For the Alternative Realities Illustrated exhibition, we decide to use the platform New Art City, a virtual exhibition toolkit for new media art with a focus on co-presence and experiencing digital art together. Shows are real-time multiplayer and accessed using a web browser on a computer or mobile device, with no need to register, install extra software, or enter any personal information. The platform allows curators to use built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts, making it possible to create and hold a full virtual exhibition online. Participants can attend virtual openings together, chat, and see each other moving around the space while experiencing digital art in its original format. The reason for choosing this virtual builder is its freedom in creating spaces that feel more like a metaverse environment, rather than just imitating the white-cube gallery style in a digital format. My main idea is to treat digital space as a new and unique medium, a place for experimentation, rather than simply replicating a physical gallery online. New Art City additionally allows users to upload their own textures, shapes, and 3D models, making it possible to create custom furniture or environments that give the space a game-like quality.

After selecting the platform, the next step is to develop a concept for how the artworks will be displayed. Here, I experiment with the idea of the artist-curator, giving participants full freedom to create their own spaces without following a specific colour pattern or style that might resemble the ADI website. However, to maintain a sense of connection between the two and provide a coherent informational space, I design a foyer, an entrance hall for the exhibition. The virtual exhibition is structured around four individual artist spaces, where each artist has full control to create their own environment, and a central room that serves as a hub leading to each space and providing overall information about the exhibition. I take on the design of this foyer myself. Using the colours from our main website, I create small portal-rooms for each artist, complete with teleportation links to their spaces. Each room features the artist’s name, their avatar, and a short phrase corresponding to the main idea of their work—rather than a traditional gallery-style description. When a user walks through the avatar, they are automatically teleported into the artist’s personalised space. 

The centre of the foyer is initially left empty, but I later decide to add a large-scale sculpture made of cube-like elements, reminiscent of the landing page cover image. The structure is minimalist and abstract, intentionally much larger than the surrounding rooms to evoke the feeling of monumental public sculptures found in physical spaces. My idea is to encourage users to jump onto and climb the sculpture—to play with how such a monument could occupy and behave within a digital environment. This concept is inspired by Antony Gormley’s 2016 exhibition Fit at the White Cube in London. As Gormley stated in an interview with Nina Azzarello for Designboom: “I began to realize that what the objects could do to each other, and how they could activate the space, was actually much more important than just letting them fight it out without acknowledging their particular language and form” (Gormley, 2016). 

I want to achieve a similar sense of interaction in the digital realm. However, there is one limitation within New Art City: when stacking blocks to form the sculpture, they remain hollow in the centre, meaning users cannot actually climb it in the intended way. Unexpectedly, this leads to an interesting discovery—when users jump onto the sculpture, they fall inside it, suddenly surrounded by its inner walls. This brings to mind films like Hackers (1995), where characters traverse digital landscapes from within. What begins as a limitation creates a new, playful scenario where users can communicate from inside a structure that appears solid—an impossibility in physical space, but a fascinating quality of the digital. A second challenge is constructing the artist rooms themselves. In New Art City, it proves difficult to align walls and panels perfectly to form enclosed cube-like structures. Gaps appear, or overlapping elements cause visual errors. This is revealing in its own way—it shows that, to some extent, digital space resists the replication of physical rooms, suggesting its own native logic and aesthetic constraints.

After building the foyer, I come to a significant realisation: despite my intention to explore and experiment freely within the digital realm, the space I have created remains deeply reminiscent of the traditional curatorial practices I have studied for so long. It proves surprisingly difficult to detach myself from the conventions of art history and the spatial logics applicable in a traditional gallery setting. Without the inclusion of clearly defined rooms and a central sculptural element, the environment feels incomplete—an instinct I recognise as the product of my own extensive curatorial training. This observation is particularly intriguing, as it highlights a tension inherent in much digitally curated space: many curator-led virtual exhibitions still rely, whether consciously or not, on the physical architectures and hierarchical structures of the white cube. By contrast, artists who work primarily in digital realms and who may lack formal academic or professional training in curation often utilise these same platforms with greater fluidity and invention, free from the weight of traditional exhibition models. This leads me to anticipate with great interest how the first-year students, the artists I am collaborating with, will approach their own spaces. Unburdened by years of curatorial education, would they conceive of the digital environment not as a room to be filled, but as a world to be coded, played with, and experienced? Their approach, I suspect, might reveal a more native, less mediated relationship to the possibilities of the virtual—a prospect that resonates deeply with the core inquiry of my research.