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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone and welcome to this Le Random discussion, the third in a series on digital curation with the most significant digital curators of the last 30 years. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Val Ravaglia from Tate Modern, one of the preeminent digital display specialists today. Ravaglia's curatorial work has been focused on display for 12 years. She assisted on Tate's complete collection rehang in 2016 and she curated the exceptional Electric Dreams at Tate Modern. My goal today is to learn as much as possible about digital display and presentation from one of the world's experts. So I can't wait. Thank you so much for listening and let's get started.
Congratulations on Electric Dreams. I know that we just recorded a podcast looking back on 2024 and we talked about Electric Dreams a lot. Then thefunnyguys, Jan and I got to go to the opening and I thought the opening and the show were both really important for digital in 2024. Congratulations. We're recording this in, I guess, the middle of January 2025. It's been over a month since the opening. How does it feel now that the exhibition has taken on a life of its own? Have there been any surprises in how audiences are engaging or how they're engaging with the themes of the show? How has it been now that you've had a chance to reflect on the show?
Val Ravaglia: It's been good. It's been humbling. The whole experience has been humbling. This is my first big exhibition at Tate Modern, even though I worked for Tate Modern for a long time. But this was my first opportunity to do an exhibition that really feels like my baby. I was, to be honest, quite terrified about the potential negative feedback that the exhibition could potentially get. Most of the reviews were broadly positive, let's say. And the feedback that I get from the artists who are included, who are all delighted beyond belief... People have been telling me that they are just happy that an exhibition like this happened in a space like Tate Modern, that this story is being told in the first place. And the fact that the exhibition is happening wasn't a given either. So I'm already so grateful for having been given the opportunity. Then on top of that, to get such positive feedback has been really good for the soul.
I love the fact that when I speak to people about what they latch on to, what they prefer, what they learn from the experience, I get quite the variety of responses. There's a contingent that thinks that the first half and the second half don't quite gel together smoothly, which is interesting because the whole point of the exhibition is to make that transition and to make it as clear as possible. But for those who do get it, connecting the heritage of kinetic art, optical art and early experiments with technology with the early computer art and experiments in digital art is the crux of the show. I'm trying to explain how artists got there. And so in a sense, maybe I should have done a better job of clarifying that passage. An even better job, perhaps.
And then there's some people that think that they know enough about the first half because in many ways that's the part of that history that is already a little better known, has been canonized, has received a number of museum historical surveys. Therefore they find themselves more attracted or fascinated by the second half because they're learning more from it. And others hold on to the idea that art made with machines is dehumanizing and the works that are in the second half don't necessarily, for them at least, make a case for their historical heritage informing that way of looking at computer art in a different way. Which is interesting to me because I also get the exact opposite, where people say, "Oh, I went into this exhibition not really knowing what to expect. I'm not really particularly interested in computer art, the generative art. And to see and read about, say, Harold Cohen and AARON has completely changed my outlook on it." And so I consider it quite the success that there is so much for people to latch on to, so many different opinions, many different publics learning something slightly different from the exhibition. So from that point of view, I'm quite happy with how it's been received.
Peter Bauman: The diversity of the audience at a museum like Tate Modern demonstrates the diversity of the views that the show has received. That's what's so exciting about the show, that such a large audience... I mean, Tate is one of the biggest museums, most visited museums in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people are going to be exposed to digital art and its history over the course of the six months of the show. It's exciting that they have all these different opinions and that they're talking about it and thinking about it. The people who aren't aware of those connections are now more aware. It was really well done, the connecting of the part one and part two, like you said. I only went for the preview. So it was a whirlwind evening, which I'm sure was even more so for you. I need to go back. I'm sure I'll be back in London the first half of the year to go back and see the show properly and spend a day there or half a day there.
That can transition to the main theme of our talk today, which is about display and, as a curator, the importance of display. We've had two other talks in this digital curator series, one about collecting digital art. That was with Douglas Dodds, formerly from the V&A. We also had a part about preserving digital art. That was with Regina Harsanyi and Jon Ippolito. They are from MoMI and ex-Guggenheim, respectively. Then now part three is with Val from Tate, Val Ravaglia. Val is a display expert. Can you just talk about display standards at an institution like the Tate? How seriously does the Tate take display? How often do you think about it? How often do you talk about it?
