/ Imitation or Innovation: Digital Space in Net Art Exhibition Practice
This subchapter interrogates whether net art curation merely replicates traditional exhibition practices through a technological veneer or fundamentally redefines curatorial logic by leveraging medium, space, and environment in unprecedented ways. At its core, the analysis seeks to determine if net art’s use of digital space represents a radical departure, proclaiming new rules of engagement, or simply transplants age-old techniques into a virtual context, with innovation limited to tools rather than methodology. To frame this, we must first acknowledge that space is not incidental but constitutive of artistic meaning. As Brian O’Doherty argues, the history of art is inseparable from the evolution of its exhibition spaces: “We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first” (1986, p.14). 2 This observation, while rooted in modernism, extends to humanity’s earliest artistic acts—cave paintings relied on the cavern’s dual role as protector, canvas, and ritualistic arena. Over centuries, exhibition spaces have morphed under historical, economic, and technological pressures, culminating in today’s digital realm: a two-dimensional screen that paradoxically expands into infinite dimensions through algorithmic perception and networked illusion.
Yet net art complicates this lineage. While traditional curation treats space as a container for art, a neutral backdrop to display physical objects, net art often collapses the distinction between artwork and environment. Here, the digital space is not merely where art resides but how it exists: a mutable medium shaping creation, interaction, and interpretation. This raises critical questions about mimesis and spectatorship. An artwork’s value as a communicative act hinges on its spatial context; remove a sculpture from a gallery or a net art piece from its hyperlinked ecosystem, and both risk becoming inert “products” severed from the dialogue that grants them relevance. However, unlike physical objects, which retain material presence even when unobserved, net art’s mimesis—its capacity to represent and provoke exchange—depends entirely on its embeddedness within dynamic digital environments. The spectator’s role shifts from passive viewer to active navigator, engaging in a rhizomatic interplay where hyperlinks, interfaces, and user agency redefine curation itself. Thus, the subchapter challenges the assumption that net art curation is a mere digital translation of physical practices. Instead, it posits that the medium’s spatial grammar, fluid, participatory, and non-hierarchical, demands a curatorial paradigm as disruptive as the shift from cave walls to white cubes, one that rejects replication in favour of reinvention.
Salon-style Art
In 1648, the French Academy initiated its Salon exhibitions, named after the Grand Salon of the Louvre where they were held. Over time, these exhibitions adopted a more democratic approach, opening to the public and eventually contributing to the establishment of state-run museums by 1793. The salon style referred to a specific mode of display: large paintings were positioned at the top for visibility from a distance, the most valued works occupied the central “prime” position, and smaller pieces were arranged at the bottom. The only fixed spatial relationship was determined by the frames, which were often grandiose, preserving what Brian O’Doherty termed the “self-contained nature of the painting” within its surroundings, observing that “The wall itself has no inartistic aesthetic; it is simply a necessity for an upright animal” (O’Doherty, 1986, p. 16). 3 A photograph of the Mona Lisa on display at the Uffizi Gallery in December 1913 reveals a striking contrast in exhibition aesthetics between then and now, where spatial experience often takes precedence over the density of artworks.
It is intriguing to observe the visual resemblance of this salon-style hanging in many contemporary websites that present artists’ works as grids or rows of images. This is often implemented on the search pages of major traditional museums’ digital platforms. For example, the Tate website offers two primary modes of search: one presents artists and artworks in alphabetical order, while the other, selecting the “artworks” tag, displays images in a layout reminiscent of salon hanging. However, this resemblance is largely superficial. Unlike the historical salon, there is no inherent hierarchy in the digital display; artworks appear in an order often determined by algorithms or randomisation. What truly differentiates this digital mode is the interactive element, the “refine your search” feature, which allows users to filter results by type, location, or other categories. Here, technology dictates the mode of display rather than curators attempting to emulate a physical hang. The viewer is still presented with an endless wall of images, but the curatorial hierarchy is replaced by user-driven, technologically facilitated navigation.
A second example can be found in the online presence of Artists Space, an institution founded in 1972 in Manhattan with a mission to support emerging artists and critical discourse. Their website embodies a thoughtful integration of technology and accessibility. To access what might be termed the “gallery” section, the user must select the “images” button, which leads to a clean, text-free interface consisting solely of images. Only by clicking on an image does descriptive text appear. This text, however, is not presented in a conventional curatorial format but is woven into the technological fabric of the site itself through the use of exposed alt text. As Laurel Schwulst, the website’s designer, notes: exposing image descriptions offers “an additional ‘entrance’ into the world of an image,” raising questions about interpretation and accessibility (Schwulst, 2019) 2. This approach, inspired by projects like Alt Text as Poetry, prioritises digital usability and inclusive design over the replication of traditional exhibition formats. Once again, the mode of display is fundamentally shaped by the technology itself.
