The Last Museum is an exhibition that explores tensions between the imagined ‘anywhere’ of digital space and its relation to concrete places and objects. Deploying a hybrid offline-online format, the project invites an international group of artists to reimagine site-specificity, through a sequence of interventions that cut across both real and virtual domains. The artists are Nora Al-Badri (Germany/Iraq), Juliana Cerqueira Leite (Brazil), Nicole Foreshew (Wiradjuri Nation/Australia), Jakrawal Nilthamrong (Thailand), Zohra Opoku (Ghana), and Charles Stankievech (Canada).
The Last Museum connects disparate sites, spanning six continents and the virtual sphere. It is an experiment that deploys a unique exhibition design—embracing the overlapping analog and digital dimensions of a given location while, additionally, exploiting the unique potentials of each for dramatic effect. Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at a location of their own choosing. The choice was only limited by a request that it be associated with communication and connectivity. Final settings ended up highlighting both technical and more esoteric forms of transmission—and included a notorious hacker hangout, ancestral land in rural Australia, an electronics mall in downtown Sao Paolo, a Cosmic Ray observatory in the Rocky Mountains, and more.
Each sculptural intervention was videoed by the artists, and the resulting clips were handed over to the project’s web developer, Jules LaPlace, before being brought together through a unique way-finding protocol; the exhibition’s ‘hang’. The public outcome, debuting as a pop-up window on the KW start page, is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. Visitors may have a sense that that the exhibition is a wormhole, of sorts.
The Last Museum is a web-site-specific project—in the sense that both its artistic content and exhibition design re-imagines the stakes of ‘site-specificity’ for digital times. What this means is that The Last Museum’s ‘site’ is a layered reality or (to borrow a term from computational engineering) a ‘stack’. Our exhibition-stack encompasses material facts on the ground, digital code, and softer site specificities—including those previously outlined by the art historian Miwon Kwon, such as ‘cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a historical condition, even particular formations of desire’. Each artwork in The Last Museum is a kind of a vector that intersects with all of the stack’s layers.
For visitors, The Last Museum offers a blurring between cinematic experience and website interactivity. The ability to stay with a moving image for as long as you want, pushing the edit along at your own pace, is not normally available as a filmic experience. In fact, it is more a province of gaming. Additional interactions include accessing texts, manipulating digital sculptures, soundtrack variations and more. All of these are artist directed, and thus in no way ‘secondary’ materials.
At its core, The Last Museum explores how tangibility and distance interact, how things that seem fixed in place might (or do) escape in various forms. In a sense, then, it it clear that we are dealing with an issue as old as art itself, but while employing contemporary tools.