Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is a curator, art historian, author, and educator. She has curated exhibitions at institutions of contemporary and media art worldwide since 2006 at institutions such as the ZKM | Center for Art and media Karlsruhe, Nam June Paik Art Center, or Ludwig Museum Budapest. She has recently edited the volume Beyond Matter, Within Space. Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality (2023). As of 2023 she has taken up a lecturer role in curation and media practice at University College London.

Beyond Matter. Within Space: Past Exhibitions as Digital Experiences

Beyond Matter (2019–2023) was an international, collaborative, practice-based research project that took cultural heritage and contemporary art to the verge of virtual reality and reflected on a condition of art production and mediation that is increasingly virtual. It put a specific emphasis on spatial aspects in art production, curating, and mediation through numerous activities and formats in order to explore a plurality of solutions and options that are emerging hand in hand with the development of computation. In this sense practice-based research within the museum context was applied for a specific type of archival research of exhibition histories.

Taking up the case studies of Les Immatériaux (Centre Pompidou, 1985) and Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (ZKM | Karlsruhe, 2002), Centre Pompidou and ZKM | Karlsruhe committed themselves to examining the possibilities of exhibition revival through experiential methods of digital and spatial modelling. Both past exhibitions constituted complex thought experiments deployed through and manifested in space. Both also experimented with innovative ways of juxtaposing scientific, technological, and artistic practices. In their respective ways, Les Immatériaux and Iconoclash proposed the exhibition as both a medium and an interface with a different level of reflection and creativity. A further outcome of the Beyond Matter project is the Generic Exhibition Platform. Primarily developed for the digital emulation of Iconoclash, it is an AI-based software tool that facilitates the generation of digital exhibition spaces. An exemplary online environment demonstrates the features of the software which seeks to encourage museums, art organizations, and cultural professionals to benefit from the open-source tool for the creation of digital exhibitions of their own. In the interest of the participatory and democratic sharing of resources, the software is freely available on the GitHub account of ZKM | Karlsruhe.