In order to explore the (un)real worlds of digital curating, I will focus less on different digital possibilities in the narrower field of art but rather try to understand how digital media produce, influence, and situate us as social and political subjects. Since we understand curating as a cultural and political practice and exhibitions as spaces for negotiating various politics, I will build on this to derive proposals for curatorial action.

As Karl Marx’s once titled “Die Historizität der menschlichen Sinne” (the historicity of the human senses) proposes, the human senses are historically, if not fully determined, then at least developed in close proximity to the materiality of a society; this simply means that the human imagination evolved as soon as optical devices opened up new ways of seeing. This goes beyond the well-known material bases and the superstructure of ideology. It literally means that the human constitution, the senses, the bodily functions, the possibilities to transfer any input from outside, is developed in close entanglement with material, mechanical, and now digital possibilities.

In the context of curatorial practice, it is essential to discuss this radical upheaval of the epistemic arrangement of body/image/technology and the associated re-situating of subjects and communities. This involves a dissociation of sensual impressions from the body; it is a new form of alienation. From this perspective, too, the traditional mere “hanging”, the mere “stringing together” of individual images in a room seems like an almost poignant retrograde act. However, this gesture of pointing is also a statement, an attempt to insist on a world of irreducible distances and ancient media. Connected to this is also the obvious effect of seeing “artworks” primarily as commodities that are and remain transportable and tangible. This conservative, if you will, way of “hanging”, usually accompanied by a backward-looking concept of art, is still a widespread curatorial act today. But we must also take into account the possibilities and problematic effects of the digital on cultural techniques such as curating. Therefore, the digital condition today is the (un)real backdrop of contemporary curating.

From Digitalisation to Alienation
But how did we come to this point? This deep alienation, triggered by digitalisation was initiated by the global corona pandemic, which not only provided new images and a previously unimagined dependency of all communication on digital media, but also enabled a new form of governance, a new form of struggle over hegemony. I refer here, for example, to digitally transmitted graphics on the pandemic with corresponding behavioral recommendations, provided by experts and self-proclaimed experts from the conspiracy theory camp. The moment facts and emotionalised images lost their connection, conspiracy ideologies could float freely.. At the same time, the pandemic isolated people, and social contacts were suddenly radically reduced.

In a talk, Johan Hartle argues that the Covid 19 pandemic was a specific aesthetico-political constellation with drastic implications — how the crisis changed our perceptive apparatus, our relationship to the world, and with his analysis, the problem of the fetishization in the arts can be understood.[1] In his view, the crisis was not only a massive crisis in itself in terms of organising social affairs, but it also deepened several forms of crises: economic crises, political crises, and on top of that, it also somewhat takes away people’s capacity to react politically. This dilemma, as Johan Hartle continues, increases the crisis in terms of economic problems, and at the same time it diminishes the capacities to confront the crisis. His argumentation develops the understanding of our current situation in three steps. First, he examines the concept of alienation as developed by Karl Marx; second, he argues the extent to which Georg Lukács’ understanding of reification develops this approach; and third, he elaborates on Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle as its contemporary extension and what follows for our understanding of the contemporary aesthetico-political constellation. I roughly rely on Hartle’s argument and will discuss what implication this ultimately has for curating. He develops the argument in a series of thoughts related to alienation. Alienation is here understood as the term that Karl Marx used to describe the specificity of work in capitalism.

Following Hartle in the fetishism chapter (chapter one of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy), it is demonstrated that we keep reproducing social conditions even if we might simply be market agents. We reproduce all implications of a market society: the increasing social inequality and reproduction of social inequality that are implied in the very act of market exchange.

Marx’s argument is in some way quite obvious, as Hartle lays out: by exchanging commodities, we reproduce the idea of the exchange of equivalence. This is problematic because there is one commodity that is worth more than it costs, and that is the commodity of labour power. One can buy labour power for its “fair price”; the fair price is the cost of reproduction — historically, not going directly to the producer of new bodies and of care work, (since this would be women’s work), labour power is capable of producing worth that is more than what it costs; this is the so-called surplus. By buying labour power and having the labourer produce, the buyer or capitalist gets richer, although he pays the labourer fairly. That is implied in the very act of commodity exchange, because it is implied in the principle of the exchange of equivalence, which is in short Marx’s concept of fetishism.

