Some years ago, my parents made a vacation and visited the Netherlands, a few kilometers away from The Hague. When scouting for good destinations in advance, they had noticed that there was a museum dedicated to the band „Golden Earring“. Since they both have some love for this band, they decided to visit it. Arriving at the supposed address, they were, however, quite a bit perplexed to find themself in front of a normal, featureless residential building – no museum could be seen, only panels with Dutch names on it. This was, if I remember correctly, before miniature computers with internet access became a common utility – and so it was not before they arrived at home that they investigated and realized that the museum was only a digital place registered on an address at Den Hague located in said building.
Many years later, I stumbled over the writings of Paul Virilio about the compression of space through technical advance. Virilio describes how the increasing speed that is made possible by more and more complex techniques basically shrinks our world : Landscapes become fly-over-country, wash-houses where people met and chat while doing their laundry got replaced by private washing machines, and the way to work and the office space vanish in favor of lines and digital meeting places. Even the apparatuses that cause these contractions are affected: Today, smartphones largely ousted the laptop that my parents used back then to find out where the missed museum got to, as the laptop had – many years before – replaced the bulky grey family computer. Ironically, I came upon all this when doing research for my own Digital Museum – a digital exhibition for the artist „Crash-Stop“, who – among many other things – depicts twisted, distorted and harsh views of towns, that I wanted to interpret, to explain – without realizing back then that I was actively carrying out one of the processes that Virilio described by replicating the structure and function of an existing place – a museum – within the digital realm; the very same compression that had once let my parents go astray in The Hague.
But the compression of space would likely not be accepted by us if it wouldn’t come – at least seemingly – with a merit: Like the capitalist society that is powered by it, the electric systems that condensed in their – for now – ultimate form of the global network bears the promise of unlimited freedom.1 Neither the Golden Earring museum, nor my Digital Museum could’ve existed as real museums – but in the digital realm, ideas can be realized even if they would be impossible to fund or even fully unattainable in the material world. Just as the worker in the industrialized capitalist society who is doubly free (from the feudal yoke, but also from every – and especially social – security), the proletarian of the digital age is set free from the limitations of the physical world, but only at the cost of the social security (and, ultimately: environment), with isolation and loneliness as almost necessary aftereffects.
But it is possible that art (and, similarly, science) is able to break up restrictive structures, and to bypass the limits and fences – by demonstrating us our desires, the faults of-, and the possibilities outside of the capitalist reality.2 Humanness, mirroring capitalism’s ability to enter every available gap, is able to bloom in the most unlikely soil. The mentioned digital museums are also a form of art,3 and in this post, I will spotlight some vastly different examples for them – lets see what they are, and what they say.
When entering The Museum of All Things, you are greeted by a vast, empty lobby. From there, hubs dedicated to general categories – science, culture, art, history, and so on can be reached, and from them, numerous passages lead to rooms dedicated to more specific topics (monks, cave paintings, tarot cards, etc.). When entering these rooms, panels with information texts and images magically elevate from the floor – and new passages allow to enter rooms dedicated to related or linked topics, that are, in turn, equally interlinked. After a short time, you will be fully emerged in an non-finite cultural labyrinth.
The game is powered – as you might have guessed – by the giant database of the Wikipedia, and while it won’t replace using the encyclopedia directly – for a lot of detail and structure is lost in the process of turning it into a three-dimensional place – it unfolds aspects that one might miss when using the page in the traditional way. Utopia and Dystopia, dream and nightmare, are closely neighboring here: On my first stroll, I went from monks over the gnosticist religion of the Mandaeans (who have one of their largest diasporic community only ~80km from my home) to New Zealand, where I met the Haast’s Eagle – who I had only discovered on an Wikipedia binge a week before – but somehow stranded on the „Operation Rolling Thunder“, where I closed the game with horror, quickly afterwards. Shortly before I had passed a floor that was plastered with illustrations of a goddess whose name I’ve forgotten, and whose images were – for some reason – conspicuously often linked with modern day war propaganda seemingly inserted by the uploading users.
