expo-facto workshop january 2021

In the EARN Conference “The Postresearch Condition” (26-30 January 2021) a workshop under the heading “expo-facto: into the algorithm of exhibition?” considered the transfer and relay of exhibitionary protocols online. This work is part of a strand of work conducted under the heading “expo-facto.“

The workshop on Friday 29 January features contributions from Prof. Noel Fitzpatrick on “Attention (distraction)“; The Aesthetics Group on “The aesthetics of (dis)play“; and Prof. Carolina Rito on “Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary.”

The brief given to the invited speakers has been to help initiate a discussion on developing research agendas in this space, to contribute to the start of a conversation rather than present developed and finalized research.

Prof. Noel Fitzpatrick indicates some of the possible ways in which the modes of attention and distraction operative in the cultures of digital networked screens might be conceptualized and described. The Aesthetics Group—comprising Cathy O’Carroll, Jeanette Doyle, Dr. Mick O’Hara and Dr. Connell Vaughan—presents aspects of ongoing research into the aesthetics of display and some different aspects of digital display in museological work. Prof. Carolina Rito introduces some questions about the practice of exhibition in general, challenging the presumption that the nature of exhibition in general is already known and that it is only the question of the mobilisation of exhibitionary protocols online that requires consideration.

Based on these contributions, participants in the workshop are then invited to propose questions, themes, issues, observations and sources that might be of relevance in further developing a curatorial research agenda in relation to the question of the exhibitionary and the ascendancy of digital network techno-political regimes.

for the break-out groups

The workshop tasks proposed to the break out groups include:

  • What are the questions and themes that might frame an initial consideration of ‘the exhibition’ and ‘the online’? What might be at stake here? Why might any of this warrant consideration?
  • What are the resources and reference points that might facilitate the framing of the enquiry into these changing practices of the exhibitionary and digital networks? What work has already been accomplished or initiated in this space? What are the terms that might help elaborate study and enquiry in this space?
  • What are the potential pitfalls or mis-steps that might be generated in approaching these themes and questions?

If the workshop participants are willing and interested, the responses to these questions will be shared publicly via this blog. In framing this initial conversation the EARN working group on curatorial enquiry is proposing a temporary space for exchange and dialogue among researchers in this space.

The rapporteur in each break out group is invited to email any notes from their session (on the day of the workshop Friday 28 January 2021) to xwimic(at)gu.se (with “Expo-Facto notes” in the message header) and these will be collated and published on this page on Saturday 29 January 2021.

A follow up event will be organised by the EARN working group later in Spring 2021 to further develop the discussion and share this material.

some material from presenters

Prof. Noel Fitzpatrick slides from the workshop will be available here shortly.

screen attention

Download

The aesthetics group paper will be posted here shortly.

The Aesthetics of [dis]play_EARN2021

Download

workshop responses

These summary notes indicating some of the break-out room discussion topics on January 29th 2021, are provided courtesy of Victoria Jones, Claire Booth-Kurpnieks, Connell Vaughan, Marloeke Vandervlugt Catalin Gheorghe, Lorena Marciuc and Naomi Siderfin who volunteered graciously during the workshop to take outline notes for feedback to the main group.

Among the issues Victoria’s group addressed were:

  • The idea of just moving what was a socially agreed space where we would all gather, trying to move that experiential activity online, divided into individual experience (because of lockdown) was discussed.
  • Conversation between the experiential of the physical space of the exhibition and the experiential of the screen-mediated?
  • Rush to move everything online. Not enough time to think about these changes in experience. Something we were experiencing before can’t survive on screen.
  • Exhibitions are not the only way we engage and produce cultures. What we are not seeing: we’ve been practicing critical practices (for at least 2 decades). The way we enter a bit more situated positionality in terms of the work we do. How this communicates in the outside world. It is not necessarily translated to a different format. Thinking about the makings of those formats.
  • All the work put in that outcome; very complex practices that we should be taking into consideration. How can we accommodate and adapt to those practices so that we are not trapped between the exhibitionary logics of display?
  • Covid-19. Nobody asks people in culture on what we think we can contribute. Institutions of display are being monitored by modes of prestige. They decide on what we can display and what we cannot display. How do we map those complexities.
  • Questions raised: How do you create cartographies of experience without the experience? Certain type of experiential is taken away. Other types of experience are focused.
  • What is experience? Why do we highlight something over something else? Capitalist logic on how to capture that experience, to commodify it. Experience is something that never ceases.
  • Exhibitions tend to work in very different temporalities. It’s kind of a continuum. In terms of mapping, what we’re dealing with is that what’s happening here uses a different vocabulary that allows us to take that as actual material.
  • The digital space: difficulties if you find these straight attempts to put into that. The digital becomes the product or another means of selling or entertaining. The challenge to create works that use the digital space in communication with the physical space. It can’t be a substitute for everything.
  • Digital experience: Not necessarily substitute of the other experience that we want. It’s generating a new mode of communication.
  • What’s happening to our practices with these new sets of conditions? Contrary to what we are told, “we are practicing social proximity of a distance instead of physical distancing” (quoted from Carolina’s conference). There is a dialogue with the intergenerational practices taking place in the 20th century. Group of intellectuals gathered to think of an alternative of the bipolar, the binary structure. Transnational dialogue to think of what that could be. Military structures that pose the binary. What we are doing: the rehearsal of social proximity at a distance. Geographical boundaries. Dialogue with the non-binary global system that was discussed in the 20th century. Dialogue of new political ideologies. There is an asynchronous, intergenerational relationship with those ideas in the past.
  • The materiality of these practices needs to be thought through. Poetic dialogue with continuality.
  • Thinking beyond the national constraints.
  • Taking into consideration these instead of mourning what we lost.
  • Social proximity. We moved online, it’s possible to watch from different countries without needing a passport.
  • Example of a participant: Argentina and looking at things in reproduction but now in a digital form. Accessibility. Look at the painting or something in the flesh. Having a relational aesthetic experience. Not about loss or gaining. Paying attention at what is taken away. Situational experience.
  • Notions of simulation and power relation. Going to the museums to see the actual work. Does the digital become a medium of simulating but keeps the power relations?
  • This experience (discussion around exhibitions) is highly capitalized.
  • You want to be there and say you’ve been there.
  • Reproduction, relationship to the copy. The origin is unfaithful to the copy.
  • Question of dynamics: why is a Spanish museum holding the original holdings of Argentina? Tension: you had the chance to go to Madrid and experience that, what about the expectation and the narrative that we assimilate as being the official, the canon? Cultural propaganda. All is politicized.
  • It’s not about valuing what you have around.
  • Idea of mimesis. Being faithful to the original. Digital experience being a new experience on its own terms. Departing from practicing social proximity.

Among the issues Claire’s group addressed were:

General introductory thoughts/ introduction to our interests:

  • Concern with the rapid transition to online as a solution 
  • Regional and domestic spheres- looking at the hardware and the spaces that host it
  • Opportunity in the absence of cultural capital through the hosting of exhibitions in work that is made for online and communing technologies
  • Online performing- jazz musician: lack of communication, delay playing together, what new forms can a jazz festival take?
  • Can the relationships that people foster for their local cultural organisations and the experiences of artworks physically be translated into an online environment e.g. is familiarity translated onto social media, what of the social interactions and connections formed in and around art objects?
  • Reputation in the art world- online world as a site where meaning and value is produced
  • How in these conditions to educate young artists and researchers to be re-enchanted in a world that is now completely digital, not relying on structures that have come before
  • Technology as something to give people multi sensory experiences of material objects/ handicrafts, could the digitisations of collections become like online shopping where there is no need to go in to the physical buildings anymore?