The final example is SPAMM (Super Modern Art Museum), an international platform for internet art founded in 2011 by French net artist Systaime. SPAMM challenges the elitism of contemporary art by functioning as a decentralised, digital-focused space. Its main page presents artworks as a list of images which, when clicked, direct the user to the “SPAMM stream”—a continuous flow of interactive video works. This streaming format recalls initiatives like the Wrong Biennale TV, which exhibits artworks randomly when the biennial is not active. As Systaime states in an interview with Annet Dekker, the ideal model is “a TV channel or something like that” (Systaime in Dekker, 2021, p. 191). 13 Although the initial grid layout may visually echo salon-style display, the underlying logic is that of streaming and interaction.
SPAMM serves as a hybrid entity, connecting online and physical realms: “SPAMM is not opposed to institutions or the classic gallery system. SPAMM is positioned as a link between the online world of the Internet and the physical world of art” (Systaime in Dekker, 2021, p. 192). 14 Here, the aesthetic of the salon is subsumed by the dynamics of digital video and participatory culture.
In all three cases, from the Tate’s searchable repository to the accessible design of Artists Space and the streaming logic of SPAMM, superficial visual similarities to salon-style display are evident. However, the curation and experience of digital artworks in these examples are ultimately driven by technological capabilities and digital paradigms rather than by a desire to replicate historical models of exhibition. The hierarchy of value and the static spatial order of the salon are replaced by algorithmic ordering, user interaction, and networked circulation. Technology does not imitate the old; it generates new conditions of encounter, visibility, and access, redefining what it means to exhibit art in the digital age.
White Cube Style
What has changed since the Salon Style exhibition is the attitude towards the use of space as a tool to evoke the aesthetic experience of an artwork that belongs to no concept beyond its own bare representation. As Brian O’Doherty argues, “The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art.’ The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its evaluation. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values” (1986, p. 14). 4 In essence, the values of the outside world are left at the entrance; the viewer is situated in a purified environment where nothing matters but the artwork itself. The evolution towards this white cube model was gradual, arguably beginning with works like Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1920), which emphasised the horizontal, frameless expanse of the canvas over traditional vertical, heavily framed compositions.
But is the white cube the ultimate form of spatial curation? My experience as an artist representative at the Saatchi StART Fair (2023) offered a deep, if ambivalent, engagement with this question. Over five days, I observed intensely how the gaze, the detached, contemplative ‘eye’, and the embodied presence of the spectator operated within a commercial white cube setting. Though smaller than Frieze, the fair followed a similar logic: artists were allocated booths to display their most commercially viable works. The layout was organised largely by nationality, and the aesthetic was one of neutral walls and polished floors, designed to focus attention solely on the art. At first, this familiarity felt reassuring, a direct, uncluttered encounter with the work. But by the third day, the sterility of the environment began to feel stifling. Without narrative cohesion or curatorial intentionality, the artworks appeared arbitrary, reduced to commodities adrift in a sea of white walls. As O’Doherty cautions, this mode of display can turn “aesthetics into a kind of social elitism… aesthetics are turned into commerce—the gallery space is expensive” (1986, p. 16). 5 The works, stripped of context, risked becoming mere decorative objects.
Conversely, the Mark Rothko room at Tate Modern, though equally employing white cube principles, demonstrated how thoughtful spatial design can elicit a profound emotional response. The nine large-scale paintings were displayed in a confined, dimly lit chamber, arranged as the artist intended, facing one another to enhance their meditative solemnity. Here, the white cube did not feel elitist or commercialised, but ritualistic—a space that used isolation not for market purposes but to facilitate a contemplative encounter. This comparison underscores that it is not the white cube itself that is inherently limiting, but rather the intentionality or lack thereof behind its use.
