Many exhibitions happened to produce their digital counterpart during the pandemic. For example, the The Allure of Matter (2020), and the Critical Zone (2020-2022) – were both initiated in 2020. In Curating in the Post-Internet Age, Boris Groys borrows the concept of Gestell from Heidegger to articulate the form-content relationship between the digital exhibition and the Internet. “The exhibition exhibits itself before it exhibits anything else (Groys, 2018, p.2).” In his words, offline exhibition remain indispensable for its spatial and temporal relationship with the spectators. It allows inspection and contemplation of the general format when standing in the exhibition hall. Nevertheless, he argues that digital archives of the exhibition render a “form-giving operation (Groys, 2018, p.5)” within the institution. Exhibitions could thus be restaged by the curator, experimenting not only through the recontextualization of ideologies but also reflecting the distribution mechanism of the Internet (Groys, 2018).
Figure 1. Critical Zone (2020-2022) online exhibition.
Figure 2. The Allure Of Matter (2020) virtual tour.
While Groys holds a relatively positive view on the resonance of digital curation in the current era, I would like to argue it from the perspective of the materiality of the presented artworks in the exhibition. In his famous book The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin has pointed out the ability of photography in reproducing images of artworks (Benjamin, 2008). Since my project features exclusively on contemporary photography, it poses the question that: To what the extent could it be realized if displayed in the digital form?
The reflection falls on the matter of material. In What Photography Is, James Elkins used the metaphor of “a sheet of black lake ice (Elkins, 2011, p.17)” to describe photography by emphasizing the materiality of images. By referencing Camera Lucida, he questions the negligence of Barthes in addressing the surface of the photographs. “…photographs are all about touching. When I hand someone a photograph, I am touching its surface.” In my designed layout, the presented images are open for not only simple “see through” but also participatory means such as touch and mutation. In the book, Elkins also expresses his disapproval of Joan Fonctuberta equaling the image as information for its digital essence. He argues that in photography, “There is always the surface (Elkins, 2011, p.24).” Compared to installation works, though my choice of mediums seems to grant merits in digital realization, it is worth considering questions regarding the loss and fracture of materiality when crossing over between the real and digital landscape.
Figure 3. The image of the selenite window that Elkins refers to the metaphor.
Figure 4. The printed thermal images by children’s camera. One of the medium used by the artist of my project. Similar with polaroids, it is also a kind of touchable image, which I will consider incorporating this characteristic in the layout.
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Reference:
Benjamin, W. (2008) The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media / Walter Benjamin ; edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin ; translated by Edmund Jephcott [and others]. Michael William Jennings et al. (eds.). Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Critical Zone (2020-2022) [Exhibition]. ZKM, Karlsruhe , Germany. May 23, 2020 – January 09, 2022. Available at: https://critical-zones.zkm.de/#!/ (Accessed: 05 April 2024).
Elkins, J. (2011) What Photography Is. 1st edition. Florence: Taylor and Francis. pp. 17
Elkins, J. (2011) What Photography Is. 1st edition. Florence: Taylor and Francis. pp. 24
Groys, B. (2018) ‘Curating in the Post-Internet Age’, e-flux, Issue 94.
The Allure Of Matter (2020) [Exhibition]. Smart Museum of Art, Illinois, Chicago. February 7 – March 14, 2020. Available at: https://theallureofmatter.org/ (Accessed: 05 April 2024)
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