This thought on alienation was further exemplified, as Hartle points out, when the most renowned Marxist cultural critic Georg Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness in 1923. In this book, he develops this idea further and stops speaking about fetishism; he now speaks about reification. Reification means turning social relations or processes into “things”. This concept implies that something is turned into a thing that shouldn’t normally be treated as a thing. (In German, this sounds even clearer, because it is called Objektifizierung). Hartle emphasises that one could say that Marx’s understanding of commodity fetishism already implies such a dynamic of turning social relations into things because in the act of exchanging commodities or in the act of thinking there is a necessary value to an object, this commodity has a monetary value. From a feminist perspective, it also means that the relations in the family become objectified, especially as the economic side of a union becomes more and more romanticised. This is typical for ideology, where a narrative or myth in a Barthesian sense confuses the clear vision of what is what. This makes the economic aspects invisible but no less pressing. What Lukács basically says is that, under capitalist circumstances, more often than not, we tend to take processes and relations as what they are not, namely as things. They are being reified, and as Hartle concludes, we do so by acting as individual commodity processors, meaning, we act as individual market agents rather than seeing ourselves as the collective producers of our own lives.

This means, in Hartle’s perspective, that we are individual commodity processors who exchange individual commodities — labour power, for example, or whatever we have to sell. But this is a misconception, because the way in which we perceive the world from this angle leads to the misunderstanding that we are confronted with individual objects that we are exchanging as individual agents. Instead, we should see the whole social reality as a process and as a set of relations that we are part of and that we might collectively change. The general understanding is that relations and processes, or society as a whole, now appear to us fragmented, as a set of individual objects and a set of individual agents. This implies that in the neoliberal economy we have a sense of fragmentation and isolation, of being individual market agents, and we have this refined reality of millions of objects in front of us that all seem to restore and contain social reality as an objective fact. When Lukács calls this “reification,” he means that the world appears to us as if it was a set of things rather than a set of forces, relations, and dynamics that we ourselves could change. And by being confronted with such a thing as “objective reality,” we end up in a “contemplative relationship” with the world: our impression is that we can no longer change this reality; we can only look at it from a certain distanced contemplative point of view.

And this is precisely what Guy Debord develops further in his Society of the Spectacle in 1967. Debord also speaks of a world that appears as objectified — but his point is slightly different: we can only approach the objectified reality with which we are contemplatively confronted as passive consumers. The idea of consumption is increased because the world now replicates itself in a world of images, in a world of representations.

In the world of politics, this means that reactions to the emotionalised, unreal world of (fabricated) images are increasingly emerging and taking on concrete forms of public expression. This is partly a reaction to being trapped in distorted doubled images. I cannot go into the problem in detail here, but we see the basic problem as already formulated by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). The problem here is massive projections into which — precisely without knowledge of the real situations or the real subjects — one’s own problems and desires are projected onto substitute subjects that do not actually exist. For this reason, it is not possible to counter racist prejudices with arguments for example; the psychological benefit of such a displacement of one’s own wish production is too great.[2] This can be described as an active reaction to a passive contemplative attitude, because it is not oriented towards historical or other knowledge or any kind of differentiated understanding or oriented solution.

