Where this project comes from & why it matters

For most of my career, I worked as a contemporary art curator and theorist. But 7 years ago, as I was finishing my doctoral thesis, I realized that I’d exhausted all of the questions and possibilities that first drew me to physical exhibition making. I felt particularly stuck by the constraints of dealing with material artworks, limiting what I could show and how. I was also itching to do work that could make a bigger impact than one-off art exhibitions.

At the time, I was involved in the European project ViMM-Virtual Multimodal Museums. It gave me the inkling that maybe digital technologies could offer a workaround to the limits of physical exhibition making. So I turned to museum computing.

My first project, UViMCA-Utility and Usership in Virtual Museums of Contemporary Art, helped me gain an overview of the field. Its ultimate contribution was a model for how to convert certain exhibition practices into a curatorial algorithm for online collections.

I was pretty excited about this research. But when I discussed it with fellow curators and presented it at different art institutions (including Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao seen here), I often got the same remark:

That's great! But, our centre doesn’t have a collection. So what technologies are there for us? Our funders are pressing us to develop a digital strategy, but nobody really knows what that means.

To be honest, I didn’t either… At first, I thought it was because it was an area of museum computing that I’d overlooked because of my focus on online collections. But when I looked into it, I found that the vast majority of digital applications in the cultural sector have been designed for institutions with collections: to display, promote and add value to born-digital and digitized artworks and heritage sites.

I couldn’t find a single project that investigated what non-collecting institutions need in terms of digital infrastructure to support their distinct mission and activities, which tend to be more community-oriented given that they don’t have to care for objects.    

That’s how the idea for this project first came about.

As for why it matters: Well, first and foremost, non-collecting art institutions make up a large and vital part of the art world so they should at least have an equivalent digital presence!

But even more importantly, these institutions often play a key civic role in their communities. They help foster dialogue (including around difficult subjects), shift attitudes and perspectives, and build social cohesion. In today’s increasingly polarized social climate, coming up with effective ways to amplify and scale up community building approaches to support citizen involvement and mutual understanding has become more imperative than ever.

In 2021, cultural economist Pier Luigi Sacco warned that cultural participation is at a crucial turning point: the way in which emerging digital platforms shape cultural participation in the next 5 years – whether towards more inclusive, bottom-up, cultural production or the further monetization of attention (‘surveillance capitalism’) – will determine the next 2-3 decades.

It’s been almost 5 years. Clock’s ticking. We urgently need to come up with better models for the digital domain. And where better to look than the non-collecting art institutions that have made cultural participation their core mission for over a century.

Azkuna Zentroa-Alhóndiga Bilbao