This tension between replication and innovation becomes even more revealing in digital curatorial platforms. Consider ArtSteps, a web-based application that allows users to construct realistic 3D gallery spaces. While accessible and user-friendly, its default options tend toward the conventional: white or beige walls, rectangular rooms, and plinths that directly translate the physical white cube into digital form. Most finished exhibitions on the platform reinforce this aesthetic, prioritising familiarity over experimentation. In contrast, New Art City offers a more open-ended approach. Rather than providing pre-defined walls or rooms, it presents users with an endless, foggy void—a tabula rasa that demands creative engagement. This often results in exhibitions that resemble game environments or speculative architectures more than traditional galleries. For instance, the Hybrid Realities Lab 2 exhibition (2025) used New Art City to create a sprawling, immersive landscape with floating portals, reflective surfaces, and monumental video structures. Here, the digital space is not mimicking physical limitations but exploring its own native potential for interaction, scale, and embodied navigation.
A particularly nuanced case is Green Cube Gallery, an online/offline artist-run space that explicitly plays with the conventions of the white cube in a digital context. Its creators, Guido Segni and Matìas E Reyes, describe art as “a collection of events and states,” arguing that “URL and IRL aren't opposites but just two distinct forms in which matter can exist under different conditions” (Segni and E Reyes, n.d.). 1 Their use of green as a primary colour is richly symbolic: green evokes the historical green phosphor of early monochrome monitors as well as the solder mask of circuit boards, grounding the digital “cube” in the material history of technology. In exhibitions like THE STRUGGLE IS REAL (2021), the platform becomes a site for performance, gaming, and critique—far exceeding the static display logic of its physical counterpart.
What emerges from these examples is a spectrum of digital curation. On one end, platforms like ArtSteps perpetuate the white cube model, prioritising legibility and tradition. On the other hand, spaces like New Art City and Green Cube Gallery embrace the fluid, experiential, and often playful nature of digital environments. They do not seek to replicate the gallery so much as reimagine it, using technology not as a neutral container but as a medium that shapes new forms of encounter, participation, and meaning. In doing so, they challenge us to expand our understanding of what curation can be when freed from the physical and economic constraints of the white cube.
Performance Art
What is particularly compelling when comparing performance art and happenings to net art exhibition practices is their profound interconnectedness and mutual influence. Many net artists trace a strong lineage to the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement, which emerged in Zurich in 1916 as a radical reaction to the trauma of World War I and the conventions of traditional art (Green, 2004, p.19). 2 Dada embraced randomness and chance as artistic methods, creating poetry through instructions and unpredictable word combinations. The net-based equivalent of such instructions is code, the algorithms and logical sequences that underpin all software and computational operations. While this historical connection, mediated through video art, algorithmic rules, and participatory engagement, is widely acknowledged, it is especially revealing to examine how the curatorial strategies of performance art can illuminate net artworks that incorporate performative elements extending beyond simple networked interaction.
This dialogue becomes clearer through events and happenings, which originated in the late 1950s with artists associated with Fluxus, including Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts, George Brecht, and Yoko Ono. These works were grounded in the open-ended execution of instructions or scores. Kaprow, in particular, was interested in layering time, space, and interpersonal encounter, an approach that anticipated the interactive, event-based nature of many computer-based artworks. He described this as an inheritance from Jackson Pollock, emphasising the use of “the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odours, touch” (Kaprow, 1993, p. 59). 1 Like net art, these works rejected the idea of art as a fixed object, instead treating it as a situation unfolding in real time.
Crucially, the exhibition space for such works was never confined to the traditional gallery or museum. From Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped urban structures to Kaprow’s Environments, art continuously experimented with spatial experience. The Yard (1961), installed in the sculpture garden of the Martha Jackson Gallery, consisted of hundreds of loose tyres through which the audience was encouraged to move. The work was inherently mutable; as Kaprow noted, it was “remade seven or eight times in Europe and America; and on each occasion it was changed, more or less greatly, to fit the particular spaces and contexts” (Kaprow, 1993, p. 113). 2 This emphasis on adaptation, participation, and sensory immersion—including the smell of rubber—prefigures the way net art often operates across variable digital contexts, inviting user interaction that alters each encounter with the work.
A more overtly political example is Yayoi Kusama’s Anatomic Explosion (1968), a happening in which she adorned nude performers with polka dots and staged a protest outside the New York Stock Exchange against funding of the Vietnam War. Like much net art, this work used embodied presence and viral visual tactics to critique social and political structures, bypassing object-based art altogether.