NFT— contemplative objectification?
In the world of the arts, the overall digitalisation has other effects. With digitalised artistic works, like NFTs for example, the process of objectivation is increased ad absurdum; unreal digital images primarily serve speculation to which the art market is particularly susceptible, as it is largely unregulated with no ban on insider trading, for example.[3] In November 2021, the price of the digital currency Bitcoin began to plummet, dragging the other major cryptocurrencies down with it. When Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, the world changed, share prices collapsed and the appetite for risky investments waned. In the meantime, the cryptocurrency market has lost more than half of its volume. In July 2022, OpenSea, the largest NFT art department store, laid off 20 percent of its staff. The once coveted profile pictures of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, an edition of 10,000 computer-generated cartoon monkey faces, are still available to buy. Ape #7827 with earrings, yellow cap and glasses was sold for 8,794 Ether, which was worth 19 million euros at the time. Today, you can buy #7827 for the equivalent of around 172,000 euros. Objects, some of which were sold for many millions at the beginning of the year, have lost an average of 92 percent of their value. Today, the general mood on the market is rather subdued, and in a way the valorisation is now institutionalised. Collectors and artists are meeting on the platform X, and it is a small group of white (fe)male people who form the core of the experts. One of these experts, Anika Meier, explains:

“You can roughly break it down and say: NFTs are digital certificates of authenticity, and you can see on the blockchain whether, for example, the artwork exists as an edition of ten or whether it is unique and who the artist is. And if it has been sold, in which wallet— that’s the name of the wallet in which NFTs are held. This can all be viewed transparently on the blockchain. It is interesting that artists have now started to combine NFTs, i.e. digital works of art, with physical works of art.”[4]

An example of a NFT gallery on OnCyber. Credit: blog.zenft.xyz

 

As a general rule, NFTs represent a logical development in hyper-capitalism; the works are bought primarily as objects of speculation. From a curatorial perspective, their forms of presentation are often astonishingly conventional and uninteresting; obviously, the reference to the art space, the white cube, must be maintained as a guarantee of ennoblement and value attribution. In order to transfer these rather theoretical considerations on alienation to curating, one can look at the NFT offer of the Belvedere in Vienna as an example, which borders on irony: The Belvedere in Vienna sold imaginary puzzle pieces of Gustav Klimt’s painting The Kiss (1908–1909). The sale takes place via a website and brought in a large sum for the museum, which suffered huge financial losses during the pandemic. Even if this reinforces the contemplative, passive attitude described in social theory, as buying suggests a kind of participation in decisions, I don’t want to condemn this type of financing altogether. On the one hand, museums and art institutions are indeed often underfunded, and on the other hand, it is important for the future of museums to offer something that resembles a game as an entry point. Like other editions, NFTs and other digital works are now often cheaper than regular artistic works. This would suggest a certain democratisation. Nevertheless, it shows a supposed participation that replaces a serious possibility of participation. The museum exists in the struggle for the attention economy and adopts the capitalist logic of exploitation; the real act of buying remains in the unreal/digital, or to put it bluntly, is irrelevant in terms of social, i.e. political influence. Furthermore, the traditional gender relations are also inscribed in the act of purchase in the example of The Kiss and also in the clique of experts who constitute the market).

Hyperreality as a third space
As these examples show, to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of deterritorialised digital images, it is necessary to move away from the dualism of real and unreal.

The hyperreal project in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) questions how the unlimited circulation of images becomes an essential rhythm of postmodernism and foreshadows our (post)digital present.[5] This includes both the circulation of images on social media and the estrangement of images, which are found under the polemical variants like deepfakes and fake news. Digital worlds allow the real and the unreal to coincide and form a third space: the hyperreal. The subject is no longer able to distinguish between the real and the fake, thereby collapsing the concrete, fact-based truth value of information. In distinction to Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” the digital creates its own real worlds with a set of rules.

When Hito Steyerl introduced the “poor image” in 2009, a general critique of the truthfulness of the image began, along with an embrace of the reproduced, often flawed copy-and-paste images that currently flood the meme-driven internet.[6] This makes Steyerl not only politically fruitful but also proves that there can indeed be a real political dimension to these images, namely in their pure “conditions of existence.” These exist independently of their origin and the logic of a mission-conscious subject that creates these images. Steyerl examines many more of the effects of images that have a practical and real impact on our present. The essential point is that, although one can assume the unreal origin of an image, one should nevertheless examine its real political implications, uncover them, and thus bring them into the discourse on art.