The Museum of All Things artistically bundles up many things described ago: Education and information are freely available to anybody who has the means to acquire them, and the spatial dimension is mostly devoided. But the place is lonely, and the feeling of forlorness is underlined by the liminal, somewhat haunted aesthetics allegedly inspired by 90s education videos. The result is a playful adventure that bears a somewhat sinister undertone at times – it almost stands like a comment about the isolated joy of the digital age. The developer plans to introduce a multiplayer mode – will the players have means to find each other, or will they strife through this vast effigy of our own world one by one, never meeting one another?
The Museum of all Things was developed with the Godot-Engine, and is – as such – fully FLOSS. Worked without trouble on Arch Linux.
I have some objects that I always carry with me. I only take them off to sleep, and usually transfer these things from one trousers pockets to the next when changing clothes. A few weeks ago, when preparing for a small surgery, I emptied my pockets, and arranged my wallet, keys, cellphone and glasses in a locker – seeing them like this evoked utmost strange feelings: It was like leaving a part of my life behind. Humans – much like hermit crabs – define, and even complete themself by entering symbioses with the objects they use and possess – and it is primarily for this reason that stripping a person is a popular technique of dehumanization among authoritative regimes and their henchman – for the effect of doing so excels the humiliation of sheer nudity.4
The Museum of Memories displays important objects from the middle of the everyday-life of people: The sword a women has smitten by herself, a piece of art that a daughter made for her mother, treasured game-cartridges, notes, and so on. When clicking on these objects, their owner will tell you a few lines about them, and why they value it. This is a very small, but great game: the small render and the few lines of text spoken by their owners are always enough to indicate a whole story – and emits enough human warmth to break the eeriness – at least for me – even though the low-poly room is basically just as bleak as any other.
The game was made with the Unity Engine, and worked well using Wine. The developer asks for „object-donations“ so they can further extend the collection.
The Zium Museum effectively pulls the genres uncanny teeth by embracing an abstract, fantastic minimalism. Many of the meshes that constitute the virtual building stand untextured, and colorful forms fly through the air, the rooms, and even the walls – by embracing the virtual, the game reaches an atmosphere that appears more like a museum in an otherworldly dream, rather than in a liminal nightmare.
But the minimalism only affects the frame – the objects displayed were made by over thirty different artists – mainly, but not exclusively 3D-designers – and range from small renders up to giant digital installations; the possibilities that are offered by a „digital place“ are extensively employed – fields with plants within the corridors can be stridden, and doors might take you into rooms larger than the building, and after going through a corridor you will encounter a thing that somehow manages to radiate the aura of something colossal even though it only exists within your monitor. The technical implementation, the curation and the art inside are all exquisite – to an amount that I had to check out the later successors, and found them to be even more impressive. The entire series is a reminder of the human ability to create and collaborate, outside of all monetary interest.
The Zium Museum was made with Unity; a working Linux version is shipped. The sequels are available on the developers Itch page.
The Online 3D Art Exhibition contains photographs from scratchbook-entries that were made over several years. The museum has a reception and a gift shop (were cellphone-wallpapers made by the artist can be obtained for free), but the actual exhibition rooms do not try to emulate an museum – instead, the images are placed on colorful, elysian sky-islands.
Similar to the Museum of Memories, the works displayed here allows us a deep insight into the artists life; they are small creative flashes that were often seemingly directly enraptured from the everyday, and combine paintings, journal entries, collages, notes, and found objects that unite emotions, excerpts from pop culture, memories, and so on – it feels like strolling through a part of a mind that was encrypted (for nearly no of the artworks is obvious in its background or intentions) into a room – everything breathes personality. The art presented here is quite and unostentatious, but by no means shallow – it might take several attempts to come close to a pervasion.
TheFrugalGamer was featured on this blog before with her Gameboy titles, that were great – but this is her work that I liked – up until now – the best.
The GiF-GALLeRY is a website that bundles nearly 100.000 animated and static GIFs. They are arranged in virtual rooms – since their sequence is randomized, every visit will be unique, with the artist stating that some rooms were never seen up until now, or might never be visited again.
