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In the landscape of online exhibitions, there is very often this digital divide that an exhibition must resemble the reality of the physical world as much as possible to be valid. In contrast to 3D and scanned spaces and the use of mega-corporate platforms by institutions, Dutch artist Constant Dullaart has been pursuing his long-term work around experimentation and exhibition on the internet through two online entities with well defined roles. common.garden is a platform that promotes social relations through the sharing of images, texts and videos in free online environments. This system allows distant.gallery to pursue the frequent dissemination of online exhibitions in collaboration with institutions and project-spaces around the world. By producing the distribution system and platform, Constant Dullaart redefines the interactions between visitors and works within the same online space. He thus continues his work of structural critique and ideological defense according to which the internet should be a space of creativity, free expression and collaboration.

When did you start curating online exhibitions?

Constant Dullaart: That goes back to 2006, when Nasty Nets started and afterwards with Club Internet initiated by Harm van den Dorpel who I curated with. Then, in 2011, I was asked to curate an online exhibition and we wanted to have works that could interfere with each other like they could do in a physical exhibition where you could hear the sound of a video while you look at a painting. So we devised a technique to do it and that became really interesting.

Can you tell us what was the prime intention behind common Garden and how did it develop over the years.

CD: In 2020, when the pandemic started, all the institutional curators were somehow forced to go on Instagram and personally I've been an activist against these companies and I’ve been making artworks around how they are problematic and destroying certain parts of culture that we appreciate. During that time, I saw that there was an exhibition of Nam June Paik at Stedelijk Museum opening on Instagram and the curator was walking through the exhibition and all these Instagram users were “ejaculating” emojis onto the screen and it felt obscene and strange because you had to be a member of Instagram to see it. You had to give up your data, you had to go through the loopholes of that company before you could access a publicly funded museum. At the same time I was looking through this old catalog of a Nam June Paik exhibition in a German Institution and I found that it was way more valuable so why don't we at least build an alternative even just to prove that we can make something to compete with the PR machines of these large companies.

So, I put all these bits of code and ideas back together and I proposed to Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam to make a platform with a bunch of artists that would curate shows in an environement where users could interact when they're close to each other on the screen. We found somebody that could program it and it worked! From being home alone, we were suddenly talking to all these people. When we opened the first show, It felt like ecstasy. I started to appreciate all the conversations, even the shitty ones! After this first experience, we decided to continue developing it during a residency at Eyebeam and we called the system common.garden. Then, we created distant.gallery.

What role do you play in the organization and development of common.garden and distant.gallery?

CD: common.garden is still officially part of my studio. As director, I manage how everything is grown, enjoying the richness of it by doing all kinds of experiments. As founder and initiator of distant.gallery, I produced and curated for it, but this is a role that Nina has taken over.

NL: Three identities flow over into each other. Me, Constant and a developper. Then, we are working with some external advisory developers but they aren't really part of the core team.

CD: Because distant.gallery is based in Amsterdam, it is officially a Dutch foundation with three external members on the board. distant.gallery is publicly funded by Creatives industry fund and the Mondriaan Fund. common.garden is running off of different projects that we've been doing or hosting. For each project, the museum or institution featured would pay for a little bit so we can remunerate a programmer and finance the server fees. At the moment, we have to see what will happen if common.garden becomes a separate company or how it will manifest itself if we keep getting funding. I want to keep it artisanal.

We can feel that there is something very familiar with common.garden. It has the plasticity of coworking/sharing platforms, the unlimited possibility of whiteboard aesthetic, the freedom of the bedroom wall of a young kid. It is an agglomeration of different working tools that we became very accustomed with during the lockdown but it seems to be a solution for showing art shows. How do you see common.garden in regards to those platforms I mentioned. Was it intentional to make it look less arty but more focused on the functions to make it more approachable ?

NL: There is always the issue that the easier you make something, the more difficult it is to make it adaptable and adaptive to work on different projects. There's a little bit of a balance in that sometimes. But I think it doesn't have to be user-friendly.

CD: I do like a purely functional design. On the other hand, because we've been building from one step to another, developing and adding different functions, it is necessary to keep a consistent overall design. Making it 2D and flat would leave enough room for the exhibited artworks to occupy that novel space of the interaction. Thus we could embed a work that would have a more interesting interaction.

Because as a platform we are occupying more of the default space of the interaction, we intermediate much more and go towards the background as much as possible. As a consequence, common.garden becomes more functional. We also have conceptual limits. For example, we don't want invisible users in space. These kinds of things are just very simple guidelines.

N.L: There is a nice effect that happens sometimes when new visitors enter the page and if they know HTML, or coding, they can imagine how it works just from seeing it because it's as simple as it looks. I think there's something nice even psychologically when somebody sees something and can immediately imagine how it works. It focuses the conversation around what we see on the page and it is not about being blown away by technology anymore and by extent fosters your own ambition to create a page with common.garden.

CD: People still want to talk about the door they came through, people still want to talk for an unnecessarily long time about how they connected their headsets and that there was something in their browser…This is in the nature of people to be obsessed about that. In principle, we set up a guideline to limit that as much as possible because what I really wanted is a reason for meeting people that you know just because you walked into the space. Just like you would have in an exhibition in a physical space.

**common.garden is an unspecified object, it puts the process of curation at the core, it makes it visible and the show is not just the end product. Even if art curating requires skills and technique, curation is not just an ‘art’ practice; anything can be curated. For now, common.garden has been used for show, panel discussions, events, all art related, how do you see it used in the future? **

CD: This is where distant.gallery and common garden separate. On one hand, common garden wants to provide reasons for people to casually meet. Right now, we're building out a structure where you could have an account and where it would be easier to create an event where you can meet people or if you want to show something easily to other people.

On the other hand, distant.gallery provides a similar framework to different scenes around the globe to be able to meet and exhibit culture. An artist from Kinshasa can be seen by a curator from New York who's seeing all the other shows and they could actually run into each other if they visit each other's opening.
distant.gallery is registered as a Dutch Foundation and at the core of the foundation we emphasize the idea that culture online should be seen in a non-commercial environment. Now, distant.gallery uses common.garden, but as a foundation, in principle, we could even start using another software.

Because it activates your microphone and camera when you enter any show on distant.gallery, you are suddenly exposed and you can be shy to talk to people as if you just landed in the middle of a crowded opening in a commercial gallery. You could be impressed, you could be chatting to new people and express your immediate feelings. Through its design, it creates some kind of unique behavior that shifts affects towards the machine.

NL: What matters is how you build a narrative or how you define a context, how you mediate the interaction or the way you make objects visible on the screen. If you add this to the fact that you can have these continuous interactions in common.garden and distant.gallery, it offers a different route towards giving meaning to the artworks and exhibitions in a very basic way. It is especially the case for distant.gallery displaying shows from all over the world where the contrast between the universally “accessible” internet and the fact that projects coming out of another context and geography matters a lot. It provides context to a show, to an object or to a narrative.

CD: On distant.gallery, you could be awkwardly close to disconnecting or wanting to walk away from somebody who's in New York while you're in Portugal. When some visitors are hiding because they're connecting with other people or because they're standing close to somebody else, they must feel like it is an unnatural online behavior because the device that takes you online is such an intimate object. It's like a book. You rarely read a book with strangers. By making such a platform accessible to this public dynamic, you break this barrier of intimacy with the device. People are not accustomed to being on a website and being able to move away from someone but if you're in a supermarket for example you're doing it all the time because you are blocking the chocolate aisle for example. So where do you put the real, do you put it in the physical interactions? We thought a lot about how you connect and disconnect to a user and it was a negotiation between what feels real online on an interface and what feels real in real life.

**During the pandemic, institutions have been closed for a certain number of weeks and wanted to exist online. For most of them, the original idea was to make a lot of documentation and a lot of viewing rooms available but they seem to have avoided or forgotten exhibitions. Why do you think online art exhibitions lack interest from institutions ? **

Nina: On the institution side, there seems to always be a combination of a lack of knowledge and not quite knowing how to adapt. Institutions can't make something digital just for the sake of making something digital or do something culturally diverse for the sake of it. There has to be some sense to it. If you just do it to tick a box, that's when you end up going down a dead end. On the side of the audience, it's a vicious cycle in the sense that what has been offered, often, hasn't really hit the spot. It hasn't really been interesting for a lot of the audience. The expectation from part of the audience is “Oh, I know how this works, it's gonna be another website or it's just gonna be like a fake metaverse type of idea.”

CD: I agree. A museum exists when there's already a reason for the existence of a cultural reference. For example, a museum would start to collect an artwork when there's already a certain relevance. It is the same with technology. An old-fashioned institution would work with Instagram because that already has a social echo.Because the character of these institutions is already conservative they wouldn't necessarily go on the threshold of developing something new or something interesting or new ways of reaching their audience. Their livelihood is in the statickness of the bullshit of justifying why there needs to be a building for a museum. There is this kind of reliability, this sense of continuation and those are conservative values. At the same time, there are museums and institutions around the world that are on the forefront of Art numérique and digital arts like Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Rhizome or the* New Museum*, trying to get over this and they can support and open up these fields.

There are also institutions that realize that digital art is actually the future and that they should do the same thing as Rhizome or HEK. They start to write it into their policy, but they have to fight against this enormously conservative institutional hierarchy inside. In the end, they would rather carry on struggling with the fact that there could be a QR code inside the museum or that they have to do something through a computer even if they know it would open new thinking about the Exhibition.

Do you think part of the issue is the fact that institutions are unable to replicate their systems of exhibition making, curation, because they don’t transform it internally to match the context of the digital field ?

CD: As an artist you're always thinking “where does the artwork manifest itself”, especially if you deal with media. So it is always the question of what is the job of the museum. Is it safekeeping and showing the artwork or is it about how to provide access to it. In my opinion, the Museum could even exist without actually having the artworks. They could just frame culture to make it possible for you to regurgitate it. The job is providing access to means of understanding culture, and this is something that could be distributed in a lot of different ways.

distant.gallery & common.garden

Constant.dullaart (NL, 1979) is a Dutch conceptual artist, media artist, internet artist, and curator whose work is deeply connected to the Internet. Within his practice, he reflects on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies while critically engaging the power structures of mega corporations that dramatically influence our worldview through the internet. His works were shown in MCA Chicago, Whitechapel Gallery London, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Import Projects Berlin, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, ZKM Karlsruhe, Victoria & Albert Museum London, and MAAT Lisbon. Dullaart has curated exhibitions and lectured at universities and academies throughout Europe.

Nina Lissone(1995) is a curator and writer working chiefly with topics of counter-cultures within the digital realm, whose interests revolve around disembodied context and narrative-building. She is currently assistant-curator at distant.gallery and Electric Artefacts, and studio manager to artist Constant Dullaart. She has contributed as a curator to shows at ASC Project Space, the Digital Art Observatory and the Window Gallery at Central Saint Martins. Her writings have been published by Vice, i-D and Village Underground, amongst others.