Sammie Veeler on the Transformative Abundance of Virtual Galleries 17 min read
Sammie Veeler spoke to us about the ways New Art City centers the ethos of culture over code and builds their platform alongside their international community of artists. She shares how virtual galleries inherently afford an abundance of space and time, lowering the barrier for anyone to curate exhibitions and show their own digital art.
Mai Ishikawa Sutton: As the Gallery Director of New Art City, what strikes me is that you describe that role as a facilitator. I see that in the way that you partner with academic institutions, museums, galleries, as well as in the way you support artists and collectives. Can you talk about how your model of facilitation reflects what you like to see in the creative process? And also, what you’d like to see in the realm of new media overall?
Sammie Veeler: That’s a great question. So when I started with New Art City, I was just beginning my journey as an artist. I spent the previous year formalizing a sound art portfolio, thinking I might apply to grad school or something like that. I had a product management background – which also feels like an eternity ago. So that’s kind of the perspective from which I was joining New Art City. I was thinking: How can we communicate with users? How can we learn bottom-up what is needed in the community? So, from the beginning, this process has been an exchange. We are not building technology prescriptively, we evolve intentionally in response to the community we serve.
In an environment where space is not scarce, the parameters of curation for physical space shift and there aren’t many points of comparison in the rest of the art world. We’ve shown over 5,000 artists, which in the context of a ‘startup’ or a ‘platform’ is miniscule, but in the context of an art gallery this is quite literally unprecedented. We aren’t just curating artists, we’re curating curators and institutions.
Culture over code has been a rallying cry since the beginning. We’re not a very feature-focused space. The process of building New Art City has really been like co-teaching and co-learning. Everybody that we talk to brings us a concept and then we think together about how this problem can be solved in virtual space. We start by asking: “What is your dream?” And then knowing what the technical constraints are, we can kind of bring it into something that’s achievable within a reasonable timeframe.
Witnessing all of this experimentation from all of these different people has taught us a lot. That knowledge is shared because anytime somebody makes a new show on New Art City, they can go look at all of the past shows for inspiration. So people always talk about how the platform has changed so much, when in fact, the technical infrastructure hasn’t changed all that dramatically. What’s really changed is that the artists are learning culturally how to approach using these tools together.
I’ve been very privileged to learn how to be an artist and a curator from all of these brilliant people, who have been so generous with their knowledge. I remember my dear friend Wade Wallerstein telling me a Hans Ulrich Obrist quote, that curators should make junctions that allow different elements to touch. These can be aesthetic or conceptual elements, but they can also be people themselves. I had never heard of Obrist at the time, so I bought Ways of Curating and this really opened my eyes to an idea of curating less as selection, and more as facilitation.
The quote that really stuck with me was this: “Artists and their works must not be used to illustrate a curatorial proposal or premise to which they are subordinated. Instead, exhibitions are best generated through conversations and collaborations with artists, whose input should steer the process from the beginning.” This really validated the approach that came naturally to my work at New Art City.
MIS: Some people might look at New Art City and describe it as a virtual reality art gallery – what are your thoughts about that?
SV: That really doesn’t describe New Art City very well. To me, it feels much more like we’re opening up installation art as a tactic for artists who typically do not have the resources to do that. In physical space, it’s just unbelievably resource intensive. So unless you’re Anne Imhof or Pippiloti Rist, that’s probably not going to be available to you.
And when you think about archiving, there are a couple of dimensions to this that are important, reflected in the way New Art City is built. The web is mostly backward compatible with itself. That’s why you can often run a website that was made 30 years ago. Of course it’s more complicated than that, which is why organizations like Rhizome exist. Digital preservation is a field that must always adapt to changes in technology, and it includes both technical and cultural concerns.
New Art City is quite constrained compared to fully featured game engines, and this intentionally serves access and preservation. In terms of spatial archives of multimedia work it’s interesting to me that an exhibition can exist indefinitely in a format that is exactly as it was the day that it was created. And so figuring out how to store that data is one thing, but I think what interests me most is, how do you document this work? And historicize it in the moment rather than kind of doing this at some later date in the future? How do you allow an artist to embed a future past in the work that they’re making now?
MIS: Why is it important that it’s a browser-based platform, as opposed to being an app? And why did you decide to use Javascript to build out New Art City?