The conversation can be summarised through a framework of loss & access:

  • What is lost when putting a jazz festival online- problems with economies and local aspect, the buy in from local community and businesses is lost when translated online, there is no need for locals to participate as much. The experience and milieu surrounding the event, the modes of travelling between the historical venues, eating and drinking can’t be replicated online, however the online events can reach much broader audiences. Uncoupling from the local.
  • As a performer there is a lack of connection and/or criticality when performing online, you are unable to receive feedback from the audience or interact with other musicians. The social act of performing is why many musicians practice, if this is not possible then why else would they?
  • Similar in motivation for artists an students whose practices aren’t easily translated into digital work- what are the motivations for making work that can’t be displayed? What are the educational structures that can help young artists to reframe their practices aside from the direct translation of image to screen? What practices are being excluded?
  • Some events are more accessible via zoom, e.g. museum talks and other gallery events, with people attending who would not normally attend in a gallery setting, this can be more accessible for the neurodiverse, or people who do not have access to these cultural events in their local area.
  • There is potentially a loss of criticality in this sphere, more difficult to perceive critical feedback through the screen however the accessibility of hardware and recording allows for resources to circulate more widely. 

Among the issues Marloeke’s group addressed were:

What might be at stake?

Michael O Hara started his research with the archive of the Irish museum of Modern Art, how is the collection archived? Our access was very much via the digital? How is it accessed? The archive – consider the mission, what is present and not present? What are the economics? The technology as way of mediation is based on ideas, logic of the institute, materialities etc.

The users of the platforms are co-performing. The actual use of platform changes how the platform evolves. How does this feedback into the institutions?

When does this illusion of being together that is a place holder of actual joint places takes over of how we are being together?

Illusion of togetherness becomes a new real. How does this feedback into the exhibition space when we get back together again?

What are the considerations when putting an exhibition online?

Possibilities and limitations of the artworks themselves?

The museum exhibition becomes an artwork itself – directing the span of attention, the screen engages the viewer, manipulating, the museum impacts the experience.

Necessity of re-creation – why do we need this recreation of the real space online? How can we find a new way of presenting art in a new space? How can we create a virtual exhibition – other ways?

Why is the concept of museum still the similar concept as in the 19th century? Let’s reframe how the institution works? What is the definition of the role in society? How to repurpose the institution itself?

Overproduction is a concern. Wave of works as an instant reaction on what happens around us. Important but often poorly supported financially.

What does the restriction expose? What is offered by the physical location and lost if the location is digital? The walk between works? The middle space = what is missing here? What do the hinderings to see something offer to the public?

Interlocution – when is there a pause, a brief moment to talk – the space of reflection, the idea of placement – the digital is taking this away, not offering space/time for this.

Space in between: how much space is left for discussion?

Relationship domestic <-> digital <-> exhibition

Google is dominating what we experience

Among the issues Connell’s group addressed were:

How can post-research be integrated into life not just artistic creation?  

Considering what the “post” in post research means. There is for example a difference between post modernity and after modernity. How does this apply to post research? Is post research informed by research or is it against research? (see Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336-57. And Shu-mei Shih; Is the Post in Postsocialism the Post in Posthumanism?. Social Text 1 March 2012; 30 (1 (110)): 27–50.) Does the term signal an end to research being within the institution? As such the “post” marks a consideration of what research stand for today.  There is a history of ignoring and undermining indigenous research.  Research is inherently colonial. It imposes categories. It is a legacy and of the enlightenment. (See Linda Tuhiwai Smith – Decolonising Methodologies 1999) Post can productively point beyondcertain forms of research. In effect the political question is whose research? 

We considered the identity of the research and researcher. Research often entails a formal performance. There is a demand to preform knowledge. This is a performance is usually narrowly framed by and quantified in terms of metrics and the correct type of citations. Endless need to contain research in metrics! Who is cited? And the politics of cited. What counts as research? So many codes embedded in research. Why are we reading so much and not listening to our grannies? Lockdown accelerates this. Only references to mainstream literature will get grants. The distinctions of a valid bibliography bring exclusion. Much is rightly made of representation but this is only the tip of the iceberg. It is important to consider what counts as valid research and a valid methodology (see Fricker, Miranda Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing 2007) 

The value and risk of curating in this context is in its emphasis on sharing research with others. The impulse to share knowledge is both a kind of mythic heroic act and generous act.  