In his post-Corona crisis essay, Benjamin Bratton asserts unequivocally that crisis situations expose emergency conditions and restore the visibility of reality.[7] Thus, since 2021, a noticeable tendency has emerged to reconnect the immateriality and unreality of the surrounding images with their material conditions during moments when the overwhelming flow of information fails to function “frictionlessly.” The moment of disruption, the struggle that Bratton links to the pandemic years, raises questions about the conditions and origins of the digital condition.

Jussi Parikka already expresses this idea in his book A Geology of Media, in which he writes: “Data mining might be a leading hype term for our digital age of the moment, but it is enabled only by the sort of mining that we associate with the ground and its ungrounding.”[8] Parikka thus made it clear as early as 2015 that the exploitation and destruction of the environment to create digital images can be traced back to a material basis. The immateriality that is so often assumed not only has real impetus, but also has immediate consequences on the physical world. The question therefore arises as to how digital art can be (re)located in curation and art.

Situated and localised curatorial practices
A critical curatorial approach now seeks to counteract contemplative objectification, i.e., a passive attitude toward the world, as intensified by digital art, through active participation, critique, and speculation. To that end, I have selected digital art projects developed in recent years within the OnCurating context. This, in our understanding, aims to re-engage with the physical world in bodies, places, and the political dimensions through which knowledge is generated and experienced.

In a way, we follow a logic of situated knowledge that takes image production and its consequences seriously, making the conditions of artistic production visible and anchoring them in place and time. This may involve, as Parikka suggests, exposing the technological conditions of extraction of nature to the viewer or allowing a performative reconfiguration of the image or artwork through participation and a conscious return to physical space.

Ultimately, the goal is to continually integrate the responsibility of producers, as Donna Haraway proposes, into the viewer's interpretive context: “Also, one cannot relocate to any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement. Vision is always a question of power to see.”[9] Relocation, in our understanding, refers to the linking of knowledge about the systems, conditions, and structures inscribed into the artwork with a call for (self-)reflection among all participants. In this sense, I aim to build upon what we developed in the Scores project, as described in OnCurating Issue 53, and expand this logic to post-digital formats — toward what we call a political form of thinking, one not rooted in representational power but in activation and reflection. This approach strives to create empathy, cultural exchange, and relationality.[10] In sum, recent theory across media and curatorial studies converges on the idea that placing art and audiences back “on the ground”— literally and metaphorically — is necessary to counteract the pitfalls of digital placelessness. Relocation provides the friction, context, and shared space needed for deeper participation and critical insight.

Three projects in particular exemplify how curatorial work can enable this relocation of subjects and artworks: Are We All Here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today (2021), Small Projects for Coming Communities”(2019-ongoing), and Attention Is All I Need. (2025) Each of these initiatives responds to digital placelessness by creating experiences that physically or contextually anchor participants through participation, critique, or engagement with shared material environments.

Are We All Here? Exploring Embodied Virtuality Today
At the OnCurating Project Space, we presented early net art in the exhibition Are We All Here? (2021). The exhibition focused on the central themes of the contradictions between presence and absence, as well as passivity and participation. One example is Eduardo Kac’s work Teleporting an Unknown State (1994–1996, adapted 2021), in which light can (and must) be sent digitally to a plant; the light always corresponds to the light of the place from which something is sent. Basically, this is an attempt to counteract the placelessness described by Peter Weibel.[11] This piece involves a live stream and a living plant that grows only by the light of a projection, thus mixing telematics (distant) presence with a tangible, local organism. By staging Kac’s work in a concrete room, visitors can walk around the installation, water the plant, or see their bodies juxtaposed with the live video feed. The curators grounded a discussion of virtual connectivity in a physical encounter by reinforcing site-specificity and temporality, treating the online space not as a timeless digital archive but as an event tied to a specific moment and location. For the audience, this was produced by an erosion of the virtual and the real space. The spectator is visiting a feedback loop, whether online or in person, viewers were prompted to reflect on their own embodied standpoint. The exhibition made “embodied virtuality” tangible and prompted critical questions about online presence and the obsolete nature/culture dichotomy.

