Learner.

Personal research & Daily Readings

​

MACC Dissertation

What new art and curatorial practice are needed under the hybrid public space context, as a result of increased digitalisation and global public health crisis?

Introduction

‘The way people communicate and connect around the world today, is being radically redefined by digitalisation. With the acceleration of digitalisation as one of the most obvious consequences of the pandemic, the use of digital tools is experiencing an unprecedented rise among arts and cultural institutions and practices (https://hybridspacelab.net/project/hybrid/, 2022).’ Even in the present post pandemic era, digital spaces have continuously living energy to face possible global health crisis. As a result of digitalisation, the public domain which curators and exhibitions are able to reach has expanded to a somehow infinite range—theoretically accessible to everyone online across the globe anytime. In recent years, due to the pandemic, social distancing measures and lockdowns re-emphasised the importance of virtual agoras (a central public space in ancient Greek city-states), which was regarded as a partial replacement towards real physical public spaces. ‘Exploring the future of artistic-cultural spaces requires looking at physical spaces together with digital media networks.’ The ‘hybrid public space’ (stated by Hybrid Space Lab) mode is becoming the dominant phenomenon after digitalisation, which consists of physical and digital spaces simultaneously, and will continuously exist due to the materiality of current human-beings. Artists and curators are also affected, as the exhibitions they create have resulted in four types of hybrid space: firstly, moving the actual physical space online, secondly, based on the physical exhibition space with access points to virtual space, thirdly, based on the digital platforms with possible physical exhibitions coming later, last but not least, metaverse (a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world) (O'Brien & Chan, 2021) oriented, which blurs the lines between the physical and digital. This thesis aims to analyse the mixture of physical and digital spaces, which produces a hybrid spatial experience in an effort to boost audience participation and engagement in the context of an exhibition. The ways in which gamified and metaverse spaces can democratise the process of artistic creation through different levels of participation will also be analysed, including utilise single-player perspective and open world game scheme. Furthermore, as a result of metaverse development, the possibility of dystopian society is also a concern worth discussing.

​

* Daily Readings in Progress, will update on blog