Is research a term that is lost in translation? 

Participants included: Lina Dzuverovic, Idil, Connell Vaughan, Jeanette Doyle, Cathy O’Carroll

Among the issues Catalin’s group addressed were:

Starting from the context of ‘propositions’ generated by the thematic of the conference, Noel Fitzpatrick mentioned that GradCAM proposed to challenge the term of ‘research’ replacing it with the notion of ‘inquiry’. He also added that, in our experience with information about exhibitions and other art news, we confront with a series of multinational public infrastructures (with non-neutral platforms — specific to our ‘platform capitalism’) that makes us to address the notion of values that are extracted from communities and also the question of agency, of the performative role of different forms of agencies. Our deliberative/interpretative participation appears to be in contrast with the question of the reputational economy (based on the idea that social capital is built through online advertising).

There was also raised the question of access (as long as digitalisation could be now everything) in terms of infrastructure and communication, the idea of the complexity of attention (following how we passed from the experience of cinema as a collective experience to the expansion of more isolated experiences, i.e. Netflix offering a more individual experience), the re-discussion of the idea of commons in an era of expansive privatization and the necessity to actualize the institutions’ missions (Maria Bella).

The question of planning and the occurrence of a kind of contingent shame in the online social space was approached by Malcolm Quinn in relation with the experience of a kind of vision blindness at the contact with the screen. 

Another opinion was brought into discussion by Vytautas Michelkevicius who questioned the power of the games played by the ones that seems to push the limits of owning the internet, and observing that there is more and more a need for photographers and videographers for documenting exhibitions to be presented on different platforms as Art Viewer or Contemporary Art Daily.

Other thoughts were presented by Catalin Gheorghe, who observed that during the ‘global lockdown pandemy’ there were reasons to challenge not only the practices of visitation and documentation in the regime of online exhibition, but also the practices of online exhibition making. As such, we’ve experienced an absorption (through captivation) in the deep-screens generated by a vertigo-like feeling of non-linear affective events in a continuous ‘fall’ or ‘diving’ through the cold digital space. As such, the experience of crossing the distances was not quite similar to the physical geographical travel. For some of the audiences, visiting art became a kind of ‘treasure hunt’ on the surface of non-narrative (or even anti-narrative) explorations. During the contradictory living of stillness (in physicality) and motion (in mind), some others experienced an acute feeling of a kind of ‘second dematerialisation of the art object’ and realized that they confronted mostly with ‘stacks’ more than with ‘archives’. And that is why there was a strong feeling that the dominant experience with the online exhibition was not happening through an interface, but rather in the speed of a contortion through a ‘grey hole’.

On the other hand, in terms of the practices of online exhibition making, someone can realize that there was a shift from the responsibility of the technicalities involved in the object installation to the necessity of a new learning for the production of the specific digital objects.

As a conclusion, we are now living in a (temporary, but seemingly not permanent) time of ‘format changing’ (from architectural/natural spaces to artificial softwares and screens) in the gorges of our accelerated and overwhelming attention economy. But, after pandemy, we can let our imagination to envision, in anticipation, a strong revival of post-internet, meaningful, cultural actions. 

Among the issues Lorena’s group addressed were:

