What are digital exhibitions?

All screens can be seen as elements of digital exhibitions. But there are still some formats of digital displays that offer a more particular and unique kind of focus than just a rendering.

For all practical purposes, we need to think of the exhibition more as a specific state of mind and less as a particular kind of configuration of space.

Exhibitions use design patterns which trigger our mind into a state that examines its surroundings in a more sensitive and aware manner. It is a different matter that in our general understanding, we associate a very singular mode of display as an exhibition. And this association makes it difficult for us to break away from this form of the physical exhibition even when we attempt to re-create such experiences digitally.

If we choose to start afresh, we can imagine that the elements that trigger us into a mode of examination that is more sensitive and aware can be present in many different arrangements. These various arrangements only get multiplied when our operating context changes to the digital space. These possible arrangements become so diverse that it becomes possible for us to entirely re-imagine what an exhibition can be. In the digital space, the worst possible thing to do is mimic the non-digital world. This mimicry does not yield anything new for the eventual user and makes it a futile exercise for everyone concerned.

We will talk here about the scope of imagining entirely new exhibition possibilities in the digital space. Of course, when we are talking about imagining novel forms, we have to define an intent first.

Our intent is simple: use the exhibition process to give a more coherent form to data.

In the same way that the digital as made data of all kinds into a more useful and versatile thing, the act of exhibition (the desire to showcase something) can translate data into a form that can be experienced in a more distinct and focused manner.

Creating a context and a space for specificity is the purpose of exhibitions. And we believe that digital media can undoubtedly contribute more to this pursuit. In this series of posts about digital exhibitions, each post will propose a new digital vision of exhibitions.