In consideration of the online exhibition

Intro

The term ‘online exhibition’ can span many expectations and needs. A simple online visualisation of a few images with little context; the online equivalent of an arts magazine where visuals and text combine in a very similar (and potentially extending) way to a physical book or mag; a full experience, where the digital show effectively acts as a carefully curated work in itself.

This exhibition and accompanying essay are attempts to engage in such discussions, which currently seem to be lacking in many of the places that may benefit from showing work online.

Putting images on the internet is easy, and has been so since this author first built an online exhibition in conjunction with PhotoForum in 1996 (with proto-VR walk-through). But many so called online galleries remain ill thought out. The problem is that in many cases the thinking about presenting art online has not developed much since that time. Twenty four years and massive technological advances have often resulted in very few differences and advances in the storytelling abilities and potentials of online shows. Browser layout and the ability to control layout and design may have advanced, but the lacklustre nature of many online galleries shows that while technically easy, both design elements and philosophy require much more effort to achieve effective goals.

Whilst there is a subculture of artworks specifically made for and using the internet and online platforms, most art is still produced external to it, and shown in the real world. For many reasons, covid only being one, showing art online becomes more imperative even though it has a history almost as long as the browser-based internet.

In the process of transitioning the works that make up Circumstantial Evidence to a digital viewing format, this show has been conceived with a meta-narrative that looks directly and critically at the nature of visual arts exhibitions in a networked environment. That is, the show itself is an investigation into showing work online.

This essay then, is a critical overview of putting visual work into online framings and collections. It covers notions of digitalisation, potential advantages and disadvantages, consequences for ‘image leak’ and loss of context and authorship and some practical considerations of best showing work online.

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The photographers here may have eschewed the tactility, texture and the diminished importance of size and colour correctness by committing to digital representation but in doing so, a new publication has been created with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Context – cease to exist

When any image is put online, it is naively offered to the limits of the network. Control has been lost with the first posting. All these images, analogue or digital in their original form, now come to live on an ephemeral platform. It’s a complex idea, reflecting the complexity we confront in all digital forms of our lives.

The digital image exists within its onscreen context. Flipped out of this, it can become bereft. Curators and authors can re-contextualise online works by thoughtful linking with social media, use of keywords and re-using contextualising text.

The fact that these images are on the internet means a number of possibilities for their circulation.  Firstly, they gain a potentially international audience by being so accessible but more mysteriously, they enter the circulatory system of cataloguing, archiving, re-use, and many other possibilities.

Online, images become decoupled from context in various ways. They are scraped by search engines, appearing out of context in google or yahoo image search. They become part of archives – the wayback machine being only the most well known of these. They are also open to being saved and stolen, cropped, reused and reposted. They may be ‘quoted’ on social media or in photographic discourse, reviews etc. And many of these uses will be transparent to the authors.   The first thing to go is context, then titles, then authorship.

Each photographer creates their own private world with their work. In a gallery or book form, these images have a controlled movement and reach. Putting this work online is akin to opening this world, initially in a controlled or contrived environment, but the reality of the internet is that these images are only loosely held, and authors have to live with this light touch on their creations.

Hito Steyerl refers to the idea of the poor image – the online image, able to travel in multiple contexts. It incorporates circulation, translation, translocution, ripping, remixing, downsizing.

The three more digitally orientated photographers in Circumstantial Evidence are embedded in the glitch, dirt, overlay and errors that resemble a punk aesthetic. Painter Christopher Wool is known for letting dirt accumulate in his inks and screens – here are three photographers using digital methods but similarly letting the grit in to settle. It’s no coincidence that two of them were involved in noise or punk music. Sound equivalents can be found in Sonic Youth (raspy, detuned fuzz), Pan Sonic (60Hz buzzes reloaded as music) and Japanese noise artists (hard out volume and edges falling off speakers).

The two photographers more at home in the analogue world, more used to gallery walls, have come to the project with a willingness to let their images fly free in the ether. Not just analogue workers though, these two are just as at home with scanners, jpgs and the high end DSLR. In fact, examining the metadata we see that both are using DSLRs to produce high resolution RAW file formats or scanning from hi-res negatives, which are then tweaked with photoshop.

This compares inversely with say Sontier, who is in the habit of removing detail, using obsolete phone cameras specifically for their digital incapabilities and lossy nature. Or Carapiet whose detail is dependent on the fuzzy nature of television delivery along with the rootsy nature of his capturing (moire patterns invade, bleached highlights and supersaturated colours are left uncorrected).

Funding and assessment

Recent Aotearoa/NZ public funding into Covid related ‘online exhibitions’ has shown the potential for low quality, minimal critical effort in online exhibitions (examples are not shown so as not to embarrass both the funders and the applicants). This emphasises the need for funding to be critically assessed by institutions, or who use expertise that allows that assessment, and by the applicants in considering carefully what their intentions and intended results are.

Practical – clean and undistracting

This project has from the start been approached as a standalone online exhibition – the domain name, the website itself are purely for the purpose of showing the collective work and contextualising it within essays. There is no commercial or other imperative at work, that would get in the way of the experience. No banner ads, sidebar ads, links to other features or clunky non-essential navigation. Everything on the site relates to the exhibition, as one would expect (or hope for – ads in show catalogues are not uncommon for example) in a physical show.

Practical – Advantages, compromises, disadvantages

In the days and months of lockdowns, online often became the only way to see work. Many artists put work online, galleries moved to virtual staging in viewing rooms to generate online. Commercial galleries worked hard to promote this, with varying degrees of success in terms of viewing experience and sales.

What are the virtues and pitfalls of taking work online?

While some museums with larger budgets and graphics departments have critically interrogated this, many have just thrown work into pre-existing websites and templates with little thought to the visual clutter and digital disadvantages.

 Sometimes the commercial imperative of the host site can get in the way of the work. Artsy, amongst others, colonises gallery online shows into its own site (with agreement from said galleries), showing often a partial view, while the gallery site itself may be showing a much more extensive show, to which Artsy does not link.* The show is often limited in concept and size and on display for a limited time, but after closure can often be found elsewhere and more extensively on the web.

The Peabody Museum exhibitions can be more formal and technical, with extensive written material and several ways of viewing the image and videos. Although, locked within their website template, the shows are quite generic in experience. **

One thing that became frustrating and a glaringly obvious commercial decision was that of many commercial galleries to require registration or at least an email address to enter their viewing rooms. It is well known with interface designers, that any barriers to entry tend to shed viewers, and personally, there was work I didn’t get to see because of the registration barrier. There was some I did try hard to get into to view, but the barrier never lifted – poor decisions and coding made them impermeable.

Another dubious strategy, riffing on the ‘if its there, use it’ strategy, was the raft of VR galleries that sprang up. Many attempted to replicate the gallery or museum experience, with a virtual white space filled with zoomable pictures on walls, clickable wall labels with titles and extended information. These allowed one to do a walk-through with the mouse and were admittedly much better than early attempts at VR. However, 3D simulations still require decent graphics subsystems and RAM and can still give a clunky jerky experience even on a half-way decent desktop. As well,  for me at least, as willing as I was to give it a go, it was invariably visually tiring. The movement interface is often intuitive but each gallery technology  is different and requires an adjustment to a particular interface. Clicking/zooming to view detail, clicking  or escaping out and clicking again for title and text became tedious. Reading user guides then unlearning an interface when moving to a new site quickly seemed to introduce fatigue.

Some places use VR capabilities of the web browser to provide virtual tours of a gallery space (sometimes a real gallery space is replicated, sometimes a virtual space is created) : see When Images Collide for instance.

There are many platforms for creating VR galleries – artsteps.com, vrallart.com etc and dealer gallery Hauser & Wirth launched their own VR platform to show and sell work. VR tries to replicate a gallery or museum  experience, but too often is quirky, glitchy, hurts the eyes or introduces perspective effects and distortions into the works.

The loss of ambience, peripheral vision glances, overhearing other’s comments, chatting with an assistant or bumping into an owner or curator is all lost. The overlap of audio from an adjacent multimedia work or just everyday sounds appear to add something to a real gallery experience that is not reproduceable. Perhaps immersive VR will change this…

Looking to more conventional online viewing of art works, I often found that works were adrift, in a visual clutter that related to non-essential aspects of the website. The commercial or branding imperatives to locate the work within a particular site meant logos, menus, ads/info blocks etc interfered with any attempt to create an online gallery experience. Instead they came across as a bunch of pictures bunged into a page.

Some museums would treat the online as a ‘taster’, showing only a couple of works or small reproductions or gallery views. Commercial galleries often showed more, but made them time-limited – some shows only available for a month, then going off into a less accessible archive, or requiring sign-up to view or just disappearing altogether. As if the online work was seen as disposable, ephemeral. That the web had a reason to be closed or limited, when in fact it is the reverse.

