Pictures in Pixels
Steel industrial parts suspended from concrete ceilings, small clay figurines set against a background of three large canvases covered with Pollock-esque splatter, a bare side room empty except for three mounted monitors playing a loop of different angles of a running roller coaster ride in South Korea. It was a Sunday morning and I was sitting in a cubicle in my college library, clicking through images from the Songs for Sabotage exhibit for the 2018 Triennial at the New Museum in New York City. What was I looking at?
It was the early spring of my sophomore year, and I had declared my major in Art History just two weeks before. I couldn’t help but doubt my choice, as I sat dumbfounded, staring through a computer screen at a stack of aluminum steel frames covered in melted copper that was oozing and bubbling over the front. Was this a representation for something? A metaphor? I felt intimidated and unequipped. The assignment for my Contemporary Art class was intended to be simple: spend some time with and formulate a review of the New Museum's Triennial Songs for Sabotage exhibition. Easy enough, right?
For the 2018 Triennial the New Museum invited emerging artists from all over the world to explore the connections between new and traditional forms of media and the social structures which institutionalize exclusion, inequity and racism. New Museum Director, Lisa Phillips, in her comments for the exhibition catalogue, explained, “through their distinctive approaches, the artists in ‘Songs for Sabotage’ offer models for dismantling and replacing the various systems of power that envelop today’s global youth.”
Since I missed the Museum trip, I was anxious about my review assignment. This was until I discovered the “digital tour” option, and promptly clicked on the page. As I virtually “rotated” around each room, I was amazed by how realistic, how accessible the simulated exhibit was. I could click on any work of art and its details would immediately pop up alongside the zoomed-in image.
It felt as though I had access to all of the museum’s information, right at my fingertips and the idea left me feeling excited and empowered. Excited by the opportunity to tap into the museum’s impressive surplus of online resources at my leisure, and empowered by the way technology had connected me to the work from home. I had the chance to investigate whether this digital simulation would be able to capture and recreate the intimate, emotional experience of art viewership that made me fall in love with art in the first place. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I would be using the same digital platforms that would eventually go on to play a paramount role in the continued engagement between many museums and art organizations and the public during the pandemic.
As a millennial, born into the blossoming age of the World Wide Web, I have always lived with technology. Digital platforms like search engines and social media have influenced my understanding of the world and provided me with an essential means of communication with friends and family across the globe. I’ve been able to tour college campuses from my living room, effectively collaborate with classmates on projects and assignments, connect with professors anywhere in the world, find the perfect banana bread recipe, explore and apply to internship opportunities, and virtually participate in my own college graduation. In fact, if I’m honest about it. I could probably say that technology is at the very center of my life. As a millennial that’s not shocking or strange or unusual.
Skimming through The New York Times headlines on my phone each morning, receiving streamlined news updates from online newspapers like The Skimm, and tuning into podcast episodes like “The Journal” and “The Daily” has provided me with a sense of meaningful and informed engagement with the unpredictable, evolving world around me.
As a generation, we’ve seen technology adapt, grow and shift over the past 20 [plus] years. We’ve seen phones become smaller, the internet faster, and social and mobile communication increasingly reliable in most parts of the world. The millennial generation (defined as those between the ages of 23 to 38) has grown to surpass boomers as the largest US population group, totaling 72.1 million people as of 2019. By the end of this year it is projected 41% of the global population will be 24 years old or younger, and by 2025, millennials are expected to comprise three-quarters of the global workforce.
A number of times during quarantine, I found myself thinking back to that experience with virtual reality and the powerful artworks of Songs for Sabotage. I’d be FaceTiming with my grandmother or Zooming with a professor or watching a video tutorial of how to handle sourdough starter and I’d start thinking about how critical technology is for keeping us both sane and connected during the pandemic. I realize it may sound very “millennial” to say I don’t think we could have done it without technology, but I don’t think we could have done it without technology. At least not the way we’ve made it through so far.
As the anatomy of public spaces has been evaluated and analyzed during the past four months in planning for the return to public life, art museums and galleries have been the subject of much debate and innovation. During quarantine, the identity of the art museum in general has been reimagined as public access to indoor shared spaces has been put on pause. Art organizations faced the challenge of maintaining the intimate, shared experiences and interactions between people and art that define them, with all the restrictions required for public safety. This is where technology comes in.
While there have been notable gallery and museum experiments with digital interactive experiences for years - think the Detroit Institute of Arts’ (DIA’s) Lumin 3-D mapping technology introduced in 2017 and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s (CMA’s) Art Lens Studio or what was billed as the world’s first digital art museum, the Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Japan, created by the art collective TeamLab with the intent of building a borderless environment for art exhibition accessible to everyone.
However, many museums and artistic organizations are still playing catch-up when it comes to technology and the pandemic created an urgency no one could have anticipated.
The pressure placed upon the art world by COVID to quickly embrace digital tools such as virtual and augmented reality, live video, social media engagement, app enabled interactions, crowdsourcing, and data modeling to determine audience behavior has actually given new life to some initiatives museums had been thinking about but weren’t able to tackle with their limited resources.
Here are two local examples that make for a fun diversion and examples of what the technology can offer:
Peabody Essex Museum’s virtual tours.
Virtual tour of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum on Google Arts & Culture.