Val Ravaglia: Historically, I've been a dedicated curator, and before that an assistant curator, also dedicated to collection displays. So for 12 years, the vast majority of my time has been dedicated entirely to thinking about collection displays: how they work, what their history is, what they're trying to say, who they're trying to communicate it to and how. I would say that, seriously, it's literally the crux of what I do. And in general for Tate, as a national institution that holds the national collection of British art and international modern and contemporary art after 1900, the collection is at the core of all of our activities. And so by extension, displays are the way that we connect the general public, which is who we want to reach out to and who we want to make these works available to, to our activities.
Having said that, you wouldn't notice it by looking at the marketing materials, because collection displays are very much not as present in the publicity and marketing and communications that Tate sends out, not nearly the same way as exhibitions are. Now that I've worked on a ticketed exhibition, I can say that the amount of times I see marketing materials or social media posts about Electric Dreams has already vastly eclipsed 12 years of all of the marketing that was done on collection displays that I worked on. This is partly because Tate is one of those national institutions in the UK that has committed to keeping the collection displays open, free to the public. They're not ticketed. People are free to come into the building without paying a penny. They can go see collection displays, three floors of collection displays. So there's quite a lot of content that you can access for free. But that also means that collection displays are technically not the main revenue-generating part of Tate. Therefore investing money in marketing materials has to be distributed in a way that makes sense of what needs to be publicized in order to attract visitors and ticket-paying visitors especially.
Of course, that doesn't mean that collection displays are not instrumental to generating the general revenue of the museum through memberships and people that come into the building and buy books from the bookshops. Or simply once they come to see the collection displays, they learn that there is an exhibition they might be interested in and then they buy the ticket to come into the exhibition. But from the point of view of how serious we are on collection displays, they continue to be the backbone of Tate's activities. The fact that there is a team within the curatorial team that is dedicated to displays should be proof that that is the case.
I have been at Tate for long enough to witness the rehang of the collection in 2015, 2016 when the extension to Tate Modern was built. Therefore I had an opportunity to see the process of rethinking the way of laying out our collection displays in an organic manner, which was an incredible learning experience for me and one that I was very actively involved in. The novelty of Tate Modern when it opened in 2000 is precisely that it distributes, it organizes its collection displays in a thematic way. And that was a big deal in 2000 because there wasn't any museum at that scale still organizing collection displays that way. There had been previous examples of thematic collections. So for example, the Van Abbemuseum had already done something along those lines, a reorganization of the collection along those lines, but that's not the flagship museum for a national collection.
If you go back to the reactions to the Tate Modern style of doing collection displays when it was inaugurated in 2000, the reactions on the part of critics were quite visceral. For many people it was absolutely inconceivable that you enter a museum and... Where do I start? There is no timeline to follow. Oh my God, are we going to connect X to Y? Which was the whole point of trying out different ways of telling narratives about the history of modernity and modernism in art. Even now that we're approaching the 25th anniversary of Tate Modern, we continue to use the thematic logic for hanging the collection, which has its pros and cons from a curatorial standpoint. Lots of both, let's say.
Because strategically, one of the reasons to choose a thematic style for the collection displays was, and I'm going to be blunt here, partly to work around what was missing from the collection. Because when you hang your collection in a strictly chronological order, the gaps in your collection are going to be quite glaringly obvious, whereas it's somewhat easier to stress your strengths and hide your weaknesses when you're choosing a thematic style and a different way to connect those narratives. It makes the curation of collection displays a little bit closer to thematic exhibitions.
There is a different approach to how we do collection displays and the narrative for collection displays from thematic curated exhibitions, partly because the duration of collection displays is so much longer. Literally, the collection displays that we have on now are still the same general themes that we inaugurated in 2016 with the extension of the building. So it's been nine years of the current collection displays: Media Networks, Materials and Objects, Artist and Society, In the Studio and Performer and Participant. They have been there for a long time now. The con of that is also that there is a certain, let's call it entropy of the curatorial principle for each of those displays. When you first conceive of them, we conceive of them organically: this flows from this and then leads to this. Altogether, they tell a story a certain way. Then the challenge in maintaining a display for such a long period of time is that when you need to inevitably swap out individual artworks or entire rooms, we need to make sure that the narrative of the display continues to make sense and still flows in a certain way. Sometimes even shifting one room can give a radical twist to the way that people understand that narrative to be.
