services, during the pandemic
Tan and Lours-Riou’s approach changed. They decided to address their
audience directly on the walls of an exhibition venue in Paris (France) with
the exhibition UNCERTAINTY-19 x EP7 (2020). Being confronted with
the steep increase of online activities, they decided to explore the idea of
the interface by giving life to a sort of a physical “Twitter mural”
(Lours-Riou & Tan, 2021) to be experienced by passers-by in the period
between the two lockdowns in Paris. As a complement to the exhibition
that would not be accessible to everyone in real life, the curators doc-
umented it online by mimicking mainstream communication channels,
whereby the documentation of the artworks was accompanied by inter-
views with artists, which used intimate language to discuss their works
and feelings, such as “How do you feel?” and “How was the year for you?”.
While there are many more examples, one that I would like to men-
tion is the service platform common.garden (2020–) conceived by artist
Constant Dullaart that was used for a series of online exhibitions curated
by institutions such as Upstream Gallery (USA) and HMKV Hartware
MedienKunstVerein (Germany). The platform allowed audiences to en-
counter other people while navigating an exhibition space in which they
could literally bump into each other while viewing artworks and have con-
versations. This setting provided an intimate yet cheerful and meaningful
way of nurturing connections and exchanges in an online space beyond
chats and messages.
These few projects which do not do justice to other valuable inde-
pendent endeavours, are to me an example of context-specific curating.
They are examples of exhibitions that moves beyond the technological,
Figure 9, 10: IN TOUCH — Exhibition Viewing mode (2020).
that is the way a medium works and the possibilities inherent to its use, to Retrieved from https://www.artintouch.in/about/. Screenshot of web page from 2020.
embrace the social context in which such medium evolves — in this case,
158 159