All kind of images are jumbled up here – sequences from cartoons, glyphs, short DIY animations, love avowals, sprites, emoticons – what that they all have in common is that they were once created and posted by a human who poured some of their time and vigor into them. The internet has (and always had) a tendency to degrade these images to a mere filler medium – symbols that are used to transport a meaning that is – to some degree – independent of the object in its actual thingness and devoided of its original meaning5. By being arranged and framed, they restored, upheaved to appreciation6, and made visible as a product of humans creative power – instead of being symbols of something that lies behind them, they point back to the world they were wrested from.7 Browsing through this museum allows us to see the beauty behind, that is so often obscured by the technical implementations and the social realities of the world wide web.
Melon, the artist behind the GiF-Gallery has several interesting digital art projects, video games, and a forum online; the common core of his work is a belief in the humanist possibilities of the digital realm aside of the Californian Ideology and its dark meanderings.
In Alien Caseno incredible funny aliens visit a mock-up of an earthly casino; while they seemingly have at least a concept of money (but might not enact it, as there is seemingly no entry fee charged), it is very clear that they find the whole hustle and bustle as utmost absurd, and have a hilarious time reenacting it. The game is very lovingly developed – you might find dancing aliens, UFOs that float the perimeters, and guardians that watch over glitched corners. Among the many variants of „aliens make an exhibition about humans/the earth“ that I found while researching for this post, I liked this (and its complete refusal of all gravitas – that is nearby but not essential to the ideas and meanings that this setting mediates) the best.
The game was realized in Unity, and plays well using Wine. The developer has released various similarly cute games.
- By creating a inherently „schizoid“, crazy reality through the process of deterritorialization. The promise of neither the internet, nor capitalism in general, can ever be fully redeemed, without crashing the entire system of capitalism. Compare Deleuze/Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, S240f/320ff, See also: Friedrich Kittler, Der Gott der Ohren, P58 in „Die Wahrheit der Technischen Welt“, Suhrkamp 2013, citing Deleuze/Guattari – Der Anti-Öedipus, S485. ↩︎
- Anti-Oedipus, P368ff ↩︎
- And I can only recommend to create one: Doing so helped me a great deal when it comes to thinking about and analyzing exhibitions (digital and physical alike), and understanding them as their own form of art: What are the ideas and concepts involved? Why are the items arranged as they are? What does the exhibition say, what things and ideas are entering dialogue within them? ↩︎
- This is often used by conservatives to attack socialist ideas. It is – however – important that one doesn’t confuse the dehumanizing stripping with political measures to keep people from exploiting others, and to redistribute possessions gained by exploitation. Simple logic tells us that a single human shouldn’t be able to own vastly more than they need, and especially not to the expense of other humans, lifeforms, or the environment in general. ↩︎
- The primary message that is decoded from these images and symbols is the promise of ultimate freedom – an ideal world, free of death, and spatial or temporal restrictions- nothing seems impossible anymore. The images shown don’t symbolize themself anymore, but this promise. This is mirroring capitalisms decoding of labor into flows that, in turn, perpetually seem to expend the world into all possible directions, seemingly to infinity. The flows that are decoded in the internet are inscribed into the reality over the medium of the human psyche. Deleuze/Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, S33-40, S140-141 ↩︎
- Appreciation is lost in the process of turning art into a flow, as the meaning is devoided. The tool used do create this effect might be cynicism. Overcoming this cynicism seems to be a central desire of the metamodern art movement in general. See this passage from Infinite Jest, sometimes considered as one of the initial signals of the metamodern literature: „…because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone […] finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. […]everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The same desire to overcome cynicism – especially in regard to symbols that are often turned into „memes“ or symbols within online contexts, is a returning motive within the web-revival community, a online movement of which the artist responsible for the GIF-Gallery is part of. ↩︎
- And are, thus, shown as art again. Compare Benjamin, Walter „Goethes Wahlverwandschaften“ in Gesammelte Werke 1, 2001 Verlag, S539: „Thus, no work of art might seem unaverted alive without becoming pure pretense and as such, stopping to be art.“ ↩︎
Schreibe einen Kommentar