 

Are We all Here?, 2021, Video 7:13, Be van Vark, Students of the MAS in Curating, 2021

 

Are We all Here?, 2021, Video 7:13, Be van Vark, Students of the MAS in Curating, 2021

 

Exhibition view, Are We All Here?, OnCurating Project Space, Zurich, 2021

 

Are We All Here?, Eduardo Kac’s work Teleporting an Unknown State, 1994–1996, adapted 2021

 

We also invited the choreographer Be van Vark to work with the isolated students, who were only connected via Zoom during the Corona Crisis. The result of three workshops with the isolated students, most of whom had never met in a shared real space, was a video; it shows moments of discomfort and intimacy made possible and enforced by digital means. The protagonists reflect on their situation, their fears and isolation while the video is being made. And yet it hints at ways of escaping isolation and relating to each other, through small gestures, through dance, through funny moments. The video ends with close-ups of skin surfaces. In this respect, the video essay on digital intimacy (video Are We all Here, 2021, 7:13) addresses (self) isolation, the loss of physical contact and singularisation, and shows an active reflection on this situation, with new ways of relating to each other and exploring the contexts.[12]

Small Projects for Coming Communities
A turn toward performative formats can also be observed in digital practice — one that emphasises liveness and shared presence between audience and performers. A compelling attempt to resist digital delocalisation was launched during the Covid-19 pandemic: Small Projects for Coming Communities.[13]

Small Projects for Coming Communities, here at ARKO, Seoul, 2024

 

This project operated in virtual space but adapted to each context by incorporating local positions. Together with a student group, we invited artists to design scores — short instructions for action inspired by the Fluxus movement. The scores offered a fascinating moment to observe one’s body in front of the screen — situated both in an abstract digital space and a real, embodied setting.We deliberately departed from the institutional white cube and radically opened authorship. The project consisted of diverse scores that allow rethinking the present in terms of collective futures.

One such score by the collective Neue Dringlichkeit, “Future Storytelling,” invited participants to imagine a time 50 years from now, when society’s problems have been solved, and to look back together, recalling how they achieved that future. This exercise sparked unfamiliar thoughts and joyful strategies. By formulating those visions together, participants no longer saw themselves as isolated, powerless individuals but created a shared room for visionary thinking and inspiration.

Small Projects for Coming Communities, here: online, collaboration with Martin Guinard and the 12th Taipei Biennial Rethinks Globalisation, 2021

 

This speculative logic can be read as a reference to Roland Meyer’s theory of the conjunctive digital image.[14] “Future Storytelling” becomes a reappropriation of the “as-if”, transferred into a decidedly analog practice. Imagination and speculation intersect here as forms of relocation. The latest activation of Small Projects for Coming Communities happened through a project, an exhibition with ongoing workshops, curated at ARKO in Seoul. As a historical reference the film on Fluxus, Flux Us Now, Fluxus explored with a camera was shown. During workshops alongside the exhibition, the scores from the website of Small Projects were used to gather and explore new forms of making art in the exhibition space.[15]

Attention Is All I Need
Curated in 2025 by Jonny-Bix Bongers in collaboration with the House of Electronic Arts (HEK) Basel and the OnCurating Academy, Attention Is All I Need was an online exhibition that investigated digital self-representation within the logic of today’s attention economy. The title echoes the foundational AI paper Attention Is All You Need,[16] nodding both to algorithmic mechanisms of visibility and to the human struggle for meaningful focus. The project treated the self as a curatorial site, suggesting that in the digital age, the self becomes a curatorial practice. Through avatars, profiles, and performative personas, the users on the internet engage in the constant, aestheticised labor of online self-curation.[17]

Attention is all I need, online, collaboration with HEK Basel, and students from OnCurating Academy Berlin, 2025

 

Attention is all I need, collaboration with HEK Basel, and students from OnCurating Academy Berlin, 2025

 