Practical – what is an online show

The notion of an online exhibition can vary widely. But putting images or a full show online requires some knowledge and effort. To know how to best show and convey an experience , and also to be aware of the consequences of the networking of images.

It is ideal that the authors have a good idea of what and why they are producing. Displaying one or two disembodied images per photographer on a page with many others, requires little thought or design, but has a smaller impact. Creating a magazine style in-depth feature can benefit from good design and flow along with minimising distractive elements.

A true online exhibition or digital show should be approached as immersive. It should act as a place where viewers can come to spend a significant time, with return visits potentially, and where an experience is created through the works themselves, the context (whether text-and-design or just through thoughtful layout and design) and attention to detail.

Just because there are systems to display images as slideshows, or in VR galleries, doesn’t mean that either is the best choice. What system best shows the images, and importantly, keeps them in context? Is there a way (or reason) to let the viewer examine the images singly? In detail, say by zooming? Does it make sense to show images in 2 or 3 columns, or single images, vertically spread.

Practical – keeping context

Curators and authors themselves will want to anchor the context, even when the image may leave its original placement (say, is grabbed by another site, by a pirate, shared on social media, tweeted and requoted).

Although it is difficult to do this without expensive software or obvious watermarking, basic application of contextual titling (ie the name of the image file, containing author at the very least), and meta data within the jpg format can allow the image to have context when it lifts out of the original. Links back to the original site, in the metadata. Copyright statements on the site and metadata (for the little they are worth, they do show intent to ownership).

Finally in this overview, is a non-authoritative listing of advantages and disadvantages of showing work online, that is worth considering – to see how disadvantages can be diminished, and to make sure advantages are being taken advantage of (eg – online galleries *can* have an international reach, but to do it effectively needs a way of reaching out, and publicising it overseas).

Advantages:

• Ease and cost of publishing (relatively)
• (potentially) international audience
• Lead time issues are diminished
• No third parties dictating format, context
• Images can be shown in context – connection of titles, captions, text can be tightly bound
• Potentially, new viewing modes and layouts are available, also multiple arrangements and viewing methods (eg the slideshow, the full screen image, the comparative, side-by-side view)
• Limitation on quantity of images (say by space or cost) is generally not an issue
• Additional contextualising can be done through interviews, videos, links to websites and articles
• Potential for interaction, feedback etc along with customised views (for impaired viewers, text translation for international audiences)
• Potential for longer shows and permanent shows

Disadvantages:

• Harder to obtain funding / Harder to generate serious attention
• Need for good design and planning for effectiveness
• Requirement of technical competence to conceptualise the show, and to be involved with the build, acquisition and port-production of work
• Viewer fatigue and loss of physical show experience
• Need for specific marketing / SEO
• Loss of size, texture, physicality of art objects, flattening of scale and surface
• Loss of control of images through stealing, image linking, image search algorithms
• Texture of physical object is generally lost
• Variation of contrast, colour is likely for most viewers
• Alternate screens may compromise viewing (phone screens compressing size)
• Working within a limited aspect ratio, plus considerations of phone/desktop displays

Considerations:

• Conceptualise the show before starting any work – what is the final outcome required?
• How will the images be selected, edited and fitted into any existing structure?
• Cost of design / importance of design – how will the images/text/show be presented?
• Promotion methods – SEO, keywords, physical promotions, reaching out digitally, use of social media
• Navigation – customised or clear and straightforward?
• International promotion may require more extensive linking with overseas orgs.
• Potential to do interviews, reviews, articles etc
• Use the artists networks
• Adding metadata to images – copyright and context
• Web stats and google analytics
• Clarity of vision for the project

• Minimising existing site nav and other intrusions
• Prospects for funding of show / artists
• Inform artists about the consequences of uploading images. What is the ongoing presentation – is it intended to be permanently shown, or for a limited time

footnotes

• * For instance Rineke Dijkstra:  https://www.artsy.net/show/marian-goodman-gallery-rineke-dijkstra      but at the Marian Goodman gallery, many more images, an exhibition feel to it and much better viewing experience:  https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/rineke-dijkstra-london-2020/

And Isaac Juliens America appears (Feb 2021) here on Artsy: https://www.artsy.net/show/jessica-silverman-gallery-isaac-juliens-america

But on the Jessica Silverman gallery site, much more information, videos and high quality images:  https://jessicasilvermangallery.com/online-shows/isaac-juliens-america/      and the show is displayed with a much better viewer experience, the Gallery navigation minimally interferes with a more sow-like structure and feel

**  https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/2098