What is possible to put on display at any one point may not be the ideal work that you would want to insert at that point in a narrative if you had complete freedom to choose from any artwork ever made by any artist. We only have the collection to source the narratives from. From that point of view, it's key that the narratives, the themes we choose for the displays, are flexible enough to allow us a certain give in how we approach the themes. So Media Networks, for example, you can interpret that title in many ways. We grapple as curators with how to make the stories that we want to tell fit within the titles that we chose years ago, because we're not in a position to retitle the display every time we want to give it a little bit of a twist. That becomes a huge problem every time. And interpretation is absolutely key to how the displays flow together.
Having said that, we also want the displays to be a series of rooms, each of which is a self-contained project, let's say. In a way, sometimes exhibitions work in the same way. You have a sequence of rooms and the rooms are also self-contained. I think something similar is happening in Electric Dreams. But also you don't want your visitors to feel lost every time they come across the threshold and be like, I do not understand how A connects to B. But if you think about the practicalities of what it means to swap entire rooms out, often you find yourself with a space that is suitable for certain kinds of works that are not necessarily the best ones for the type of argument that you want to make at that point in the wing. It's good curatorial practice to find the balance between the two. But we also are not at liberty to change the architecture of the galleries. And sometimes it's the size, literally the proportions of the gallery, that dictates what works can go there. And there are some works that are almost meant to go in a room that is that size or positioned in a certain way. Sometimes you find that collection displays can take a bit of a left turn in terms of what you encounter next. And that is dictated by architecture more than it is by thinking about the curatorial narrative in an organic way. But yes, these are all aspects of my job that I have been thinking about for 12 years straight.
Peter Bauman: All those different considerations, like space and then what you actually have and the narrative that you're trying to voice. It's been since 2016 since the collection display was fully cycled. About how long is that process? Is it incremental or is it something that you have a plan and every 10 years it gets completely updated? Or is that up in the air?
Val Ravaglia: I think at the beginning of Tate Modern, there was a hope that this place could change completely every year. And I mean completely, so you would have maybe a couple of anchoring rooms but everything else would change. And that complete collection rehangs could happen, say, every five years or so. The first big collection rehang at Tate Modern happened in 2007 but there had been several cycles of the existing themes before. And over time it became clearer and clearer that that was not a financially sustainable model.
We continue to need to cycle the works because of conservation reasons, because of the fact that we acquire new works and we want to put them on display for our public. So we have to find spaces and that means something needs to come out in order to put something else in. Although I would say the majority of cases of display changing are due to the fact that the works can only be on display for a certain amount of time, either because of light exposure or because of wear and tear. If it's an interactive collection display that has elements that have been fabricated for manipulation by the public, it just doesn't last more than a couple of years tops.
It's just not financially viable, however, to make the amount of changes that we would want to make in an ideal world. It's the reason why there are so many works in the collection that haven't been put on display yet. We have a long backlog of works that we really want to give an opportunity to be seen. And at the moment... by now it has been five years but we're still in a post-COVID world. We're still feeling the financial restrictions from the loss of revenue that happened when all of the sites were exceptionally closed for a total of, I think, nine months, if you consider all of the lockdowns back to back. And we're still trying to recover from that economically. Everything to do with programming, collection displays, exhibitions, acquisitions, conservation projects... they are all reduced greatly from what they were in a pre-COVID time. And already even pre-COVID, with the reduction of governmental subsidies and just the funding for the arts getting smaller and smaller, we were already on a trajectory of slowing down activities and reducing them. If anything, over the time that I've been at Tate Modern, I've really seen that reduction take hold.
So often we have to rethink our plans because they are simply not feasible, simply because of questions of capacity that are based in the workforce that we have. Say, for example, the collection care team simply doesn't have enough people on the ground to be able to carry out all of the preparation and conservation work that needs to be done in order to prepare the works for display in time, alongside the work that needs to be done to acquire works into the collection. That's its own parallel activity that's precursor to, but in many ways completely distinct from, preparing works for collection displays. In many ways, what we do on a daily basis also includes trying to figure out the most effective way of using our resources.
Peter Bauman: I mean, that's unfortunate to hear about that budgetary constraint, especially at a place like Tate. But I'm sure that's common at all the museums. I think many major museums seem to be still recovering to pre-COVID attendance and I guess also resources. It leads me to... We spoke a lot about display at Tate from a broad perspective or from a high level, but I'm interested also in display considerations that are unique to digital media. How does displaying the digital differ from more traditional presentation methods?
