Intenet Browser (Log Journal)
Featured in Log #50, “Model Behavior”
For their 2014 multimedia art performance Art Project 2023, artists João Enxuto and Erica Love crafted a speculative narrative centered on an economic crash in 2020 that swiftly destabilizes the global art market. Five years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 acquisition of the Marcel Breuer–designed Whitney Museum building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side (changing its name to the Met Breuer), “the museum board elected not to renew its eight-year lease.” In 2023, the multinational technology company Google purchased the vacant structure to transform it into the Art Project Museum, touted as the “first virtual museum.”
Rather than undergo a yearslong renovation of the 57-year-old structure, and as a means of rebranding it as a Google product to showcase other Google products, the company chose to demolish and replicate it on-site as a full-scale model with the aid of a digital scanner, the original blueprints, and a subsidiary 3D printer. “Google reasoned that if there was no break with the past, then no one would be alarmed that a new dawn was upon us.” In a matter of weeks, the distinctly stacked facade and window boxes, once clad in gray granite slabs, were recreated as a hollow concrete sculpture (for their performance, the artists printed a miniature, powder-based model of the museum).
The Art Project Museum contains no physical objects. Its virtual artwork can only be accessed through an arsenal of proprietary software and devices in a process that starts with visitors logging into their Google+ accounts at the front desk for personal data collection. Once inside the gallery space, “with the aid of a Google Glass prototype, visitors can assemble virtual walls, partitions, and pedestals that follow Breuer’s original grid,” and are “invited to curate the collection with the help of a Google Art Scholar.” However, the virtual assets sometimes spontaneously glitch, blur, and fracture until they all disappear without a trace, eventually leaving the Art Project Museum virtually bare – a vacant shell masquerading as the Breuer-designed original that once stood in its place.
The artists’ parable of a rapidly reproduced museum, emptied by a dysfunctional suite of elements required to activate its interior, satirizes Google’s treatment of the art world through Google Arts & Culture (originally titled the Google Art Project), an online platform launched in 2011 that allows users to view artworks from partnering cultural organizations around the world. The exchange of users’ private data for tailored creative content is as easily permissible to its users as it is corrosive to the centuries-old museum typology. “As Google Art Project continues to grow by consuming content from established institutions,” Enxuto and Love explained in an interview, “the question remains whether host museums will atrophy in the networked future.”
Six years after the presentation of Art Project 2023, the 2020 economic crisis Enxuto and Love imagined came to fruition (along with the Met’s subsequent dispossession of the Met Breuer), as a result of the global spread of COVID-19, leaving cultural institutions with the task of reevaluating their online presences to reach their newly homebound audiences. Prior to the pandemic, the Met, the Whitney, and over 2,000 other cultural institutions had already established profiles on the Google Arts & Culture website, supporting its mission “to preserve and bring the world’s art and culture online so it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere.”
While a handful of these institutions can be walked through virtually using Google Street View–adapted photographic panoramas, the experience is compromised by low and inconsistent resolutions that make it a poor substitute for physical engagement. The majority of institutions are represented, instead, as visual catalogues. The viewer can see an image of an artwork from any given museum, with the option to browse through a collection of artworks from the same location or countless others in Google’s seemingly inexhaustible database – searchable by time, place, medium, and color, and always against a blank, spatially indeterminate expanse.
Like the superficially reproduced Breuer-designed museum imagined in Art Project 2023, Google Arts & Culture has reduced the concept of the museum to a repository of images excised from their contexts. To scrap the space in museum space, in other words, is to replace the slow, contemplative stroll one might take through a museum with the disembodied, potentially endless scroll of a web page made free of charge by the cultivation of user data.
As an alternative to Google’s database-as-space approach, the contemporary and modern art gallery Hauser & Wirth unveiled Hauser & Wirth Virtual Reality (HWVR), the first virtual reality modeling tool of its kind to emerge from the art world. Developed by ArtLab, the gallery’s recently established research and innovation arm, HWVR converts Hauser & Wirth’s collection into 3D assets and models its exhibition spaces from the ground up without the aid of combined photos. “Drawing from techniques applied in architecture, construction and video-game authorship,” Hauser & Wirth’s announcement of the new research division reads, “the tool creates true-to-life scale and accuracy, as well as the authentic look, feel, and interactivity of our galleries.” The inaugural HWVR exhibition, “Beside Itself,” takes place in a digital model of Hauser & Wirth Menorca, an 18th-century building complex on a small island in the Mahon port of Menorca, Spain. The gallery, in reality, is currently undergoing conservation work with an expected opening date in 2021.
“Beside Itself” starts in an open-air courtyard with one wall adorned with Lawrence Weiner’s BESIDE ITSELF (1970) and, next to it, another wall cut out to frame Louise Bourgeois’s Maman (1999) in the nearby garden. A white circle on the ground by the entrance beckons the visitor into a high-fidelity re-creation of the exhibition space, complete with overhead spotlights hanging from white-painted wooden rafters and patches of light cast on the floor from skylights. Other white circles scattered across the polished concrete floor become the steps one takes throughout the exhibition, where even the smallest material aberrations are reproduced in fine detail – the protective acrylic sheets in front of Charles Gaines’s Librettos (2015), for instance, reflect and distort Glenn Ligon’s silkscreen Come Out (2015) on the opposite wall.
When considering virtual reality technology’s commendation as “the first step in a grand adventure into the landscape of the imagination,” its application to the reproduction of an ordinary exhibition space can appear to be an underwhelming use of resources. Yet in its insistence on the quotidian, at a time when most of the world is either unable or hesitant to leave their homes, HWVR demonstrates a potential of its software platform rarely expounded upon by technologists.
By rendering the textures of the architecture as faithfully as those of its collection, HWVR rejects the scroll of the internet browser for the greater material interconnectedness of experiencing art. By modeling its affordances and limitations after those of the building it emulates, as opposed to those of the database in which its assets are digitally archived, HWVR attempts to reembody its viewer using a platform that has a tendency to do the very opposite. And unlike the in-person experience imagined in Art Project 2023, made limitless (perhaps exhaustingly so) by its virtual augmentation, basing the constraints of “Beside Itself” on those of the physical gallery space compels the viewer to take pause and consider itsthe curatorial decisions: the interplay between the artworks and the lighting, or the isolation of a single set of paintings in a lone corridor, or even the choice to drape a Max Bill–designed cashmere blanket on an inconspicuous side chair.
“The museum,” writes art critic Mike Pepi, “is a symbolic stalwart in an age of instant gratification, a commitment to posterity in an age of presentism, and a structure that supports the value of humanity’s lone unique characteristic: the penchant for narrative, uncertainty, and the unknowable in the face of an algorithmic regime careening toward a society built around optimization and measurement.” As COVID-19 pushes museums to increase their virtual outreach, Google Arts & Culture and other websites with nonarchitectural spatial organizations might, for good reason, increasingly become the dominant platforms for art viewership through their easy and inexhaustible accessibility. Yet the less popular choice to model this outreach on the relationship between a curated set of objects and their environmental context, even through the relatively time-consuming processes of creating and viewing a virtual simulation, can reaffirm the centrality of museum spaces as sites of knowledge production.
Given the pandemic’s capacity to accelerate innovation, and given its discontents, a stroll through “Beside Itself” is indeed a welcome respite.