SV: In media preservation terms, ‘forever’ is neither specific nor expected. We don’t expect that Javascript will last forever, but if you think of a ten year vision for preserving these works, it’s likely that Javascript will still be here. There will almost certainly be a point at which these worlds need to be reauthored with another technology, or emulated in a different way. Compare that to proprietary game engine technologies, which are not designed to be preserved and often cease to work after a few years.
We chose to build for the browser because downloading an app is a barrier to entry and maintaining an app is a preservation challenge. Half of the world’s internet users, about 2 billion people, only access the internet through a mobile device. That’s the lens that we’re trying to view this through. We’re not really trying to make bleeding edge technology, we’re trying to bring in all of these people that get left behind by the advancement of technology. We recognize the fact that the tools of Web 2.0 have been unequally distributed. That’s the problem that we want to solve.
People have been asking us since the beginning: When are you going to put it on the headset? The answer is generally, the people that we want to use the tool probably don’t have a headset, and the people that we want to access the exhibitions, also probably don’t have a headset.
How do you allow an artist to embed a future past in the work that they’re making now?
MIS: Something I harp on about is that the very framing of Web 2.0 and Web3 is so focused on the technology. It’s narrowly focused on the evolution of our tools, not accounting for the fact that it’s the organizational aspects that matter. The ways that we talk to each other, the ways that we share power. Examining and experimenting with the ways we relate to each other – that’s what I think carries the most revolutionary potential. Potential to find ways to give people, not just access, but the ability to actively participate.
SV: Right, it’s like these are not so much questions about technology, as they are questions about being. And this is a refrain in a lot of things that I write, which is that computing begins and ends with human bodies, that the network facilitates connection. You know, solidarity is not encodable in the networks that transmit it.
MIS: Can you talk a bit about how New Art City is responding to the gatekeeping of traditional art institutions? You might have a lot of thoughts about this particularly because you work with art institutions, as well as art schools. I feel like they often enforce the commodification of art, as well as the individualization and alienation of art making. How do you try to melt that away?
SV: I mean, that was a really interesting thing that I noticed back before we had open signups when we were fielding every inch of inquiry individually and speaking to every artist who walked in the door. The posture that people approach us with really says a lot about the way institutions are perceived, right? That we receive these very serious formal emails with, like, clearly thoughtfully crafted proposals, which are wonderful to read. But at the same time, the way that I tried to respond to them was like, “Thank you, but honey, please come in.” You aren’t being judged on your mastery of international art English.
We made a point of communicating our values very clearly, so any artist or institution reading up on us knows where we’re coming from. This meant that our institutional partners like Gray Area and Format Festival shared our values, which became the foundation for these generative collaborations. And it means that artists who find us can see before they reach out, like, yes. I belong here.
It’s really important to try to counter that in the way that we speak and relate to artists on an individual level. And I think there’s something special about being a place where so many people have not only their gallery debuts, but also their curatorial debuts. When I was 20, I had this impression that one needs to have a Masters, if not a PhD, and fluency in German, in order to curate. And so I thought, well, not in this lifetime – this is not an option that’s open to me. This obviously couldn’t be farther from the truth. In an information culture where images are so, so abundant and so promiscuous – everybody has to be a curator. Drawing connections between disparate information is, it’s something that everybody should have the power to do. This is what meme pages are, this is what making playlists is.
Just before starting at New Art City, I thought I would need an MFA if I ever wanted to seriously pursue sound installation as a medium. Thank goodness I found New Art City, because I could make the installations that were in my head in the course of a single afternoon. And so this is the foundation from which I started my work at New Art City – it transformed my life in this very material way and I wanted that experience to be open to as many people as possible, especially those who think they aren’t called to make art.
MIS: There’s so much pressure to be an individual Name when you’re an artist or cultural worker. Whereas through a feminist lens, we can affirm the collective process, the dialogue that exists in knowledge creation and cultural production. The way that you make space for conversation and mutual support, in the Discord community for instance. In the way you do so much to help people use your tools – which are already pretty accessible since you don’t need to know how to code to use them. These approaches seem to lower the barrier for expression, to give people who normally don’t feel equipped to share their perspectives to use new media to do just that.
