Get your own House in Order: Curating the Digital
A while ago I was browsing the website for The Whitworth, an art gallery in Manchester, doing research for an old exhibition of theirs when a tab holding the Digital side of their collection caught my eye. Clicking on the link reveals some recorded zoom discussion sessions, podcasts, audiobooks and some virtual exhibitions.
I’ve long been interested in the concept of the virtual exhibition, an idea that I feel is only ever vaguely described and seems to be the source of much trepidation for curators, collection managers and marketing officers alike. During my MA (Arts Management and Heritage Studies, thanks for asking) I began to unpick what it means for a museum to embrace the digital, referring to the online space as another ‘room’ in which visitors can explore, learn and begin to form new connections. I am of the belief that this room must offer equivalent opportunities to any regular museum exhibition room, but it should not be the same, employing the same techniques in the same way using the same information.
Virtual exhibitions are a masterclass in variety, at their best wrapping curation, storytelling and appropriate use of digital elements into a cohesive and educational experience. The internet is endless, and opportunities, when harnessed properly, are abundant. This is a terrifying prospect. But it’s also incredibly exciting.
So I decided to see how The Whitworth curates a virtual exhibition. It turns out that the gallery takes a literal approach, presenting their exhibitions online through a matterport (a spatial mapping programme I’ve seen used before when nosing upmarket flat listings). I explored Althea McNish: Colour is mine. When ‘entering’ the exhibition, visitors can see a bird's eye view of the space, though the quality resembles early 00’s PS2-like graphics. To set foot on the ground and move around visitors must click on certain prompt buttons akin to the Google maps street view function, but navigation is clumsy and often overshoots. The graphics don’t improve much and while some objects in the space can be clicked to provide further information in the form of a bland text-filled pop up, this is not exhaustive.
A display in Colour is Mine. These objects did not come with an ‘explore more’ option.
All images in the space are at best difficult and at worst impossible to make out and in particular displays placed on tables are entirely incomprehensible for digital viewers, consequently giving the further information provided with them an almost mocking tone. The extra information does not include a high resolution image, and at no point is alt-text or similar adopted to help aid context. Two dresses in the middle of the exhibition come with a 3D image of the display model in the garment, but mostly you have to wonder what the point was at all.
Note - Albrecht Dürer's material world, another past exhibition at the Whitworth differs in that visitors are able to zoom in the displayed works, and some labels are accompanied by audio description, narration or a high resolution image. Again not all works are afforded such details.
At best, I would make the argument that this would be helpful as a tool to preview the exhibition in the space if you were planning a visit and thus could be rolled out as an accessibility tool. The choices made here leave me with questions: why are only some images given accessible labels, and why not include an image so viewers can understand what the labels refer to? If you cannot provide context for all images in a virtual exhibition, perhaps you should consider why so many images were used? A matterport documents a space, but it is mostly used for real estate and property listings and is not reliable for documenting exhibitions. It occurs that perhaps curators were hemmed in by the exhaustive floor plan, which meant that all objects could be ‘viewed’ digitally but there was neither time nor budget to translate all the pieces to an appropriate digital form, resulting in the half-finished vibe of the current iteration. Counterproductive as it may seem, creating a new space for virtual exhibitions can allow curators to edit their physical exhibition down to the ‘highlights’ to avoid such complications. It is always worth remembering that those pesky visitors will skim, not read, making this slimlining even more pertinent.
Going over the Whitworth’s virtual exhibition catalogue made me curious to see how other institutions harnessed the opportunities presented in the digital to display their objects in alternative exhibitions.
Online exhibitions take a myriad of forms. The National Museum of Women in the Arts curates an entire online exhibition programme, sitting separately on their website from ‘Current’ or ‘Upcoming’ exhibitions as a medium in its own right. The exhibitions offer further content for physical exhibitions or some, like The Book as Art series explores items from the collection of over 1000 artist books held by the institution, and gives visitors a chance to explore objects that might otherwise be inaccessible.
One object per page for The Book as Art.