Val Ravaglia: The specificities of the modes of presentation are fundamental to digital media in many ways. Often this is in relation to historical works, where technological obsolescence plays a big role. That's where our incredible time-based media conservation team, which is one of the best in the world, comes into play. They do an incredible job at the acquisition point. I love how in your conversation with Regina and Jon, Regina was advocating so much for pre-acquisition questionnaires. Actually, at Tate, I think we can say with some certainty that we have been implementing that methodology for collecting information and archiving information about the collection for a fair amount of years.
However, there is also a period before we probably did that archival work, where we have works in the collection, some of them being historical, let's say, new media works, works of variable media, to use Jon Ippolito's term, that are not quite as well documented and that would need a certain amount of reconstruction. Or at the very least, consultation with either the artist or the estate and the studio of the artist if they are not around anymore. In many ways, that reconstructive research is far more complex for digital media, but also for variable media at large, than it would be for traditional media. It doesn't mean that it's not necessary, because there's always a question to be asked for conservation purposes: types of pigment, material science-type questions. But with variable media it really is a question of painstakingly reconstructing the display history of an artwork as it was shown in the past, in relation to the intent of the artist at the moment of making the work, and also how that might have evolved over time.
Because it does happen that an artist starts with a certain viewpoint on how a work needs to be shown. And maybe even after the first display, they realize something that they had in their mind really doesn't work and they need to shift it. But what happens if the curators use the visual references to the first display of that work as their primary source? And it's actually not the one that the artist was happiest with. As a curator, you're not going to know unless you do that research around the history of the work and have an opportunity to ask the artist or the representatives how they really feel about that mode of display.
And then, to sadly circle back on the question of resources, all of this has an enormous impact on what the institution can do. And by that I mean that sometimes we have to really think long and hard about whether we can afford to put certain variable media artworks on display. Because either they need a certain expenditure in order to procure the equipment that is necessary to achieve what the artist intends with that particular artwork or it's a question of upkeep and maintenance.
Even then, a very simple artwork that includes a website... So for example, Yinka Shonibare's The British Library is a work in Tate's collection that also has a website that runs parallel to the display of the books on shelves. It's a work about the history of migration into Britain. It lists names of figures of migrants that have contributed to the history of culture in Britain, written on the spines of books that are made out of the typical wax print fabrics that Shonibare uses extensively in his work. And the website that runs in parallel to the work is a website where people can tell their stories of migration. Anyone, including me as an EU migrant into the UK, can say something about how we feel about the cultural transition, culture shock, how we've been received, what it means in post-Brexit Britain, how the approach to migration has changed.
So even running that website, which already exists in a form because it's a network that was already running, the foundations of the website had already been laid before... But then we need to think about budgeting for its upkeep, for someone to review the content, because being an open-submission website, we will also need to make sure that there is some moderation for it. And that is money that we already struggle to set aside for making the display happen in the first place. Money that is spent for maintaining a website is money that we can't spend for purchasing a historical piece of equipment for another media artwork. It's a very fine balancing act.
And I think that there's a bit of a general misconception, for people who are not overly familiar with the art world and the institutional art world in particular, about literally the amount of money that we have at our disposal to make displays happen. It's very much not infinite. Whether we can build, say, for instance, a light lock for a time-based media artwork will determine whether we can put it on display in the first place or not.
I found it interesting that Regina was making quite the point about respecting the vision of the artist and making sure that the work is as close to how they want it to be, rather than them having to negotiate and feeling unsure about how much agency they have in changing how the institution works. But the counterpart to that is that the institutions have limited resources. Sometimes the ideal of what the artist wants to achieve is just not feasible, economically speaking, or even in terms of time.
To give you another example, and this time it's from an exhibition, it's from Electric Dreams, but the works are in the collection, so I think I can use them as examples here. Samia Halaby's works have been coded on Amiga 1000 hardware and Samia feels quite strongly about showing them, definitely respecting the ratio of them. That is a given. I absolutely loathe pillarboxing screens. That is something that if you ever see me doing, just know that I basically had a gun to my head. It's the only reason why something like that would happen. Ideally, I thought when I started considering the works for the exhibition that I would be able to purchase a vintage Amiga 1000. Even if it's an emulation and we're faking it rather than running it directly from the code, it would at least have the look of an Amiga 1000. Even better if we could actually run the works from the source code, which you see in the particular case of the three works that we have in the exhibition.
