Talk: Post Internet Curation: Online Art Ecologies of the Web 2.0 Era
Pita Arreola-Burns, Elliott Burns
29th November 2023, 19:00
Zoom
Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns introduce their online curatorial platform Offsite Project and explore how Web 2.0 platforms reshaped online art curation. They trace post-internet practice from early hub-and-spoke galleries through social-media ecologies, GIF gatherings and template-based sites to metaverse spaces such as New Art City and Occupy White Walls.
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Video Recording
Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns analyse online exhibition design through the relationship between post-internet art, browser interfaces and historical display conventions. They propose that, as internet aesthetics move into physical galleries, established curatorial logics flow back into online spaces. Comparing salon-style hanging and the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition with screen layouts, they examine how positioning, centrality and navigation distribute attention. Early net-art platforms organise works through accumulating links and databases; Web 2.0 galleries increasingly adopt scheduled exhibitions while responding to social media, accessible publishing tools and precarious physical spaces. Four examples reveal different approaches: scrolling exhibitions combine artworks with online conversations, browser-extension programmes interrupt desktops with pop-ups, large GIF exhibitions let visitors assemble routes through abundant material, and shared navigable spaces enable encounters between viewers. Turning to virtual galleries, the speakers criticise exact architectural replicas that reproduce familiar prestige without exploring digital possibilities. More experimental platforms support imaginative environments, collective exhibition ownership and game-like curating. Discussion addresses preservation, changing software, broken dependencies, accessibility, bandwidth and commercial pressures. They argue that alternative art networks depend less on technology alone than on communities, sustained relationships and stronger connections between generations of digital practice, treating online curation as both spatial and social work.
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About the Event
Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns present their online curatorial platform, Offsite Project, and trace how Web 2.0 galleries reshape exhibition design by borrowing from both internet aesthetics and physical display conventions. They compare the dense, hierarchical hanging of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with the contained frame of the laptop screen, arguing that scrolling replaces the salon wall with a vertical axis of attention. They locate “post-internet” art in Marisa Olson’s writing as work made after the internet has become ordinary, where artists move fluidly between online and offline worlds. They contrast Web 1.0 hub-and-spoke platforms such as adaweb and Gallery 9 with the later ecology of social media and template-based sites, then examine four Web 2.0 platforms—isthisit, arebyte’s plug-in programme, the “Well, Now, What The Fuck?” GIF gathering and Distant Gallery/Common Garden—to show how curation can use pop-ups, social feeds, navigable maps and shared digital space. They conclude by discussing Web 3.0 metaverse spaces, warning that faithful replicas of real galleries risk limiting imagination, while more inventive platforms such as New Art City and Occupy White Walls offer playful, game-like curatorial potential.
About the Speakers
Pita Arreola-Burns
Elliott Burns