This lineage finds a powerful contemporary echo in Devin Kenny’s performance Untitled/Clefa (2013), which directly engaged with digital culture. Kenny re-enacted the “trayvoning” meme, which is a tasteless viral trend on Tumblr that mocked the murder of Trayvon Martin by physically embodying the meme in a public space in Mexico City. As Kenny explained, he aimed to “take an image-creating practice which was circulating online, and a) slow it down, and b) charge it differently by having it happen in real time”(Kenny in Swenson, 2013). 1 His work critically examined how images of anti-black violence circulate online, often becoming detached from their human context. By transposing a digital meme into a live, durational performance, Kenny blurred the boundaries between internet culture and physical protest, between viral content and embodied critique.
What these examples share is a commitment to art as event, contingent, participatory, and deeply embedded in its social and technological moment. Net art extends this tradition, using algorithms and networks not as neutral tools but as sites of performative encounter. Code becomes the new score; the user becomes the performer; and the gallery expands into the infinitely adaptable space of the browser, platform, or virtual environment. In both performance art and net art, curation is less about displaying objects than about choreographing situations, whether through Kaprow’s tyres, Kusama’s dots, Kenny’s re-enactment, or a net artist’s interactive system that requires an audience to become active participants in the creation of meaning.
In her performance piece House With Ocean View (2002), Marina Abramović positioned three functional units—a bathroom, bedroom, and living room—within a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), constructing a domestic space in which she lived publicly for twelve days without food. The installation included a set of stairs made of knives, symbolically trapping the artist within the experiment and intensifying the psychological tension between freedom and constraint. By situating this intensely personal, durational act within the institutional frame of the museum, Abramović created a potent dissonance: the voyeuristic impulse of the audience conflicted with the formal, contemplative expectations of the white cube space. As she reflected, “I have in this period people who came first just for a few minutes and then stay for three hours, four hours, and come next day to stay even longer, without really understanding what's happening... that you can change on the atomic level of the space in a certain way with the public and feel and just be in the present time” (Abramović, 2002, p. 124). 1 This work exemplifies how performance art bends the rigid conventions of gallery display, blending spatial, temporal, and experiential elements to redefine the relationship between artist, audience, and institution.
Where Abramović used the museum to frame a meditative, almost ritualistic encounter, Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension (2007) leveraged digital connectivity to stage a politically charged critique of mediated violence. Confining himself to a gallery, the Iraqi artist livestreamed his existence 24/7, inviting online viewers not only to observe but to interact with him—most strikingly by operating a remote-controlled paintball gun that could shoot him at any time. The piece responded explicitly to the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism intensified after 9/11, while also reflecting Bilal’s personal trauma growing up under Saddam Hussein’s regime and surviving sectarian violence. By turning his body into a target within a gamified, digitally mediated environment, Bilal highlighted how technology can facilitate detachment and dehumanisation, allowing participants to inflict harm—however symbolic—with the click of a mouse. The gallery space became a hybrid zone: simultaneously a physical refuge, a broadcast studio, and a virtual battlefield where online audiences morphed into perpetrators, defenders, or spectators within a charged political drama.
Both works demonstrate how performance art disrupts and reconfigures the traditional gallery model. Abramović does so by importing the private into the public, using the museum’s authority to amplify the intimacy and stakes of embodied presence. Bilal, by contrast, opens the gallery to the unruly dynamics of the internet, revealing how digital networks can extend, distort, and weaponise participation. Each artist, in their way, challenges the neutrality of the white cube, turning it into a site of social and technological interrogation—a space where art does not simply hang on walls, but unfolds in real time through the complex interplay of bodies, technologies, and audiences.
An equally compelling dimension of happenings and environmental art is the deliberate fusion of private and public realms within exhibition practice, a thematic concern that finds a powerful analogue in the digital domain. An example is Lucas Samaras’s Room #1 (1964), in which the artist transplanted his entire studio-bedroom from New Jersey into New York’s Green Gallery. Within this meticulously reconstructed space, measuring just 6 by 13 feet, viewers encountered an immersive collage of paintings, sculptures, personal belongings, clothing, books, and intimate notes. As Samaras explained in an interview with Alan Solomon, he intended to create “the most personal thing that any artist could do… a room that would have all the things that the artist lives with” (Samaras in Solomon, 1966, p. 33). 1 Unlike contemporaries such as George Segal or Claes Oldenburg, who incorporated objects into gallery settings while retaining the institutional frame, Samaras sought to create a total environment: a sealed capsule of private life that audiences could enter and experience as a complete artwork.