That would have been the ideal. But not only would it have meant having to spend time and money in sourcing the equipment... because Electric Dreams is such a conservation-heavy exhibition, a lot of the time for our collection care team was spent preparing all of the works for the exhibition. The idea that the curator really wants that vintage Amiga 1000, and one that actually works, means someone in collection care has to spend that time going through mailing lists and subreddits dedicated just to the Amiga 1000 in order to find one that works. And then even if you do find it, there is no guarantee that a vintage monitor for an Amiga 1000 will actually run smoothly for the six months that the exhibition is open. So we need at least two because you need one on the side in case the first one breaks. It's astonishingly complicated, in a way that if it was just a Samia Halaby exhibition or display, perhaps we would be willing to dedicate that time and money. But in an exhibition where we have 75 artists, each of whom has their own views about how their work has to be displayed, I had to make a compromise, which was discussed with Samia long and hard. So I don't feel like I pushed anything onto her that she didn't fundamentally want to do.
Perhaps the fact that we've projected the work at the entrance of the exhibition... that was the one thing that she wasn't particularly convinced about, because she wants her work to be on a retro-illuminated screen. She wants that luminosity. Having said that, it is literally the iconic work at the entrance of the exhibition. It's on the cover of the catalog. And importantly, we also have it inside on a 4:3 CRT monitor that we selected in order for it to look as close to a computer monitor from the mid-1980s as possible. And that was her condition. She told us, "You can project it outside. And of course I'm happy that you're making it the flagship artwork for the entire exhibition but it needs to be on a monitor inside."
Peter Bauman: The story really demonstrates all the thought and care that goes into each piece that goes on display at a museum and all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into what the audience ends up seeing. That's a perfect transition to the next question or the next part, which is about your work displaying pieces at Electric Dreams specifically. Can you just talk more about the challenges of presentation at a show like that, with so many different periods, media and rooms to think about? I mean, display must have been something that was constantly on your mind. I'm just wondering, what were some of the challenges for this show specifically and how did you go about solving them?
Val Ravaglia: In general for displays, whether collection displays or exhibitions, in an institution like Tate Modern that gets such large footfall, we get so many visitors that sometimes we have to keep in mind how the visitor flow within the galleries is going to work. Actually, I said sometimes. That is imperative. We always, necessarily and almost most importantly, have to put the visitor experience at the core of what we do as curators. Curators that work in galleries that maybe don't have quite the footfall that a place like Tate Modern does, they feel like they have this freedom of not putting barriers anywhere, creating labyrinthine layouts that are visually stunning and the best possible way of presenting, inventing the spatial narrative that they want to set up. That might not be feasible in a place like Tate Modern, because you immediately on day two get a toddler stumbling upon the artwork and dismantling it.
So in many ways, one of the starting points for laying out an exhibition like this is that you have to make sure that it's spatially conducive to the high-footfall visitor numbers that we get. And that is already a huge limitation. Some of the things that you would want to do if you had carte blanche and none of those problems are just not feasible. And of course, barriers are not the best-looking objects. There's a lot of discussion about their visibility, especially with artists that prefer not to use barriers. We then have to push back and say, if we don't put a physical barrier in front of this artwork, it will be interacted with whether we want it or not. Visitors might break it.
To give you an example, and this has not happened with any artwork in Electric Dreams, but the Tatsuo Miyajima room... ideally, Tatsuo Miyajima is the purist artist here. He shuddered at the idea that there would be any physical barriers between visitors and the work. But if we don't put barriers in only one room and there are barriers everywhere else, there is a worry that people may interpret the lack of barriers as an invitation to touch. And so everyone would go and touch the LED units that form the artworks. The circular one in the center of the room that has a little platform looks perfect for the kids that may want to jump on it and stand in the middle of this luminous circle to have a nice picture taken of them. They can't do that. And all we can do, without putting a physical barrier, is to have a sticker there on the ground that says, please do not touch, please do not walk on it. And even so, we have to take into account that that sign can and will be ignored by some, especially if they are young enough that they can't even read it nor care about it. And so with the number of visitors that we get, the likelihood that incidents of that kind are going to happen increases exponentially. All of this comes into play.
Questions of access for people with different physical abilities and neurodivergences are something that comes into play as well. An exhibition like Electric Dreams was always going to be quite a sensorially intense exhibition. So in a sense, I also was thinking about how to lay out the exhibition so that the experience of going through it would not be too relentlessly, sensorially overwhelming. I was hoping to alternate quieter and busier spaces. And one of the reasons for me to have certain group rooms that anchor the narrative alternating with the monographic rooms is also to modulate that pace a little bit. It doesn't necessarily mean that the monographic rooms are the quieter ones, because sometimes they are precisely the immersive installations that really get you that dizzy feeling, like the Carlos Cruz-Diez Environnement Chromointerférent being the case in point. But it has as a positive that it is one large monographic room with only one installation, where all you do is experience it while you're in the space. Even the interpretation material is outside of the room. So the moment of learning what it is and what it means is distinct from the moment of enjoyment of the artwork. That's something I enjoy as well.
It's also a long exhibition. It's on for six months. Some of the artworks are fragile historical pieces of machinery that we, again, knew from the get-go we would have to take tender, loving care of. There are some of them whose motors are really held together with rubber bands and hope. And in some cases, we always have to keep an eye on them in case they start making a strange whirring sound and send a conservator to take a look if there's something wrong. Bulbs burn out. In the Dreamachine, they're regular bulbs. Having said that, and again this connects to the conversation you were having with Regina and Jon about the Sol LeWitt and the nature of light work, it's not the case that you can just swap a bulb for any other bulb. Different types of bulbs emit light in a different way. And so there was a particular element that created a strange artifact at the top of the bulb. It literally was an optical illusion. That was not part of the artwork. It was an optical illusion created by the bulb. And so you keep learning lessons about the material nature of these artworks as you work with them.
Sonically speaking, an exhibition like this is an exhibition that ends up having quite a lot of sound spillage. Therefore you are designing or choreographing the way that the sonic landscape of the exhibition works, so that the very present soundtrack of a work like Matrix II by the Vasulkas doesn't impinge too much on the experience of the works that are around it and come afterwards. In some cases it's an impossibility. Either we dedicate an entire room just to Matrix II or we have to accept that while you're looking at the beautiful Atsuko Tanaka works, you are also going to have the very present soundtrack of the Vasulkas' work just behind you.
Sorry, going back to the fragility of the motors, but that also means the kinetic works cannot all be functioning at once. Each of them has very specific timings. There's a work in particular, the Boriani, that can be on for eight minutes per hour. That's what we have negotiated with the lender. We decided that we were going to turn it on for four minutes every 30. That is the only work that has that timing, which also means that you then have to communicate to the public that if they are standing in front of it and it isn't currently functioning, they would need to come back at a certain time in order to see it in action and hope that the timer actually communicates effectively with the ancient machinery that makes that work function. Because actually the Boriani is an example where the timer goes off but the work takes a little bit longer than it should to activate. We tell people to come at the hour. But during the day the work accumulates delays. So by midday it starts a couple of minutes later than what we had said. And again, that's something that we could not have predicted until we opened the exhibition and we realized that there's something wrong with the timer. It's something that you can only correct by resetting the timer every so often.
“There are some of them whose motors are really held together with rubber bands and hope.” — Val Ravaglia 36:55
I spent quite a lot of time trying to choreograph the kinetic works so that there would always be something on in the room, making spreadsheets, trying to make sure that they were organized in a way that made it compelling for the public to jump from one work to another. And it was just too chaotic. There's just too much entropy in the way that this exhibition functions. So I decided to trust the individual artworks to function the way that they can. And actually it works quite well. It wasn't completely left to chance. I still considered that there ought to always be something on in every room. Even which works ended up being on timers and on which pedestals were, in some cases, decisions I made while installing the exhibition. So it was really a trial and error situation.
Just to round that up and go back to the question of ratios, I will forever be grateful to Tate's time-based media conservators for keeping a pool of equipment that includes a number of 4:3-ratio plasma flat screens, because they are rare. They are dying and not being remade. So this may be the last time that some of these works can be seen using the types of equipment that the artists know that they can use. Because once all of these 4:3 plasma screens die off, what flat screen are the Samia Halabys going to be shown on?
Peter Bauman: All those challenges and considerations of the historical digital show that you just put on at the Tate are fascinating. And I wonder about displaying more contemporary digital work or maybe advice that you would give to a contemporary artist. Artist Tyler Hobbs has said to me that with video art and new media artwork, often presentation is very specific and the presentation layer itself is part of the artwork. I'm just wondering if you agree with that. And what advice would you give to artists who have to arrange or manage their own shows, or even galleries or exhibitors, to improve the quality of their digital display?
Val Ravaglia: I usually consult with the artist to guide me in making the displays on variable and time-based media. So I don't think I have much to say to artists curating their own shows, as they usually know or are supposed to know what they want to achieve and they will do their best to realize their vision. They would normally know better than I do from that point of view. And then I have to speak to them. If they don't quite know exactly what they want to achieve, then I would say it doesn't hurt to ask for advice. Ideally, someone that has both technical knowledge and display experience, because the two go together. That's a skill set that is rare. Ideally, you want a time-based media conservator that has already had experience of mounting something in a gallery or museum. You may want Regina Harsanyi, for example, if she's available.
Also, what I can suggest is perhaps to keep into consideration every aspect of the visitor experience. So considering the space that the work is installed in, the exhibition that it's included in, how do they expect the audience to behave in front of the work? For example, would an audience member want to sit down in front of the work? If it lasts more than a certain amount of minutes, it's a good thing to think about potentially where they might rest. Also, it's a question of access, as some people just can't stand for prolonged periods of time. So if an artist thinks of an installation that has a long time-based media piece in it but they are resolutely against providing any form of sitting down, then the museum might have to override that decision because of access reasons.
Is there sound spillage from the other artworks? As I was mentioning earlier, that is something that often comes into play. Headphones are sometimes much better for experiencing a work where the soundtrack is important, because they allow for a concentrated attention without sonic distraction. So it may not be the first thing that you think about, but it helps to think about whether in a future incarnation of a display of that work it might be better to move the soundtrack to headphones, for example.
As for display considerations for the longer term, the lifetime of an artwork, all artists should think of future-proofing their digital artwork and their modes of display. Even if they consider the first display of the work to have been particularly successful, how many of those specificities are absolutely necessary for what they see as the success of the artwork? So, yeah, I was talking a lot about the question of feasibility. These are questions that will not go away, especially if they're thinking about the potentiality for an artwork to be collected by, say, a museum. So insisting that there's only one model of monitor that can be used for a particular work will sign its death, essentially. It will die in storage, because it is effectively impossible for curators to provide the necessary equipment. This is the information that they will need to think about when they are asked about their work for a pre-acquisition questionnaire of the kind that Regina and Jon were talking about. In general, these are the main things that come to mind.
Peter Bauman: I think that's all really good advice. For an exhibitor who's maybe new to displaying digital art or screens, is there any advice that you would give to them? I guess maybe your first piece of advice would be to extensively consult the artist. Then what's the next step? Especially maybe they know the space already. Once you know the space, what are some of those initial steps, once you know what work is going to be displayed and you know about the space? And then where do you move forward from there?
Val Ravaglia: It's going to be a very ad hoc set of considerations. But maybe in a very basic sense, if the work that an artist makes is displayable on a set of wall-hung monitors, you run the risk of retreating into a fairly traditional mode of display. If you end up with what looks like what would have been a painting gallery, only it's all monitors, is that really the most interesting way of displaying those works? It's the easiest way and certainly it helps to have some works that are easy to display on a wall-based screen. But if you're doing an entire exhibition of works of that kind, finding creative ways of mounting the monitors... these are really basic things. I'm thinking how Eva and Franco Mattes sometimes do really interesting, elaborate modes of display for their monitor-based work, where you need to crouch in order to see them. And that choreography of accessing the screen in itself becomes part of the work, where the audience performs part of the work in itself, to become part of it by performing the labor as visitors, in a sense. So these are interesting things perhaps to take into account, to try and do something more interesting with the space that a digital artist has at their disposal.
“So insisting that there's only one model of monitor that can be used for a particular work will sign its death, essentially. It will die in storage, because it is effectively impossible for curators to provide the necessary equipment.” — Val Ravaglia 44:47
Peter Bauman: It's a really good point to de-emphasize screens. I know that some of my favorite exhibitions, even if they're digital or they involve AI, some of them don't even necessarily have any screen. So I think that's really good advice to be creative in your presentation and maybe not to be overly reliant on traditional hanging presentation.
