A Digital Museum That Can Be Viewed IRL
A new real-life gallery exhibition of a digital museum that houses digital art.
We've seen real art displayed digitally, we've seen digital art digitally, and now you can view digital art on screens in a brick and mortar gallery in Brooklyn. The Digital Museum of Digital Art has had an online home since 2013, but this tangible exhibition has just opened in November. Hyperallergic describes the exhibition at TRANSFER Gallery. Last June, the Department of Design Media arts MFA students presented a group show in a digitized version of our Broad Art Center New Wight Gallery. You can still view their group show the gallery is naked here.
Like a digital snake eating its tail, digital art now has a (digital) museum it can call home. On display IRL at Brooklyn’s TRANSFER Gallery, The Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA) is the brainchild of artists and directors/developers Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William James Richard Robertson.
In a way, this was inevitable. As Salazar-Caro and Robertson themselves — both members of the glitch, new media, and digital art scenes — would note, and as other commentators have pointed out, the idea of a virtual art space has been in development for a while.Paper-Thin, Panther Modern, and Crystal Gallery are just a few examples that mirror the gallery or museum (Panther Modern features artist shows in digital “rooms”). But looking out over the sea of development in virtual reality, digital art, and museum documentation/accessibility, DiMoDA is more like the fascinating head of a building convergence, the first of a thousand sails.
But novelty or inevitability shouldn’t obscure what is in fact a DIY, self-made digital groundbreaking, an attempt to move toward more accessible, immersive, and potentially transformative art worlds. After all, Tumblr and Reddit are, essentially, just updated versions of Geocities and message boards, but that doesn’t diminish the remarkable online spaces that have been created within them. Whether DiMoDA becomes a guide for what to follow or what to avoid in digital museum creation, it is creating a model, which is in and of itself both interesting and important. The project implicitly asks, “Where do we go from here?” It’s a museum you can visit from nearly anywhere, at any time, a fact that might gain significance as DiMoDA grows. As will questions of archiving: Will we be able to jump between different versions of DiMoDA over its lifetime, visiting its inaugural show, for example, just as its umpteenth exhibit opens? Will DiMoDA attain a kind of permanent omnipresence, despite its intangibility? Sabin Bors atanti-utopias has critically considered the degree to which DiMoDA and other possible virtual art spaces should replicate the traditional museum’s physical and political model, which will be essential as DiMoDA moves ahead, others follow in its wake, and virtual reality becomes a part of everyday life — but perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What is DiMoDA? And what has been created or installed within it?— Jeremy Polacek, Dec. 18
Read the full article at the Hyperallergic website.