ARCH-4980.6 | Chris Perry, Assistant Professor

Occupy Art

MORGAN DANNER

Through the collaboration of thematic ideas from post WWII advertisement culture and contemporary art trends, a design proposal of what the future art exhibit will entail has been realized. In the postwar era the Independent Group and Smithsons transformed the way traditional arts were displayed by using influences of their surrounding ad culture to create an immersive, ephemeral, and interactive exhibit. The exhibitions of Parallel of Life and Art and This is Tomorrow, contradicted former galleries of white walls and framed rectangular art work, to make an exhibit that was in tune with current pop culture.

Now art has followed pop culture once again, but now into a digital age. The internet has become the storage device and node for visualizing art. So, where does that leave the future art exhibit? The art gallery that once was reserved for privileged citizens with ticketed entry is now being circumnavigated by the cloud and mobile devices. Art has and will continue to lose its presence in the community as the digital age absorbs it and standalone galleries of brick and mortar foundations will disappear. Thus, an art institute that embodies the mobile wave and can harvest a storage system on the cloud, with portable exhibit devices (PEDs), and temporal sites will become the future exhibit.

Occupy Art, will act as a viral institution with the mission to restore cultural activism into communities of the Hudson River Valley with technologically progressive modes of ephemerality and originality that will democratize art. The new aged art media will be stored in a cloud database and accessed through the institute’s website, but the physical translation will mimic the smartphone frenzy by deploying PEDs to varying sites with QR codes to register them with individual’s mobile devices. The future exhibit will become the “Pandora” for art, where users can access the digital gallery freely and easily, transforming traditional fine art concepts and returning art back to the people’s finger tips.