ExHiBiT, closest feeling to face to face art experience.

A journey to the project:

Now a days success of each and every businesses are depend on their image online. Visual and performance contemporary art industry was the least interested on online market as far as the artists prefer near contact and some times interaction with the audience. Therefor it is important to make the industry more attractive and more engaging online.

“The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder

“So many people did not see art on a screen as legitimate, though.”

Miranda Sawon, an art dealer in New York

Before the pandemic Marina Abramovic, the grandmother of performance art, has this believe that human contact / touch is essential. Now she says she is interested in using the technology as much as possible.

Since the pandemic began in March 2020, many art museums have been closed, biennials and art fairs have been canceled or postponed. The second wave, which started in several European countries during September, caused a deterioration in the art market, which was already strongly affected by the first closure in the spring of 2020.

Art lovers all over the world have had to learn to live without being able to enjoy the exceptional experience of visiting museums, galleries or art fairs indefinitely. At the same time, the art world has insisted that art must be experienced in real life, not virtually. Aria Dean says: “I understand the financial motives right now, but just because you can put a work of art online does not mean you should.”

Since there are several organisations that depend on artists and works of art, the question is “How can contemporary art survive in the future that seems to be more and more dependent on digital presence”

Fase 1: Discover, Explore and Define

In this project, I had lots of great conversations with Artists from Norway, France, Canada, Britain, Iran as well as curators, art teachers and historians, art critics, Galleries, auctions, Munch museum, Oslo biennal, Norsk Billedkunstnere (NBK) and public art organisations from different countries.

as far as this project is done during pandemic and several countries suffering from closing down, the only place to experience art is cyber world. There are lots of points (pain and gains) with getting online that mentioned during interviews. here is the most important pain points:

To get better perspective, I had a great research on market and art activities online that lead me to some service safari experiences.

A survey with 60 answers from a good range of different groups of people was enlightening as well.

At this stage there was a clear path to define the problem,

Fase 2: Ideation, develop concept and test

For ideation fase, I facilitated 3 workshops with colleagues, artist and IT experts. at the end of all these three workshops, we gathered ideas and had a decision jam workshop on deciding the ideas that lead to the best concept based on what users really want from us.

Ideas that came together from workshops:

The concept is a platform managed by artist or the page owner like other social medias which have the homepage to share the daily work, process of an artwork, news of exhibition and other information as well as exhibition page, shop and archive.

In exhibition page, the owner is responsible to create new exhibition which can be seen by every body or only those who are invited. In the exhibition the visitors can join together in small groups and have conversation. They can have private conversation or let other to join them. To create the face to face experience, voice of conversations can be heard as mumble by other visitors. Each exhibition can have a background sound that is changeable with different art works or different time of performance, as well as sound of artist or executor. The exhibition is not achievable after deadline but artworks can be archived and be achievable by every body.

The arts in archive and shop page can be seen by every one.

Getting picture or recording video by visitors is not allowed.

To prevent the fake and fraud pages, blue tick and endorsement from known organisation and public figurs is defined in the concept. here is the wireframe in Figma: ExHiBiT wireframe

and the pitch video: