Online Exhibitions and the Long Game of History

Some late night in my friend’s living room. We’re in a small city, so the streets are dead quiet. It’s dark and wintertime, and he’s playing me these Terrence McKenna lectures he watches every night before bed. There’s snow drifted up around the house, and the heat from the small wood stove fights with the draft pressing in from the bay window. These lectures have a distinct sense of mania—travelling over many topics at great speed. For the most part McKenna is touting the transformative effects of plant-based psychedelics, their capacity to alter human behaviour and create social and environmental change. And while I’m not exactly buying into it, there’s something he says that sticks with me, such that I still can’t shake it, even now. Something about how digital technologies may not be as single-minded or subservient as we imagine. After all, in their physical structure, they are literally built with minerals from the earth. He suggests that in this earth-based material structure, we may encounter a re-assertion, a re-articulation of the intelligence and agency of the larger earth-system. It is this far-out thought that is in the back of my mind as I consider social media and other online platforms—trying to parse through the ways they have transformed my life and my self, and the selves and lives of people around me.

Honestly, I spend so many hours every week in these online spaces: interacting with the thoughts and observations of others, but ostensibly alone. And while I worry that this allocation of time and energy might take away from my ability to be present in physical space, I also feel that there’s a meaningful connectivity that accumulates here over time, or at the very least, there are ways we might grow and learn from each other. Also, if I’m not here, I wonder—where am I? It’s become harder to communicate without this web. As Donna Haraway anticipated, “communications technologies and biotechnologies [have become] the crucial tools re-crafting our bodies.”​​¹ The information may be fleeting and splintered, but it builds up in layers, “interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity.”​​²

In their Xenofeminism (XF) Manifesto, which articulates a queer and techno-materialist, anti-naturalist, gender-abolitionist feminism, the transnational collective Laboria Cuboniks describes their long-term strategy, saying: “XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity, and persistence.”​​³ For me, it’s this articulation of “the long game of history” that clarifies both the importance and the relative insignificance of every small act—every artwork—when understood within a much larger and longer continuum; remembering that each of our shared acts of community and imagination are something that both precede us and exceed us. For me this feels hopeful, and now more than ever, hope feels like a powerful thing.​​⁴

The Centre for Art Tapes’ online exhibition Poems for Impending Doom​​⁵ is one of many recent projects engaging with this long sense of history—contributing to an imagination-continuum, over generations. However, in reading co-curators Lucy Pauker and Alessia Oliva’s curatorial statement, it becomes clear that the exhibition didn’t exactly start out that way. While the original premise had been to poetically re-imagine the world by doing away with its existing structures and starting anew, the exhibition’s four artists questioned this curatorial prompt. Each artist was in their own way wary of the desire to start over, to be born again, overhauled. They connected this drive towards newness with the ideological legacy of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, echoing critiques made by many colleagues and forebears, including in A Cyborg Manifesto from 1985, and the XF Manifesto from 2016, mentioned above. 

When I first encounter Poems for Impending Doom, Camila Salcedo’s work Frutas (2019) is on my left, and opposite that is ASTAM (2019) by Arielle Twist. Between the two is a veiled space—a curtain to be pulled back—revealing fragments of their process and leaving me with a sense of their conversation. Through this correspondence they’re saying things like: multi-sensory work—homelands—where those places might be—larger context of Turtle Island—I want it to be messy—messy foods—fruits; and in the works themselves, it is the artists and their siblings whose presence is communicated—alternately by their voices, their images or their self-describing words. Juices from the fruits are dripping down through their fingers, over faces, down their arms. They share with us this act of tasting fruits, both real and imagined. 

Scrolling down, I find Camille Rojas’ Apparatus (2019) on the left and Madeleine Scott’s Flat Circle (2019) on the right. The rhythm of their shared process is markedly different, but it remains woven in between them, revealing more fragments of conversation. Here, Camille is saying, “I can’t dismiss the things that people have fought for already, you know what I mean?” and Madeleine replies, “I know what you mean… with any ‘utopia’ you just have new and different problems.” In Apparatus, Rojas dances with and around a static body—a digital camera, perched on three legs—while in Scott’s work her hand appears to reveal small, glass sculptures, narrated by snippets of conversation and nearly camouflaged against the winter ice.

Sitting here searching for words, I’m startled by gaps in my own understanding when trying to describe an online exhibition. Sure, I could imagine it as a room, or as something sequential like a book or a film, but this seems anachronistic—like how early photography was always understood in relationship to painting. Instinctively, I want to differentiate the exhibition from the other webpages I visit on any given day, but in many ways it’s not actually that different. As with many current platforms, it’s primarily one page. It can be skimmed over by scrolling up and down. There is depth added to the content by clicking on various links—expanding and contracting elements of image and text—playing and pausing video. The colours, fonts, and size of the columns may be different, but the site’s baseline structure is so familiar as to almost be invisible.

Ultimately, Pauker and Oliva conclude that “in order to build a future we need a foundation to refer back to,” and as “we build on the worlds that have been constantly built on and on and on… we arm ourselves with our precious histories, so that we may dance wildly into the jaws of the future…”​​⁶ While each artist has differing interests, the overall project of Poems for Impending Doom connects them with histories of experimental practice and digital art—something Western Front’s online exhibition collection describes as “a long tradition of utilizing new and networked technologies.”​​⁷

In Western Front’s archive, the titles of selected online exhibitions read like poems in their own right: Postcards from the Feminist Utopia​​⁸ from 1996, realized in collaboration with MAWA; The World’s Women On-Line​​⁹ also from the 1990s; and A Small Gathering for the Healing of Our Aboriginal Languages​​¹⁰ from 2012, curated by Tahltan artist and curator Peter Morin, to name a few. Comparatively, the structures of these sites are stranger to navigate—reflecting other architectural conventions perhaps, or relics of the recent past. In Postcards from a Feminist Utopia, I travel through layers of pages, each tiled with a different wallpaper pattern, while in A Small Gathering for the Healing of Our Aboriginal Languages, the site gently shifts its centre when I reach out to touch the image of a stone. 

It is strange to conceive of these online spaces existing in perpetuity. This cannot actually mean forever, but it still exists a little bit out-of-time. It is a period of time that has yet to be known. I imagine all the different spaces of the internet, blinking open and shut over years, months, decades; rooms full and then emptied of people—subject to movement and decay, just like everything else.

In direct contradiction of the XF Manifesto’s embrace of alienation, I’m also recalling Susan Buck-Morss’ suggestion that the challenges of the present moment are “demanding of art a task far more difficult—that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium… not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them,”​​¹¹ and I wonder if this is part of the work undertaken by projects that are both deeply embodied and available online. After all, “it is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man… breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex.”​​¹²

sophia bartholomew (they/them) is a trans non-binary femme and interdisciplinary artist currently based in Vancouver. They recently launched Screen Ecologies, a risograph zine co-written with Emma Hicks and collaboratively published by Moniker Press. 

Featured image: Arielle Twist, ASTAM, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

1. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” originally published in the Socialist Review in 1985.
2. laboriacuboniks.net, Xenofeminism Manifesto, also published by Verso Books in 2018.
3. laboriacuboniks.net, Xenofeminism Manifesto.
4. As Audre Lorde writes in her book The Cancer Journals (1980): “It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside, and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death.” 
5. cfat.ca/news/online-exhibition-launch-poems-for-impending-doom
6. www.cfat.ca/news/online-exhibition-launch-poems-for-impending-doom
7. front.bc.ca/wwwf-collection/online-exhibitions/
8. frontprojects.nfshost.com/1996/postcards/
9. wwol.inre.asu.edu/artist_index.htm
10. front.nfshost.com/gatheringlanguage/
11. Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork EssayReconsidered” in October magazine vol. 62, Autumn 1992.
12. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” originally published in the Socialist Review in 1985.

This article is published in issue 37.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue