An interactive platform for a Berlin art collective’s exhibition in the time of Covid-19.
Background
Coven Berlin is a queer feminist transdisciplinary art collective creating art exhibitions, performances, and artworks. In 2019, we received funding to present commissioned multimedia artwork in a public venue in the second half of 2020. Faced with the task of making an artistic program accessible to the public during a Covid-19 lockdown, we turned to the web. We normally use our online magazine as our main digital outlet, but the highly structured format of our magazine’s web template felt less suited to a digital art exhibition.
Our priorities were:
- a simple, accessible design,
- a playful, fun digital experience, and
- a website that allowed the viewer to ‘discover’ the exhibition by moving through digital space on their own terms.
Design
With these priorities in mind, I explored a variety of digital exhibition formats used by larger institutions during the pandemic up until that point, as well as social media platforms and artist websites. I explored various gallery and carousel-style presentation formats, but these formats did not feel playful or particularly close to Coven’s previous exhibitions and working style, and many such templates were also not fully accessible for keyboard navigation.
Based on all of these factors, I came up with a simple design with a homepage where the user was able to access all available artworks in sequence by either mousing over their linked widget, or cycling through the available widgets using the arrow keys. When the widget was selected, it appeared in silhouette, with the artist’s name shown on a red background to indicate which piece would be viewable if the user clicked that widget. In hindsight, the contrast ratio between the colors used did not conform to accessibility guidelines, and I would approach certain aspects of the visual design differently from an accessibility standpoint today.
Clicking on the individual widgets took users to pages where the artwork was displayed as a Vimeo embedded video, with the artist statement and information about the piece, including credits and runtime, underneath. Text links at the bottom of the homepage, which were also keyboard navigable, included information about the event series and the curatorial text. A back button to the homepage was visible in the top lefthand corner of each page.
The event’s title, IN HEAT: COLD SWEAT, taken from our 2020 online magazine theme, provided an initial direction for visual design elements, and we hired artist Nani Gutiérrez to create some distinct clickable visual elements based on their past artwork. The final design, evoking bubbling mud or lava, ambiguously hot and cold and accented with red outlines and hover effects, tied the year’s concept and the commissioned works together thematically.
I also built and implemented this version of the Cyberbog, using HTML/CSS and ReactJS for the interactive elements. The Cyberbog was on view from December 2020 to March 2021.
