After visiting this year’s documenta, I was struck by how much video art was included in the exhibition. Some of these works, such as the four-channel video installation at the Gleishaus, or the Douglas Gordon film being shown at the high-end theater Cinestar, required highly specific installation techniques. Some videos, however, were not so demanding in terms of installation, and I began to wonder: what if we sacrificed installation quality for accessibility by creating an online mega-exhibition?
I’ve been thinking about the accessibility of the mega-exhibitions we have visited, both in terms of travel and time, and have been increasingly thinking about means of making these artworks more accessible. This year’s documenta was split between Athens and Kassel, but what if documenta 15 was split between the real world and the digital one?
In the mid-90s there was a dawning fascination with net art and the internet as a platform for art presentation.

Since then, the fervor has somewhat died down, but there still remain a few places to experience contemporary digital works. There are archives online of art videos, such as ubu.com and Kanopy. Personally, I have used these sites as a means not only of watching the video works of artists I’m already familiar with, but also to discover new artists. When experiencing new video works in the gallery, I always think about how much the staging and installation contributes to the impact of the work itself. Usually, the setting is such that having it accessible on the internet would detract from its potency to a certain degree—but there are some films, such as Roee Rosen’s The Dust Channel (probably my favorite work I’ve seen at documenta) that might not lose too much if brought to the small screen. Ultimately, in order to make these art films more accessible to more people, sacrifices in quality would have to be made, but especially with regard to works present at documenta (where the goal isn’t the sale of the work, and the work is usually politically motivated) they might benefit from a wider audience.
There’s the possibility, also, of a new kind of site-specificity in online works. There are considerations to be made about the nature of the internet that could be used or highlighted in fascinating new ways. There’s also the question of what specific technology artists are taking advantage of, and at this point we would have to consider the inherent rotating-door of new technologies coming out all the time. Eventual obsoleteness is something to grapple with both from an artmaking point of view, but also from a conservation point of view. If new technologies are coming out all the time, how can we prevent viewers from not being able to experience art works on older platforms?
There’s a whole host of issues that arise here, but I can see documenta moving in perhaps a more digital direction again in the future. Especially considering the themes that were prevalent at this year’s iteration of the exhibition, such as migrancy, nationalism, democracy, and notions of borders and border-crossing, it makes sense to move to an arguably ever-accessible and ultimately borderless place like the internet. It’s also interesting to consider the issues of online freedom and privacy that have been coming up recently with governments increasingly trying to regulate their citizens’ online activities. Perhaps artists could be the ones to take up the activist mantle of defending the inherent democracy of a place like the internet. Some artists at documenta were already engaging in ideas dealing with the internet, such as Angelo Plessas, author of The Eternal Internet Brotherhood / Sisterhood, an organization that aims to use the internet to help foster notions of collectivity.

With this increasing interest in a joining-together, in a shift away from xenophobia and nationalism, and growing interest in borderlessness and compassion for displaced people (themes we witnessed both at documenta and the Venice Biennale), the internet may again become a space to host works of art that wouldn’t require a plane ticket to experience.