This act of exhibiting the artist’s private space resonates with a longer art historical tradition of fetishising the studio as seen in tourist pilgrimages to the Pollock-Krasner House, where the artist’s personal environment is framed as a key to unlocking creative genius. Yet Samaras’s approach is distinct: rather than presenting a memorialised shrine, he curated his lived space as a dynamic, albeit frozen, assemblage where art and life intermingle. The room functions not as a relic, but as an expansive sculpture that challenges the boundary between private experience and public display.
This tension between public and private finds a natural extension in net art, which inherently occupies both spheres simultaneously. The encounter with a net artwork often occurs in the private space of the user’s own device, yet the work itself resides in the public domain of the internet. This duality is further complicated by the rise of social media, where artists routinely blend personal life and artistic practice, unsettling conventional notions of privacy and publicity.
A revealing contemporary example is the series Desktop Tours, produced by arebyte Gallery, which invites artists to guide viewers through their computer desktops—displaying folders, software, bookmarks, and works-in-progress. These videos function as digital counterparts to Samaras’s Room #1: they offer an intimate glimpse into the artist’s creative process and virtual mind, transforming the computer interface into a curated exhibition of personal and professional life. In an era when daily activities are routinely shared online, the desktop has paradoxically become one of the last frontiers of privacy—a space whose exposure feels more revealing than images of one’s physical surroundings. As such, these tours highlight how digital technology continually reconfigures what we consider private or public, further dissolving the boundaries that once separated the artist’s studio from the gallery, and the personal from the professional.
In both Samaras’s enclosed room and the screen-shared desktop, we see a consistent desire to make the private site of creation publicly accessible. Yet where Samaras presented a fixed, physical environment, digital practices emphasise fluidity, process, and real-time engagement—offering not a frozen moment but an ongoing, navigable window into artistic practice. This shift reflects a broader transformation in curation itself, which increasingly operates across physical and digital spaces, blending the personal with the public in continually evolving ways.
In comparison, Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998) offers a more concentrated—and controversially intimate—glimpse into private life. Whereas Samaras’s Room #1 condensed 14 years of accumulated existence into a holistic environment, Emin’s installations on a single, charged moment: her bed, left exactly as it was following a period of personal turmoil, surrounded by detritus such as empty bottles, discarded clothing, and personal objects. The space is radically reduced—from an entire room to a single bed and its immediate surroundings—yet the emotional intensity is amplified through this condensation. While both works are deeply autobiographical, the spatial and temporal framing alters their reception: Emin’s is often read as a carefully staged representation of vulnerability, whereas Samaras’s feels more like an archaeological slice of everyday artistic life.
This discourse around intimacy, exposure, and curated private space finds a compelling digital counterpart in SANGHEE’s VR work Oneroom-Babel (2023–2024). The piece takes its name from the Korean term “Oneroom,” which refers to compact, undivided apartments where bedroom, kitchen, and living area merge into one. Using LiDAR scanning, SANGHEE digitally reconstructed these intimate living spaces, creating an immersive VR environment where users “dive” into the homes of young residents. The experience incorporates textual fragments from interviews, ambient sound, and dreamlike visuals to convey the emotional reality of precarious urban living. Notably, the project includes a barrier-free version, ensuring accessibility for players with mobility impairments, a thoughtful expansion of the audience that physical installations like Emin’s or Samaras’s cannot easily achieve. Oneroom-Babel was recognised with an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica and nominated at the Venice Immersive Competition, underscoring its critical resonance.
What emerges across these examples is not necessarily a radical departure from the concerns of performance or happening art, but rather the augmentation of these traditions through digital technology. Whether through the re-enactment of viral memes (as in Devin Kenny’s work), the livestreaming of embodied vulnerability (as in Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic Tension), or the digitisation of private space (as in Oneroom-Babel), technology introduces a performative layer that deepens and diversifies audience engagement. It enables artists to scale intimacy, to hybridise physical and virtual presence, and to reimagine how and where artistic encounter takes place. In doing so, it extends the conceptual premises of happenings and environmental art into new domains, proving that the digital is not merely a tool for replication, but a medium that expands the very possibilities of performative expression.