Rather than present this condition as a fixed critique, the curatorial format itself enacted a counter-strategy: by relocating these virtual self-performances into an art context and eventually into physical space, the project reframed identity not as a disembodied abstraction but as a site of shared reflection and discourse. Throughout its online phase, Attention Is All I Need activated the web as a live, participatory site. Artists not only contributed deepfakes, 3D avatars, and browser experiments but also engaged with the students of the OnCurating Academy in three participatory online workshops. For example, Orhun Mersin’s remote workshop, “Dragging the Self,” invited participants to manipulate their image with deepfake and reflect upon it by engaging with queer feminist theory. Though held online, these workshops emphasised situated action: every participant was somewhere — on a couch, in a kitchen, in their city — performing identity through real gestures and creating video material that was later bricolaged by the artists. The digital, instead of replacing presence, became a portal toward embodied, critical coexistence and collective learning.

By doing that, the exhibition did not treat digitality as neutral ground. Instead, the infrastructure itself became part of the materiality on display. Works like Damjanski’s Sie liebt mich, sie liebt mich nicht (She loves me, she loves me not) (2023), which exposes algorithmic logics and censorship in a fragile interplay of two chatbots, make visible the constraints within which digital identities circulate. In this sense, Attention Is All I Need enacted a reflective interface, encouraging users to slow down and consider how their subjectivity is shaped by visibility metrics and platform norms.

The final gesture of the exhibition — its in-person gathering at DOCK 11 in Berlin — was not an add-on but a pivotal moment of relocation. Despite our initial plan for the exhibition to be entirely online, we could not resist inviting artists and visitors for the exhibition’s finale in Saal4 at DOCKdigital. What had been individual navigation(s) across screens, became embodied again in a final coming together that placed the discourses in a mutual, affective, and dialogic setting. In collaboration with the talk series “Realtime Affairs,” participating artists, like Allapopp, Carla Streckwall, and Kim Albrecht, held inspiring, rather improvised talks about their work that generated informal conversation and mingling with the audience.

In this way, Attention Is All I Need demonstrated a powerful model for curating digital subjectivity and self-representation. It refused both technophilia and nostalgia, instead building relational bridges between the virtual and the physical in a network of artists, internet users, friends, workshop participants, and collaborators. The exhibition treated online identity as contingent and performative — but also as something that could be grounded, collectively reflected upon, and transformed through communal experience.

Preliminary Conclusion
From across Are We All Here?, Small Projects for Coming Communities, and Attention Is All I Need, a shared conviction emerges: that curating in the digital age must involve deliberate acts of relocation and re-contextualisation. This is not a nostalgic return to physicality, but a strategic rebalancing of the real and unreal, shaping and reacting to socio-political contexts. Relocation, then, is not merely a spatial tactic. It is a curatorial practice that insists on friction, presence, and context as antidotes to placeless consumption and disembodied spectacle. These projects illustrate how curators can craft environments — physical, virtual, or hybrid — that allow audiences not just to view or click, but to be somewhere and to reflect from that position.

The displayed exhibitions suggest that yes, there is power in being there, in standing beside others, and in slowing down to inhabit a moment collectively. Whether through a plant that only grows by light sent across networks, a score that asks you to walk barefoot in your apartment, or a livestream that culminates in eye contact across a room.

In an age of ambient distraction, curating relocation is a political gesture. It creates time and space for situated reflection. It acknowledges the erosion and redefinition of spectatorship as participatory co-presence, where the roles of viewer, participant, and co-producer blur. It also opens up speculative zones —“as-if” communities, future imaginaries, temporary assemblies — where alternative modes of being together can be tested.

Dorothee Richter is Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, UK, where she also directs the PhD in Practice in Curating programme. She previously served as head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (CAS/MAS) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive and was a curator at Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated various symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, as well as an archive on feminist practices entitled Materialien/Materials. Together with Ronald Kolb, Richter directed a film on Fluxus: Flux Us Now, Fluxus Explored with a Camera. Her most recent project was Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone, a collaborative exhibition at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, in 2024. This project was co-curated by OnCurating (Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb) and ARKO (curator Haena Noh, producer Haebin Lee). Richter is Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief of OnCurating.org, and recently founded the OnCurating Academy Berlin.