Art and technology forging the future

While the world’s biggest museums and galleries began offering online tours and walkthroughs, NYUAD Art Gallery took a different approach. Born digital art made specifically for the online world and tailored for the smartphone screen. (Paid content.)

The art exhibition is called, not in, of, along or relating to a line. Its name suggests the beginning of something vast, beyond the linear and potentially multidimensional. Or maybe the opposite, something lacking a physical dimension altogether. Maya Allison, executive director of NYUAD Art Gallery, and curator and artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, began the task of collating the virtual exhibition. As parts of the world went into lockdown, so did NYUAD Art Gallery. There was no longer a physical space in which to interact with the work.

While the world’s biggest museums and galleries began offering online tours and walkthroughs, NYUAD Art Gallery took a different approach. Its exhibition would not be one in which people could enter the gallery space virtually and tour it in 3D.

Instead, it would show works that are “born digital”, made specifically for the online world and tailored for the smartphone screen. Host Alexandra Chavez looks at the ideas culminating in this exhibition. We hear from Dewey-Hagborg and artists Maryam Al Hamra and Lee Blalock. (Paid content.)