Creating Online Exhibitions on Google Arts & Culture

 

Imprints of Soviet Christmas tree decorations in concrete, a cardboard model of a typical Khrushchev house and an old tea set painted with swimmers of the "Moskva” pool inside each cup. These objects were created by 18 Russian artists as part of the ART-MEMORY project (launched in fall 2019). At that time none of us thought that that these artworks would not be presented to the general public in a "real" Moscow museum or gallery but in an online format. 

 

Opening an exhibition in a physical space is the conventional way for cultural organizations to present their collections to the world. Later, if necessary, the exhibition may be digitized to attract the attention of other audiences. Another path is to create art projects that can exist exclusively in a digital format. In the time of a pandemic these classic patterns fail to work. And also independently of COVID19, cultural projects have to be mobile and adaptive in order to find opportunities for development and scaling.

 

 

The idea of ART-MEMORY was born from reflections on the phenomenon of memory. Everything that we remember is important, and the act of passing on memory is a key tradition of human culture. But why do some memories fade faster than others? What happens to individual memory over time? These questions shaped the basic concept of the project: sometimes our memory needs a mediator, and art can be that mediator. 

 

The heroes of the project are residents of a Moscow nursing home who are deprived of the opportunity to preserve and pass on their memories due to social isolation. These people have witnessed the rise and fall of the 1960s era in the USSR and today their memories are a rare evidence of a time that is rapidly drifting away. The fund therefore brought together 18 artists as mediators of the memory that by some chance became neglected: representatives of contemporary art and the classical school, residents of cultural institutions and independent artists. A variety of approaches to creating artistic expression helped us emphasize the polyphony of the heroes' voices that the project was filled with. However, we were still in need of a conceptual view of the project to create an exhibition. 

 

 

We made a decision to organize a one-day art residence to build a bridge between the heroes of the project and the artists. This collaboration set up a space of common plots and cross-cutting themes which we ultimately turned into a leitmotif map ¬- a document that synthesizes the memories of different people.

 

This work was no less important than the process of creating the art itself, since the project reveals the phenomenon of memory through the biographical narrative. Therefore, we carefully worked with each memory.

 

 

We could not help presenting the artists’ works to the heroes of the project so they would see how the artists perceived and transformed their memories. That is why we organized a closed exhibition of contemporary art in the nursing home where the heroes of the stories lived. The residents recognized themselves in every object - even when they were not based precisely on their stories. The image of the 60s, crystallized before our eyes from fragments of memories, was formed from the inner, subjective reality of people and the conditions of the objective reality of that time.

 

 

The next step would have been to set up an exhibition for the general public in a Moscow museum or gallery, but the lockdown forced us to radically revise the development vectors of this project. "Although at that time [before the lockdown] we did not think about creating an exhibition in an online format, but it was still clear that we had a lot of work to do with the visuals: we turned to existing narratives and artistically transformed them into visual stories. Therefore, reassembling the project for the Google Arts & Culture platform seemed like an organic stage of development”, says Daria Dmitrieva, Head of the Fund.  

 

When the lockdown made obvious the urge to look for other opportunities, we realized the project could not be simply rebuilt to fit in digital space but had to reach a new level. The original concept of the exhibition was a metaphor of a maze: artworks would lead the audience through different clusters of memories to the very centre of someone else’s memory. The memory maze is filled with various filters - a certain social, political, economic context of that time. Overcoming these filters, the viewer can get closer to the narrative of the heroes - their memory. The center of the labyrinth is self-perception: the way people remember, see and define themselves at present.

 

Before adapting the exhibition concept for the online format, we had to, as in the case of a "real” exhibition, decide on the display space. Where was it possible to quickly organize a large-scale and, most importantly, accessible online exhibition? We decided not to run it on our own platform because of the high level of competition with producers of entertainment content, other digital formats and platforms during quarantine. 

 

To solve this problem, we approached a platform with a stable audience and well-established digitalization mechanics - Google Arts & Culture. The often discussed disadvantage that Arts & Culture is carried by Google is an advantage at the same time, since this implies that  it does not belong to any cultural institution or initiative, but works as an intermediary platform that allows the organization to maintain its brand and the necessary positioning. This is especially important when it comes to digital content since a broad audience beyond that of your organization gets to know your brand in a very short period of time. 

 

 

The main feature of the Google platform is its focus on storytelling to make collections more accessible. The main tool of immersive storytelling is deep zoom, the enlargement of certain fragments of the picture. It transforms an art object into a sequence of episodes that visually and linearly lead their "viewer-reader” through the traditional plot structure from an exposition to a denouement. The narrative is created not by means of art, but literally inside of it: deep zoom works to reveal details and expands the narrative but does not go beyond the boundaries of one story. Through immersive storytelling cultural institutions strengthen their brand: the stories surrounding their collections convey the mission and principles of the organization and help them broadcast their value among the audience.

 

 

On the Google Arts & Culture platform the stories unfolding inside the artworks are presented like comics: we examine pictures of different scales and read the captions that accompany them. How is it possible to adapt complex cultural projects to this format? In ART-MEMORY there are two types of storytellers that always coexist: elderly people, whose memories formed the basis of the project, and artists, who interpret their memories. Moreover, the narrative of the project is deeply connected with the national context, the era of the thaw in the USSR, which made us think about the foreign audience. To what extent will the created visual narrative be understandable and interesting to another audience?

 

These questions became a starting point for reassembling the concept of the exhibition. We strongly did not want to create another online viewing room that would simulate an exhibition in a physical space and ignore the medium of the platform. We had to leave behind the original concept of the maze that was built around a spiral shape and focuses on the bodily presence and the feeling of attraction of the objects. The exhibition still should have a common narrative that could lead the viewer as confidently as the feeling of an actual space. We also had to split the exhibition into two parts due to the large amount of material: the platform suggests that one exhibition should consist of 35-40 slides and ours had about 70. 

 

 

We found the solution in sound or rather in the voice of the collective storyteller. Interviews with the residents of the boarding house became a part of the exhibition. The sound of a voice helped us overcome one of the main obstacles to creating an online exhibition: it immersed the viewer in a space of new experience. Thanks to the transmedia storytelling we managed to separate the artworks from each other in a homogeneous screen space.

 

The voices also emphasized the diversity and polyphony of the statements within the project. Despite the linear movement through the exhibition, its visual narrative unfolds non-linearly and reveals unexpected connections between different stories. "It was important for us to preserve the diversity of stories and to map numerous conflicting statements. The artists were not supposed to take the place of the heroes, but to enter into a dialogue with them,” says exhibition curator Ksenia Bashmakova. The artists created a new representation of memories that does not become a separate world, but rather highlights the seams, gaps and connections between the blocks from which it is assembled.

 

To make this experience available to foreign viewers, we have prepared some historical references. For example, an information about the "Moskva” pool, crystal sets and housing of Khrushchev project, provides the audience with deeper understanding of the historical context through the prism of everyday life and also lets them see it by the means of archival photographs, which also became part of the exhibition.

 

 

Working with Google Arts & Culture is very engaging: the project is focused on creative search, experiment and innovation and its employees are always open to suggestions. However, this does not negate the fact that Google is a huge and rather clumsy corporation with its own set of rules and requirements. The platform gives you the freedom to choose and organize content, but it has its own rules and requirements that must be followed for successful cooperation.

 

 

It took us about 4 months to create ART-MEMORY. A lot of time was spent on digitizing and organizing content as well as on communicating with representatives of the platform. Therefore, it is better to start working on a project at least a few months before the desired date for the realization. During these months we worked in a team of five people: two authors of the project took part in shaping its vision, the curator was responsible for systemizing, uploading and organizing content in digital space, the PR specialist communicated with the platform and planned a PR strategy and a content writer created and translated heroes’ interviews and historical references. 

 

 

If your project application is approved, platform representatives will schedule an online meeting with you to discuss the details. The most important thing at this stage is to show that the concept of your exhibition project has an inner dramaturgy and potential for storytelling.

 

 

Google Arts & Culture is an international cultural platform. If your project was not originally created for an English-speaking audience, you should remember that content must be translated into English. If the project touches on not very widely known topics and events, try to find a way to tell more about them to immerse the viewer in the necessary context. For example, using immersive storytelling tools or historical references.

 

The statistics show that in two months the ART-MEMORY exhibition has been viewed by almost 1000 people from 31 countries and the feedback we got was mostly positive. Our audience emphasised that the exhibition seemed to them as one of the most qualitative and interesting projects created in Russia during the lockdown. And the artists involved were happy to present their works despite the coronavirus restrictions. So all in all, partnership with Google Arts & Culture helped us shape our view on future work regarding digital formats. We have learned to think about digital projects as carefully as about analogue, physical ones. Now we are thinking about how we can transform digital formats into a permanent daily practice to broaden the horizon of our vision as a cultural Fund.

 

Fund of Cultural Projects "Thursday” is an interdisciplinary space in Moscow that brings together artists, curators, cultural managers, volunteers and everyone who loves and makes culture. Together we create unique projects and raise the quality level of cultural initiatives in Russia.