In trying to grasp a “post” framework for the research condition and in a manner that merges the “incompatible forms of knowledge”, drawing from concepts already articulated as “deep attention”/ “deep description”/ “deep listening” and avoiding a mimetic translation of the old into the new, alongside my colleague, we find ourselves nominating a solution for an intricate time. Departing from a theatre of objectification and by reducing to zero the distance “imposed” between us and the so-called “flattening effect” of the screen, we enforce on our project a technical label – interactive listen-based postexhibtion. A fully immersive spatial “laboratory” that questions the ontological conditions of the artistic object, a world-making endeavor with an ever-changing character: from architecture to experiential coordinates (T, S). A reality that allows for time-based composition of the subjective – which deals not with an opaque screen, but a “reflecting” VR/AR dimension. An intellectual individual exercise of liberation from under the siege of the normative not by living as an outlaw or disobedience, but through literally creating a world according to one’s own biases, biases which are thus discovered. Not a dummy, nor a back-up, an alternative space in itself, our idea of an exclusively on-line and immersive exhibition space is stripping the mind off (phenomenological reduction) in order to catch from behind the essence of the mental act. The authority, THE SOUND, is tipping off the participant about the inexistent (so to speak) artwork, its “intentional inexistence”. Listening becomes an active act which allows for the cognitive construction, in an intuitive manner, of the artifact, which becomes, in turn, a revealing (when facing the physical and the digital) reference situated in the world. The imperative is therefore to be, inasmuch as it the only method for seeing the conditions of our (collective or individual) actual framework. Being recasted in this different zone gives permission to self-rehearsal in order to finally be, less regulated and with agency.

Among the issues Naomi’s group addressed were:

We decided that our task was to explore the binary of physical exhibition space and the online virtual space and agreed that both spaces alienate audiences, depending on their constituency. We spoke of the relative power dynamics and the limitations of both.

E.g., institutional ‘cultural’ spaces alienate communities that are not of that culture, whilst the online space is comfortable and familiar to a youthful demographic but can be alienating to earlier generations: both spaces are unavailable to vast numbers of people.

We noted the imbrication of the curatorial with the institutional marketing machine and raised concerns about the tail wagging the dog. The conversation touched on:

  • repackaging of the content of the museum
  • egalitarian ambitions of educational mobilisation
  • the question of whether marketing becomes a medium in its own right.

We agreed on a confusion about the nature of the digital, a lack of digital expertise amongst curators compared to expertise within marketing teams, raising the question of whether marketing is the new curatorial.

We considered the problematic of power dynamics:

  • in physical exhibition space the curators’ monopoly of power is well established
  • the digital exhibition space is lagging behind due to lack of skills raising the questions about how the issue of the curatorial might be included
  • (also raises the question about how the curatorial might be evaded).

On space:

  • Where does it begin?
  • How can we relate to the digital space?
  • How do we experience digital space?
  • Is digital space just a toolbox – where is the accessibility?

We noted the positive benefits of accelerated international discourse but also the international digital divide and the exacerbation of communication gulfs in the presence of digital poverty.

The group assented to the opportunities presented both by the lame and unsophisticated lockdown response from the artworld to date, and the combination of digital and physical space. The issue of mediums enabled by new media and the digital was raised (sound art being the most obvious).

One speaker from Scotland was a former resident of Johannesburg and spoke about strong and positive examples of digital innovation and renegade ways of working being regularly showcased through an annual festival (Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival), showing what could be rather than what should be…

Another spoke from Australia and felt that this was an old discussion with a rich history in media and cultural studies, that has been amply covered in research such as Tate UK’s Post-Critical Museology (2013, eds. Dewdney, Dibosa, Walsh). She felt that a shift in thinking is required to critique the digital: that it is important not to perceive the digital merely in archival terms but to consider issues of authenticity and reclaim the digital space as a liberating space outside the museum, with the potential to destablise the hegemony of high art.

Several participants reiterated a need to understand the logic of political power in shifts from physical to digital space – digital space is owned and controlled by global corporations etc. – in order subvert for our own use in a new scenario where a new kind of ‘show’ will emerge.

It was suggested that artists and curators need to get more comfortable with what ‘the political’ means.

The conversation returned to the point where it started; noting a cognitive dissonance between ‘the work’ (of artists and curators) and the manipulation of audiences through ‘marketing’ – and a lack of joined up conversations/thinking. We were left with the questions:

  • Do museums and galleries need dedicated digital curators (as opposed to social media curators)?
  • If so, is such a post ghettoised through formalisation?

An analogy was made between the recent surrender of cinema to Netflix and the gallery to online space.

And a final suggestion (from Australia) that ‘the digital exposes the limits of art rather than the limits of capitalism.’