Val Ravaglia: Yeah, what I would like to add is, is showing the work in a gallery actually the best way of showing it in the first place? It doesn't have to be. Again, it's a retreat into modes of display that come from a legacy of traditional art that digital artists can dispense with, precisely because they're working in a medium or a set of media, a family of media, that allows them to do something that's completely different. Sometimes the gallery display is actually a compromise on what they're trying to achieve.
“If you end up with what looks like what would have been a painting gallery, only it's all monitors, is that really the most interesting way of displaying those works?” — Val Ravaglia 46:25
We have acquired as part of the collection two web-based animations by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. There's a whole complex history because they used to be part of a commission that was made by Tate but not by the curatorial team. We had a set of web-based commissions made specifically for Tate, for the Tate website, of microsites that lived alongside it. Then the institution completely forgot about them. We had this whole history of having intervened in the net art space and none of those works was ever considered even for acquisition until very recently, when there was a project of revising that whole history. For those that are interested, this is all on the research part of the Tate website, The Lives of Net Art. It's a really interesting read, part of the Reshaping the Collectible research project that Pip Laurenson was spearheading.
But to return to Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, those web animations were made for the web. Even as part of the collection, if they are best experienced online, then maybe the best way to put them on display is to provide the QR code for people to then go and experience the works on their screen. Of course, the original mode would have been a different type of screen, different ratio. It was, if I remember correctly, made in Flash. So either way, it couldn't function the way that it used to anyway. But in consultation with the artist, we decided that even if the works are in the collection, they should be accessed on someone's computer monitor. We decided to provide the QR code on the interpretation caption instead of plunking a monitor, a mouse and a chair for people to sit down and see it in the gallery.
Peter Bauman: I really like that. The last question can just be if you have anywhere to point people to resources, if they want to learn more about presentation or display or even yourself or Electric Dreams. Do you have any places to point anybody who's listening and maybe wants to learn any more?
Val Ravaglia: Well, like I mentioned, some curators have worked in the space, so look at their bibliographies, articles, interviews, podcasts. First and foremost, Christiane Paul is someone that really everyone should know about. There's a manual about how to curate new media by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook that is also a book that I highly recommend. Annet Dekker is someone who writes about the curation of digital art. Of course, Tina Rivers Ryan as well, having had quite a presence in the space. The people that you've interviewed so far, so Douglas Dodds, Regina Harsanyi and Jon Ippolito, are great resources. Their podcast interviews are really informative and I would recommend them to anyone. I could go on. There's a number of young digital curators, I think, that are rising stars and are doing the bulk of their work now. To keep an eye on them would be a good suggestion. So Pita Arreola, who used to work at the V&A and is still somewhat associated with it, is someone to keep an eye on for sure.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, Pita. I got to listen to her talk at the V&A when they released their digital art book in October. I think you were there that evening as well, right?
Val Ravaglia: Yes.
Peter Bauman: That was a really interesting talk that she had already...
Val Ravaglia: Sorry, I really ought to mention someone. From a historical standpoint, Catherine Mason, for sure, is someone who has written extensively about the history of computer art and really ought to be better known in this space.
Peter Bauman: Catherine is really incredible. Somebody who's been writing about this space and thinking about it for so long. I agree that she's one of my favorite thinkers about digital art. I got to visit a studio with her last time I was in London, which was really nice. That was Licia He, a London artist. Is there anything going on for you in 2025?
Val Ravaglia: On the sixth of February, we have a performance by Samia Halaby, an event called Performing Abstraction in the South Tank. So I invite everyone to come or get a ticket until they run out. But yes, I'm so looking forward to it. It's the first time that Samia Halaby gets to perform with the Kinetic Painting Group in the UK and it's going to be glorious.
Peter Bauman: Wow, that's really exciting. Yeah, Samia Halaby is one of my favorites. I interviewed her earlier this year at Le Random. Then we just did our 2024 wrap-up podcast and she was one of my artists of the year. I think she's had a really great year and that's really exciting to see that she'll be doing that at Tate.
Val Ravaglia: She's also in Outernet. She had a period in November in the run-up to the exhibition and she's going to have another slot in Outernet around the time of her performance.
Peter Bauman: Okay, exciting. Yeah, really looking forward to that. Unfortunately, I guess I have to let you go. It was really informative and I really appreciate everything that you communicated to us today. Thank you very much.
Val Ravaglia: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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