As the development of emerging technological media such as blockchain, the metaverse, and NFTs accelerates the normalization of the digital world and anticipates a transition toward a more advanced digital paradigm known as Web 3.0, contemporary art is likewise rapidly diversifying across a wide range of technologies and media, branching into multiple genres and forms. This trend continuously expands the categories of works that contemporary art museums must collect and accommodate, while simultaneously giving rise to new types of exhibition spaces distinct from traditional museums.
 
The 2022 Busan Museum of Contemporary Art collection exhibition 《After Graybox: From Collection to Exhibition》 has been organized to examine the evolving media characteristics of new media artworks following the emergence of the exhibition space known as the “Graybox,” which arose through the reciprocal influence between technology and art. At the same time, the exhibition reviews the current issues that museums encounter in the processes of collecting, conserving, restoring, and exhibiting works categorized as new media, based on actual works from the museum’s collection, and seeks to explore future-oriented directions for improving these practices.

From an art historical perspective, museum exhibition spaces after modernism have evolved from the traditional “White Cube” to the “Black Box,” and further into the “Graybox”—a hybrid of the two preceding forms (also referred to as the “Gray-zone” or “Studio”). This transformation is closely related to technological advancement and the expansion of media. Unlike the White Cube, which was designed for traditional painting and sculpture, the Black Box is a dark, enclosed space created for film and video projection.

It emerged as experimental moving-image works—pushed out of the commercial film industry driven by large-scale capital—began to enter museum contexts. The Graybox, although not yet clearly defined and still in a state of becoming, arose from the need generated in the 1990s as performance genres such as dance and theater entered museum spaces. Thus, while it refers to a space where the White Cube and Black Box overlap, it is also considered a typical environment for performance. Interestingly, Claire Bishop (b. 1971) emphasizes that these transformations coincide with the emergence of network technologies and smartphones, which opened up new modes of spectatorship based on immediate interaction between audiences and artworks.

In this way, the historical evolution of exhibition spaces is deeply intertwined with the technological conditions of each era that expand the scope of visual art media: just as the Black Box was shaped by the emergence of time-based, technology-driven media situated between art and the film industry, and the Graybox expanded through an increased focus on performance—where the temporality of moving images is maximized—so too are these spaces closely connected to the technological conditions of their time.
 
As works of art inevitably reflect the conditions of their time, the current trajectory of museums appears to be unfolding in a new direction in tandem with the full-scale expansion of digital technology. This is evident in the increasing number of exhibitions in recent years that focus on the wide-ranging transformations of artistic genres centered on the attribute of the digital—from single-channel and multi-channel video that transitioned into digital formats following the emergence of early moving-image media such as television, video, and film; to web (net) art that appeared in the early stages of the digital world; to video (installation) media utilizing advanced digital technologies and software such as games, VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and MR (mixed reality); and further to digital painting, digital sculpture, performance, and interdisciplinary, convergent art forms that break down boundaries between genres.

The emergence of new digital technology-based art media not only transforms the fundamental mode of existence of artworks, but also proposes new viewing environments and modes of spectatorship that extend beyond the three aforementioned exhibition space types. Even if these developments prove to be temporary, contemporary art museums function as sites where diverse artistic experiments are conducted across the boundaries of the real and the virtual, the material and the immaterial, and the offline and the online, while navigating this transitional moment in which everything converges toward the digital.

Through this, museums attempt to anticipate what new worlds visual art may open up. However, such endeavors are not limited to the spectacular visual effects enabled by technological devices, nor do they subordinate art to technological media. Rather, they are grounded in a critical perspective on the characteristics of a machine- and technology-centered world—from analog to digital—and on the restructuring of human life under the influence of such conditions.

As of January 2022, the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art holds a total of 269 works, of which approximately 220—over 80% of the collection—consist of technology- and time-based media works, including new media, single-channel and multi-channel video, and video installations. While most museums adopt a broad classification system under the category of “new media,” encompassing video, media, performance, and other technology-based works, this museum categorizes its collection into four types based on the final form of visualization: “new media,” “single-channel video,” “multi-channel video,” and “video installation.”

If “new media” broadly refers to works that utilize new technological devices and programs such as the internet and computers, then single-channel and multi-channel video, as well as video installation, refer to works characterized by the property of the “moving image,” including documentation of performance. However, this classification system cannot be applied precisely to all collected works, as some possess characteristics spanning multiple categories or exist in forms that do not fit neatly within the system.
 
In this exhibition, although various definitions of new media exist, the term is limited to the domain of visual art that actively employs technology- and time-based media, reflecting the characteristics of the museum’s collection. The issues most museums encounter when collecting new media works are closely tied to the defining conditions of such media: “technology” and “time.”

Technology inherently entails “variability,” as it is subject to continuous change over time, while time implies “immateriality,” as works are not fixed as physical objects but exist transiently. While “variability” is more pronounced in works that directly employ physical technologies, and “immateriality” is especially evident in performance, which exists only temporarily, most new media works contain both characteristics as external and internal conditions. In particular, recent works utilizing digital technologies—such as video works in digital formats or works requiring continuous updates and online networks—exhibit increasingly intensified forms of variability and immateriality.

This is because the materiality of the digital consists of abstract codes, lacking a fixed physical substance and capable of easy movement, replication, and transformation. Considering that institutional museums have traditionally collected works with stable physical forms—even though such works are also finite and subject to disappearance due to numerous factors—artworks whose very nature is variable and immaterial prompt a reconsideration of what constitutes an object worthy of collection, calling for a shift away from conventional approaches to collecting.

This exhibition not only allows viewers to perceive the changes in artistic media, exhibition spaces, and modes of spectatorship occurring within rapidly evolving technological environments, but also raises the question of what kind of collection economy is appropriate for media such as video, performance, digital, and new media. It is composed of artworks and related research platforms that call for new approaches to collecting.

The exhibited works evoke the intrinsic characteristics of technology- and time-based media, such as the variability of new media, the collision between outdated technologies and new ones, the emergence of immaterial works existing only as data, and the ephemerality of performance that remains only in the form of sequences, photographs, or video documentation. At the same time, these characteristics stand in contrast to the modes of existence of traditional painting and sculpture, whose status as collectable objects was once clearly defined.

This contrast leads to practical issues—already present, overlooked, or yet to be encountered—in the process of collection, thereby underscoring the necessity of reexamining how contemporary new media works should be collected. In this sense, the works occupying the exhibition space after the Graybox traverse both variability and immateriality, suggesting that the collection of physical objects may no longer be the central concern of museum acquisition policies. If so, what is it that contemporary museums should ultimately collect?
 
From this question, 《After Graybox: From Collection to Exhibition》 reflects on the role of collection exhibitions—not only as a means of presenting collected works, but also as a platform for reestablishing acquisition strategies based on a proactive understanding of new media characteristics in relation to current temporal, environmental, technological, and situational conditions. Regular collection exhibitions, which present works after acquisition, provide opportunities for close condition assessments and enable museums to address the academic, technical, and policy-related issues that emerge through such processes.

In this regard, they constitute an essential part of the collection system. It is hoped that this exhibition, which activates the cycle of the museum’s collection system from acquisition to exhibition, will serve as a foundation for the next cycle—raising questions that must be newly considered beyond traditional notions of collection and seeking solutions to them.

References

• 《그레이박스 이후: 수집에서 전시까지 (After Graybox: From Collection to Exhibition)》