The exhibition is presented as one image of the object alongside text adapted from objects labels for an exhibition shown in 2007, reusing old content in a new form. The layout is reminiscent of traditional exhibition design, though adapted for an online medium with only one object viewable at a time - the introspection this could garner is hampered however by the fact that the image is static, not even able to zoomed in on, leaving viewers unable to ‘interact’ with the object. A shame when the objects are so fantastically detailed and unusual. This mirrors the physical museum, which doubtless would encase such objects in glass, but considering the interactive medium of the objects it’s a shame more is not made of the possibilities present to engage the visitor. Perhaps more images of the books from different angles, or even a video of a curator opening the books to show how they are constructed, would add vitality and context for visitors. It is also bizarre that instead of scrolling down to see each object, visitors must scroll up, no one’s first instinct.
An exhibition which takes great advantage of multimedia online is Gods in Colour, an online counterpart to a travelling exhibition of the same name, first shown at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt. Text and images blink into existence as visitors scroll down the page, the design bold and colourful and consistent with the content within. The exhibition details the long-faded but rich polychromy of ancient statues of Greece, a far cry from the white effigies we see today. The interactivity of the digital exhibition plays into this, and visitors are able to swipe across images to see what they would have looked like compared to their current form, and the exhibition misses no chance to employ dynamic movement, interactive elements and audio or video files to maximise visitor engagement. I particularly enjoyed one element that positioned ‘find out more’ shapes across an image that when clicked pulled up completely new information and images about the conservation process.
However, like The Book as Art, visitors are unable to access a central navigation system and must scroll indeterminately up and down the page to access older information. This is particularly frustrating as the exhibition is divided into deep dives on one statue at a time, which could have easily been pulled into a small navigation bar. Again this is particularly pertinent when you consider an average person’s attention span, already arguably shorter than a goldfish’s, and how it keeps getting lower. Strong, clear navigation would add further longevity to this marvellous online exhibition. Regardless, Gods in Colour is a great showcase of how to make the digital medium work with your exhibition content.
Then of course there are exhibitions made up of only the digital, unable to exist anywhere but through our screens. One such example is the Panther Modern, a fully file-based digital space. This white cube digital exhibition venue allots one ‘room’ to each displayed digital artist to do with as they please. The confines are then stretched, expanded, painted in chrome or plunged into darkness. Anything is possible and each of the seventeen rooms is accessible by clicking on an artist's name or on any room on the digital floor map on the About page. The shape of the space changes as each new room is added, demonstrating the fluidity of the digital format. Of course total digitality is not completely reliable, one room on the floor map leads to a broken code screen, unless of course this is the art, but somehow I don’t think so.
Room 8 by Kim Laughton, 2015.
The rooms are presented through ten large images focusing on different angles or close ups of the space. Some are accompanied by background music. These pictures are the only way to view the space, and are therefore dictated by what the artist wants to be shown, no text accompanies the images so no reason if given. The visitor is left to wonder how such decisions were made and if they are perhaps also part of the narrative of the work. In this way the Panther Modern itself becomes art along with the work it displays. An online exhibition immediately becomes an archive upon publication, and it is interesting to see how Panther Modern retains freshness by keeping its site flexible.
The best online exhibitions lean into the digital medium, shirking the layout and often the content in the original exhibition to fully embrace its new medium. The removal of direct human contact with works or objects necessitates the substitution of a wealth of digital outreach opportunities which would be more difficult, more expensive or simply impossible in a physical format. Online exhibitions should entreat digital visitors to become onsite visitors by demonstrating care and passion for the presentation they can find online. We as curators must be cognizant of the tools at our disposal in different mediums and work with them, rather than stick to the binary of another at the expense of visitor engagement.
So how would we curate an online exhibition that is meant to be experienced in tandem with the exploration of a physical space? Join me as we explore the process of creating a virtual exhibition.
Welcome to the first of the ‘There’s no place like home…’ blog series, documenting the development of Facing Staircase House, an online exhibition in unofficial collaboration with Staircase House, a heritage property in the North West of England. Follow along to discover how the exhibition unfolds, from conception to curation and even design.
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