Exercise 5.4 Online exhibitions

For this exercise we are asked to read a short article by Sharon Boothroyd regarding online exhibitions. 

Boothroyd uses an example of a curated exhibition of American landscape and urban scape images:  Looking at the Land.  21st Century American Views. Her prejudice that slideshows 'don't work' is clearly set out:

"[This is] a carefully constructed, visually compelling piece of slideshow....well structured, intelligently considered, thematic, beautiful. Ticking all the boxes of a well curated exhibition.  But it is still a slideshow and even in association with The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, a slideshow isn’t going to break the boundaries of viewing experience.  Probably."

Boothroyd compares the experience to another slideshow exhibition in Sweden, where the images were shown in a dark room with black walls. She felt more 'connected' as she was in darkness.

There is a strange contradiction here: printed images of whatever sort - art or photographs - are generally (not exclusively, admittedly) displayed in well lit rooms in galleries, but somehow it seems the slideshow is better in darkened room. Surely the difference is simply that images are by definition lit themselves? See my post on MOMA in New York: the works of Tiffany Chung and Bouchra Khalili are both shown in a darkened environment; the slideshow element per se is irrelevant - what Boothroyd is commenting on is the display of digital images in general. 

Boothroyd continues with a comment on the pace at which the slideshow takes the viewer through the images. She considers a slow pace works with Looking at Land. This is an intrinsic problem of slideshows: the viewer is no longer in control of how long to spend viewing each image. Some may view that as a disadvantage, but consider also that it directs the viewer to obtaining a wider perspective: what is the connotative element derived from a collection viewed as a collection, not merely as an assembly of individual images?