“ON THE INTERNET I AM AN ARTIST.”— “ART LOOKS MUCH BETTER ON INSTAGRAM.” These statements, declared as conceptual artworks by Düsseldorf-based post-internet artist and curator Florian Kuhlmann, outline the media shift and ambivalent value with which art and artists are confronted in digital, network-based cultures. Parallel to the dependence of artistic design and production processes on digital technology and the internet, the virtualisation of institutionalised forms of presentation, mediation and marketing of art is advancing exponentially. Natively digital art museums, online art collections of museums and galleries, NFT collections of crypto art, online and AI-curated art exhibitions, Insta-Walks, AR and AV in art museums, as well as smartphone-based art presentations illustrate how the digital transformation is resetting the art system.

Drawing upon the concept of ‘paraverse,’ this special issue deals with the digital expansion and virtual augmentation of curating, exhibiting, and collecting art. The term ‘paraverse’ is a linguistic short form for parallel universe. From ancient philosophy to contemporary quantum physics, science-fiction, critical posthumanism and the transhumanism of digital capitalism, the term refers to a hypothetical universe beyond the known. The overarching theory of multiple universes assumes that there is not just one, but several parallel worlds that come together in what is known as the multiverse.[1] As an implementation of the scientific concept, there already exists concrete applications of the worlding concept of paraverse, such as the AR NFT metaverse platform PARAVERSE (https://www.paraverse.world/), a network-based multiverse that uses augmented reality, blockchain and geolocation technology to creatively merge the real physical world with virtual world creations.

The journal issue explores which parallel worlds of curating, exhibiting and collecting have emerged in digital spaces and how these can be located in relation to the familiar physical-analogue world of exhibiting and collecting art — whether as an extension of existing institutional practices or a parallel-world phenomenon of a subversive, institution-critical digital culture. It tackles a series of questions that have surfaced in the process of digital transformation: How does the practice of curating art (pre-digital, algorithmically generated and minted art) change through its migration into virtual spaces, cross-realities and automated scenographies? What new display, participation and mediation possibilities do digital and net-based exhibition formats offer? How are public and private collection strategies and practices changing through the introduction of NFTs?

The Paraverse issue brings together different theoretical, practical and empirical perspectives from researchers, curators, mediators, critics and artists. Under discussion are the digital image ecologies of curating, showing and mediating art and cultural heritage, the blockchain-induced decentralization and commoning of exhibition-making, collecting, and art sales, the potentials and dangers of artistic value creation and value preservation in the collective space of virtuality, and the future of art-curating in the age of artificial intelligence. By these themes and research foci, it connects to and expands on two former issues of the journal OnCurating: the issue Curating the Digital from 2020, edited by Dorothee Richter and Paul Stewart,[2] and the issue Digital Curating Expanded from 2023, edited by Christine Kaiser, Li Ruixuan et al.[3] — a bilingual (English-Chinese), revisited and updated version of the 2020 issue.  

The collection of contributions is the final outcome of an interdisciplinary lecture series entitled “ParaVerse_Digital Cultures of Curating, Exhibiting and Collecting.” It was organized by Birgit Mersmann and Hauke Ohls at the Institute of Art History of the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn during the winter term 2023/2024 and served as the inaugural event of the newly established Chair of Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures. To open a more diverse prospect and to provide a critical assessment of burgeoning AI opportunities and challenges for art curating, exhibiting, and collecting, the selection of lecture contributions was expanded by interviews with influential representatives of the respective fields.

The first section deals with the digital mediation complex while focusing on cultural heritage in GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), and the transformative relation between exhibits and audience experience in digital and hybrid museum contexts. Historian Lucas Burkart argues for a digitally informed instead of a technology-driven approach to the management and curation of cultural heritage data. Presenting his Curiositas project, a historical digital exhibition of the lost Basel-based Museum Faesch of the 17^th century, he stresses that the main emphasis of digital exhibition-making should lie on the curatorial agenda and storytelling rather than on technological tools. Digital curator Jacob Franke and digital strategy officer Martin Zavesky discuss digital formats and mediation strategies for analogue objects with regard to the museum collections of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Departing from a critical debate of Walter Benjamin’s aura concept against the horizon of digital reproduction and simulation, they conclude that the paraverse of the digital has the potential to enrich the live experience of the auratic object, but that this only works through reconnection with the analogue world of embodied museum experience. Florian Wiencek, founder and CEO of Musealisten, a studio for digital mediation, presents five key strategies of how Augmented Reality can be employed for curating or mediating art and culture in museums. Instead of comprehending digitally augmented space as a separate parallel universe, he advocates for a holistic museum experience merging the physical and digital world(s). Augmented Reality also plays a key role in the visual essay by digital artist Manuel Rossner. During his Domus artist residency in Galatina in Southern Italy, he discovered a parallel structure between the local limestone Pietra Leccese and informatic Reaction-Diffusion or Turing patterns, i.e. the natural and artificial digital world. By digitally simulating the materiality of the stone and dropping it on the kitchen table of his apartment, he exhibits the paraversing of his real living condition with the destructive force and dissolving dynamics of the pulverizing stone. In (Un)Real Worlds of Digital Curating, curatorial scholar Dorothee Richter reactivates Marxist and Situationist theories, arguing that the digital age imposes “passive contemplation,” replacing sensory engagement with spectacle consumption. NFTs epitomize this by transformimg conceptually fluid digital art into speculative objects that are then displayed conservatively in white cubes for validation. The author proposes “situated curating” as resistance — emphasizing bodily presence and shared environments to re-anchor art in tangible reality, countering digital “placelessness.” 

The six contributions of the second section take a closer look at the digital exhibition complex. Art historian Birgit Mersmann explores an emerging global phenomenon of the digital exhibitionary complex: Immersive digital art exhibitions staged as art-historical spectacles in memory-ridden real places of historical significance. Providing an image-theoretical analysis of immersive digital art exhibitions in the legacy of Albert Plécy’s concept and technology of the “Image Totale,” she demonstrates that immersive digital art exhibitions have evolved as a new tech-centric exhibition genre with the industries of digital image creation and that they serve the profit-oriented function of para-sites. Curator and curatorial scholar Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás presents her international collaborative project Beyond Matter, a practice-based research on exhibition-making under virtual condition. Focusing on spatial aspects, she reflects on the digital revival of past landmark exhibitions as well as the digital curation of new art and archival exhibitions. From a technology-historical, space-theoretical and user-participatory perspective, (digital) curator and art scholar Peggy Schoenegge traces the emergence and transformation of curating web-based exhibition spaces. Including own projects by the curatorial collective “peer-to-space,” she argues that within the paraverse of the web, new speculative exhibitions formats can be created that leave behind traditional approaches. The internet as exhibitionary complex is also the topic in art historian Hauke Ohls’s deep analysis of Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s works Berl-Berl and Boreal Dreams. Interpreting the exhibits of live simulations against the grain of Jonathan Crary’s harsh critique of the internet complex, he stresses the significance of a digital-ecological paraverse for the artistic creation and reflection of more-than-human life-worlds.

The introduction of the blockchain ecosystem has exerted great impact on the digital exhibition complex and the global art market. Nina Roehr’s personal curator report on the crypto art exhibition DYOR. Making Sense of the Crypto-Artworld, and Rebecca Partridge’s interview with the crypto art critic and market expert Pau Waelder examine this disruptive paradigm shift. They reflect, even question the idea and practice of decentralized curating, assess the interactive involvement of audiences in the creation of digital collectibles on the blockchain and look into the market share of NFT-based art and exhibition making.  

The third section scrutinizes the queering of human and machine curation in the rising AI complex. It consists of two interviews and a manifesto-like text on the “queer multiverse.” Birgit Mersmann’s and Hauke Ohls’s interview with curator and researcher Li Xi from Aiiiii, a research lab for art and artificial intelligence supported by the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, Shanghai, discusses the potentials, challenges and limits of exhibiting AI art across the paraverse and considers how AI-driven A-Life art could contribute to a deeper understanding of ecological issues with respect to a more-than-human world. Nicolas Flessa’s interview with curator and critic Răzvan Ion moots

how a collaborative partnership and genuine symbiosis between human and machine intelligence could redefine the curation of art. It provides insight into the creation of the 10^th Bucharest Biennale (2022), the first-ever art biennale curated by an artificial intelligence system in VR. In the final article of the section on the AI complex, curator, critical thinker and tech-queer activist Răzvan Ion opts for a Multiverse Radical AI, i.e. a more inclusive and diverse AI that acknowledges the inherently queer nature of artificial intelligence. The manifesto-like text is a call for reimagining Free Radical AI from a queer perspective.

We as editors hope that the articles and interviews merged in this issue contribute to a deeper theoretical and practical techno-cultural understanding of the ongoing digital transformation in art curating, exhibiting and collecting, and that they provide orientation of how to navigate constant change within the art world. We would like to express our sincere thanks to all authors and interview partners for their insightful and enriching contributions, to Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb from OnCurating for their continuous editorial support, and to the Gielen-Leyendecker Foundation and the Open Access Service Center of the University of Bonn for their generous financial support to enable this open access publication.

Birgit Mersmann is Professor of Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her interdisciplinary research covers modern and contemporary Western and East Asian art, global art history, migratory aesthetics, museum and exhibition studies, digital art, image and media theory, visual cultures and visual translation, interrelations between script and image, and history and theory of photography. Recent book publications include: Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst (ed. with Hauke Ohls, Lüneburg 2024); Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage (ed. with Christiane Kruse and Arnold Bartetzky; Berlin/Boston 2024); Okzidentalismen. Projektionen und Reflexionen des Westens in Kunst, Kultur und Ästhetik (ed. with Hauke Ohls, Bielefeld 2022); Über die Grenzen des Bildes. Kulturelle Differenz und transkulturelle Dynamik im globalen Feld der Kunst (Bielefeld 2021); Bildagenten. Historische und zeitgenössische Bildpraxen in globalen Kulturen (ed. with Christiane Kruse; Paderborn 2021); Handbook of Art and Global Migration. Theories, Practices, and Challenges (ed. with Burcu Dogramaci; Berlin/Boston 2019). 

Hauke Ohls is a postdoctoral researcher with the Chair of Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research focuses on theoretical, sociological, and philosophical questions of modern and contemporary art with particular emphasis on eco-relational art and ecological aesthetics,neo-extractivism, ecofeminist, pluriversal, posthuman theory, the discourse on objects, materiality and images, as well as the relationship between art, economy, and neoliberalism. Additional areas of interest include the intersection of art and music, artists’ writings, media art, and transcultural art history. Recent book publications include: Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst (ed. with Birgit Mersmann, Lüneburg 2024); Many-Valued Aesthetics. Interconnections in the Work of Mary Bauermeister (Bielefeld 2024); Okzidentalismen. Projektionen und Reflexionen des Westens in Kunst, Kultur und Ästhetik (ed. with Birgit Mersmann, Bielefeld 2022); Objektorientierte Kunsttheorie. Graham Harmans spekulative Philosophie im Kontext einer (nicht-)relationalen Ästhetik (Hamburg 2019).