SV: Making it easy to start building quickly is vital, and documentation has been an important part of that. Using our tool itself isn’t all that challenging, but the constellation of tools and practices that make up virtual production are a lot trickier. So our documentation includes guides that encompass technology and theory. Not just things like Blender, but also, how do you write good alt-text? Where can you find 3D assets, and how do you make them perform well online? How do you think about installing a video or image work in virtual space that doesn’t replicate the expected white cube? One thing I’m also quite proud of is my Shape Garden, which is a room where you can download a bunch of models that I’ve made. It’s so sweet to walk into a show and see a shape I made.
But, going back to what you were saying about curation. Thematically, when you prioritize people who are disadvantaged by structural injustice, I think the work really speaks for itself. That there are so many queer and trans people who are making work about, you know, their bodies in relation to technology. For instance, surveillance, how do AI and large language models with opaque datasets contribute to this new techno-colonialism. There are all of these ways that people are investigating the critical poetics of these media through a lens that’s like, often really excluded especially in mainstream conversations about art and technology. Technology is not inherently liberatory!
SV: I think we keep it really open ended because we want to see how people who are building a world for the first time want to do this. And it’s so amazing to have a world full of beginners – myself being one of them. Because you find these novel approaches even as video gaming has kind of eclipsed music as the cultural language – especially for Gen Z. It’s giving more people the power to express themselves with this medium. It just unearths all of these things that cannot be clear at this very moment.
I quote Alice to myself constantly – she’s like a voice in my ear – she told me once that ‘virtual architecture exists to anchor the mind.’ I think I extended that by saying that physical architecture is still anchoring your mind, but it’s fixed and not immutable. So when you’re in a gallery, you say, “Okay, I’m in a gallery, I must be looking at art.”
The internet has always been a fertile ground for countering these architectural conventions. Net art accesses people on their most intimate device, much like how with performance interventions in public space, sometimes you can’t tell whether it’s art or not. It really changes the paradigm for how you are interacting with art, but then adding a spatial component to that. It’s abundant, because the ways you can express yourself are not limited, and because there are so few conventions for how to do so.
We’re not really trying to make bleeding edge technology, we’re trying to bring in all of these people that get left behind by the advancement of technology. We recognize the fact that the tools of Web 2.0 have been unequally distributed. That’s the problem that we want to solve.
MIS: What are some examples of the way New Art City enables cross-border creative collaboration that’s maybe not possible in other contexts?
SV: The first example that comes to mind was an exhibition called Disembodied Behaviors, by bitforms. Think there were five artists, I remember LaJuné McMillian was in it, Vitória Cribb, Kumbirai Makumbe, Julie Béna, and Alicia Mersy. Each of these artists is in a different country. I remember talking to Vitória, who’s based in Brazil, but bitforms is based in New York. At that time, she wasn’t gonna be able to fly, even if there wasn’t a pandemic on, she wouldn’t have been able to fly to New York to go to that opening. That may have been her first show in the US even. But because this was the primary mode that it was being experienced, she felt as present at the online opening as everybody else. I remember being so moved when she told me that, because that’s exactly the type of thing that we want to enable.
And so allowing curators to curate across borders and bring all of these disparate people into conversation. This happens constantly, constantly on New Art City. For instance, there are a lot of Asian diasporic people, especially Chinese folks, who couldn’t go back to China for many, many years, who are still able to collaborate with people and friends. We’ve had opportunities to bring together these international shows, that would be really, really hard to do in physical space.
MIS: Can you reflect on how New Art City approaches avatars, and your general thoughts about them as they relate to physical embodiments?
SV:
The reason why New Art City avatars are the way that they are, is that we try to center what’s on the other side of the camera. Pragmatically, if you want to have more people in a space, the avatars have to be very, very low poly. This is the reason why you can only have like 30 people in a Mozilla Hub space, because the avatars are given a lot more attention. We wanted to make the focus the art, not the other people.
I remember somebody calling the New Art City avatar a “sentient rhombus.” Simply sensing one of those avatars moving around, it’s very, very clear that a human is piloting it. And indeed, that aura is enough. And so I think we see it more like you are a human body piloting a camera and that the avatar is not your body. It’s a viewer, you know what I mean?
New Art City is a really great venue to make work about the metaverse about blockchain, about avatars, without having to adopt the technology that you’re trying to critically engage with. It allows a swiftness that’s difficult with physical exhibition timelines, but it doesn’t sacrifice conceptual rigor. A lot of people are making work about embodiment, and indeed, uploading archives of all of these different avatars. But it’s like the mechanic of piloting the avatar is not what’s being discussed, it’s really like about our relationships with the body.