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston never fails to innovate when it comes to adapting to change. Over the past few months, the ICA has capitalized on the opportunity to create greater online experiences by releasing new programming to maintain public engagement across their web and social media channels. They mobilized the trending hashtag #MuseumFromHome and created the personalized #ICAFromHome tag on their Instagram profile. This links to some of the museum’s most popular works and installations previously on view in galleries only. They included releases of weekly streamed programs such as “Friday Art Note” highlights and “Behind the Scenes” interviews with exhibited artists on IGTV, created virtual playdates for children and families and hosted Freedom Fête, a Virtual Juneteenth Celebration.
They’ll even be making their annual gala virtual this year featuring artists/designer Virgil Abloh of Off-White and LA based artist Sterling Ruby.
Museums are not the only art institutions capitalizing upon the new opportunities in technology in light of the COVID shutdown. When the Frieze New York Art Fair got word that they would not be able to host their annual event in May, they moved fast and leapt over the pandemic’s roadblock, launching an online edition of the fair. Through the newly launched digital initiative, “Frieze Viewing Room”, more than 200 galleries were able to showcase a max of 30 works at this year's fair in a virtual gallery space. By utilizing augmented reality, the Frieze’s technological advancement provided their artists and visitors the ability to view various works of art, sculpture, and photography to scale as seen upon the walls of the physical exhibit spaces. Additional resources, such as filmed interviews and performance art videos along with certain search functionalities (such as by artist, price, medium) were available to visitors through the mobile app and web-based platform.
Sure, this is all great, but what about independent collectors? What about local galleries? Oliver Miro, entrepreneur and son of the famous art dealer Victoria Miro, asked himself these same questions. He turned questions into a solution when he founded Vortic XR, an “extended reality platform” created to address the needs of art galleries and collectors by offering exhibition services using virtual and augmented reality and other interactive tools. The London-based company released the program in early May, just in the nick of time for spring exhibition season. The XR platform uses simulation technology so audiences feel as though they are strolling through an exhibition, attending a private viewing at a museum or watching an art fair preview in real time.
Local visionary, curator and owner of Oh! Art Agency, Olivia Ives-Flores, share a similar ethos: to design a more accessible, engaging, and diversified community around art, and to leverage technology for facilitating a discourse around art’s connection to people’s lives. For the past five years, Oh! Art Agency has been increasing its reputation as a hub of Boston’s creative culture and emerging artistic community, through brand collaborations, shows or customized activations with a diverse set of emerging artists and brands.
Oh! is unlike any other agency in Boston and Ives-Flores says she has always had to incorporate the digital into her activations. In a recent project for the architectural and urban planning firm, Sasaki, Oh! partnered with photographer Feda Eid to create REFLECTED, a visual series featuring stunning portraits of local millennial artists. The series was supposed to launch with live events in early May, but lockdown forced the planning team to quickly pivot and find an alternative way of exhibiting. Collaboratively, Oh!, Feda Eid and Sasaki built a virtual viewing room using CAD software and Eid’s photographs. Ives-Flores said many participants actually preferred the virtual experience because of the intimate nature of the access they had to the artist’s explanations.
Despite the constructive and forward-looking innovations made by some art museums, galleries, and fairs, the concept of assimilating digital platforms has not been as readily accepted by other museum directors. One of the central concerns that has arisen amidst this transition into this “new normal” is the question of whether museums will become obsolete in virtual worlds? Is it possible to create and maintain the reciprocal relationships between virtual online and physical museum experiences? And if so, how? These questions are daunting ones, but if there is any business that can find creative ways to continue to serve the public, it’s the art industry. Growing pains synonymous with the introduction of any new technology should be expected, especially when the future identity of learning institutions like museums is at stake.
Visitors experience a virtual reality exhibit at a gallery in Italy. Photo credit, Lucrezia Carnelos.
Art is not only important as a creative platform for the artist’s individuality, thoughts, and emotions but also a means to forging a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in our communities. Art makes us feel, art makes us think, art challenges our assumptions and opens us up to concepts we never otherwise would have encountered. Art teaches valuable lessons, whether we’re standing in front of the real thing or viewing from a computer screen.
Museums are more than just physical buildings, littered with velvet ropes and “do not touch” signs. Museums, galleries, and collections are necessary civic spaces dedicated to collective sharing and meaningful discourse. If there is one thing my generation has demanded of museums, it's a more democratic approach to viewership, programming and curatorial strategy. Digital transformation will obviously take time, but maybe the pandemic has a silver lining - maybe it will speed up some of the integration of technological benefits. Instead of standing in the way of museum’s futures, technology is defining it by making the intellectual experience of art viewership more inclusive and accessible to all online.
Now more than ever, voices need to be used, books need to be read, action needs to be taken in our community’s and our country’s systemic infrastructure needs to be challenged. Art speaks, shares and represents what words cannot, challenging our understanding of our own realities and facilitating discourse through the power of creative expression. As we emerge from quarantine, we will need the arts.
Art has never been confined to galleries, museums or private collections. As artists have always led cultural discourse and defined the zeitgeist, so artists will show the way with technological innovation and modes of display. Photo credit, Mana 5280 on Unsplash.
In such a way, museums have always had an obligation to their community to draw in and educate their audiences, leaving them inspired with a powerful feeling of connection to what they experienced. By establishing these connections and continuing to share pertinent educated messages across to a larger audience, I believe that the influence of art will continue to inspire and incite action for a better tomorrow.
And if artistic expression shared on a digital platform is one way of staying woke, I say why not.