Gatherings
What occurs when the private studio is reimagined as a social space for collective artistic practice and gathering? Andy Warhol’s Factory serves as a definitive example: an iconic studio that became a creative hub for a diverse group of artists, musicians, and cultural figures in 1960s and 70s New York. More than a mere workplace, it functioned as a site of collaborative production, social exchange, and continuous performance (Jones, 1996). 1 Its most striking feature was its spatial transformation under Billy Linich, who sheathed the entire interior, including walls, ceilings, and even mundane objects like the toilet, in silver foil and paint. This deliberate aestheticisation turned the Factory into a reflective, futuristic environment that embodied Warhol’s blurring of art, industry, and celebrity (Goldsmith, 2004). 1
This ethos of gathering and collective production finds a direct parallel in the early net art community, which also relied on self-organised, often informal events to foster exchange. In 2010, for instance, Rafaël Rozendaal organised Bring Your Own Beamer (BYOB) in Berlin—a one-night exhibition where artists used projectors to display work in rented spaces, creating an ad-hoc, communal showcase (Rozendaal, 2010). 1 Similarly, Aram Bartholl’s Speed Show involved temporarily taking over internet cafés to exhibit net art, integrating artistic practice into a functional public venue (Bartholl, 2009). 1 As Domenico Quaranta noted, such events aimed to “gather communities born online and to facilitate dialogue and exchange between their members” (Quaranta in McNeil, 2014, p. 32). 1 A more sustained fusion of social space, commerce, and artistic practice can be found in Cory Arcangel’s Arcangel Surfware—a project that exists parallel to his artistic work, functioning as what he terms a “non-aspirational lifestyle brand” (Arcangel, 2020). 1 Beginning with pop-up shops and online retail, the initiative has evolved to include a brick-and-mortar store in Stavanger, Norway, complete with its own gallery space, Flagship A.S. By operating through commercial digital platforms and physical retail environments alike, Arcangel bypasses traditional art institutions, creating a hybrid social-commercial space that reflects net art’s long-standing engagement with the aesthetics and infrastructures of everyday life (Paul, 2016). 1
What becomes clear from these examples, from Warhol’s Factory to Arcangel’s Surfware, is a consistent reconceptualisation of space as a medium for community, commerce, and creativity. In each case, the environment is actively constructed to support new forms of interaction and production, whether through silver foil, internet cafés, or online storefronts (Groys, 2016). 1
Overall, this chapter has argued that net art exhibition practices necessitate new parameters rather than the mere adaptation of traditional curatorial models. As these examples demonstrate, it is technology itself—through indexes, algorithms, and networked platforms—that increasingly dictates how space is organised and experienced. Digital environments often favour game-like, interactive, or streaming-based formats over the fixed hierarchies of salon-style hanging or the neutral containment of the white cube. While net art retains strong connections to earlier movements like performance art and happenings, particularly in its emphasis on gathering, participation, and the blurring of public and private, it also introduces distinctly new spatial possibilities (Frieling, 2008). 1
This comparative analysis, spanning salon-style exhibition, the white cube, performance art, and gatherings, reveals that net art curation is not a mimetic translation of physical models, but a redefinition of curatorial logic by its medium. While superficial visual echoes exist, such as the grid layout echoing salon hanging or virtual spaces mimicking white cubes, the underlying mechanisms of engagement are fundamentally transformed. In the digital realm, hierarchy is replaced by algorithm, static display by interactive flux, and passive spectatorship by participatory navigation. As demonstrated, technology does not merely provide new tools for old methods; it generates new conditions of encounter, where space is no longer a neutral container but an active, constitutive agent of meaning.
This historical journey culminates in a critical realisation: the inherently democratic nature of the networked environment. From the early, anarchic spirit of net art communities to contemporary platforms that prioritise user-driven access over curatorial gatekeeping, the digital sphere possesses a unique capacity to decentralise authority, democratise production, and facilitate collective exchange. This potential is not without its contradictions, algorithmic biases, commercialisation, and digital divides persist, but the structural openness of the network provides a foundational principle absent from the hierarchical salons and rarefied white cubes of the past.
It is this democratic potential, born from the comparative failure of mere imitation, that forms the conceptual bedrock for the next stage of this inquiry. Having established that digital curation must invent its own parameters, the challenge becomes one of enactment. How can we construct a curatorial practice that truly embodies the rhizomatic, participatory, and democratic logic of the net itself?
The answer proposed here is the development of Curatorial Interface: a website conceived not as a digital replica of a thesis or a gallery, but as a native, experimental platform for curatorial thought. In the following chapter, this digital environment will be presented as both a methodological tool and a creative argument. It operates on the principle that form must follow networked function, employing hyperlinks, non-linear navigation, and modular structures to create a living, navigable discourse. Through this interface, the theoretical conclusions drawn from history, the need for openness, interactivity, and a collapse of hierarchical authority, will be put into practice, offering a concrete proposal for how to curate, critique, and experience art in a way that is finally congruent with its digital medium.