Digital Exhibition Collaborators

In the development of digital exhibitions, it’s important to understand an artist’s relationship with their technology.

Some artists will prefer to be their own technicians, while others may request support or provide their own collaborators. Communicating clearly with artists about their expectations of developer involvement should happen early in development. Regardless of an artist’s technical involvement, regular feedback sessions should be scheduled between the artists and developers.

The technical proficiency of an artist doesn’t directly correlate with the installation’s complexity. In our pilot projects, we had established digital artists opt for simpler, altered versions of their work for display, while other artists requested more complex, complete reconstructions of their piece. It’s therefore important to be clear about developer or technical capacity during the early planning phases. We found that artists more versed in digital exhibitions often had a clearer understanding of an iterative design process through their own experiences. Artists who were less familiar with the development process felt more supported when we shared pre-recorded versions of interactive components and more polished prototypes.

Maintaining the development timeline while supporting an artist’s feedback is an ongoing balance. Meeting file-submission deadlines is critical. When developing an exhibition, you must think holistically about the ways that different projects will interact, quite literally as some interactive projects may break or change the overall structure of the project (for example, having multiple player controllers present across several interactive works). After the initial installation, there must be opportunities for the artists to give feedback. However, these meetings are often accompanied by a desire to expand upon the existing work with custom coding. Developing digital exhibitions requires balancing iterative design with perfectionism. Hard deadlines for final edits must be held, and unique platform errors can still rear their head in the final weeks. It is important that adequate time be reserved for bug-testing and for finding the most optimal, overall exhibition experience, rather than pressuring developers to ensure the most perfect version of one particular artwork.

If the developer is amenable to sharing their project files, the artists can greatly benefit in the long run from having a version of the working file that can be further altered beyond the scope of the current exhibition (see Section 3.8).

Curators played a central role in developing the DETAIL toolkit through our pilot projects.

We chose to work with curators who could both select artists and shape exhibition directions in terms of concepts, aesthetics, and themes. This collaboration served a dual purpose: to create compelling exhibitions while gathering insights about curatorial needs for digital exhibition tools.

Building each exhibition largely from scratch allowed us to create virtual spaces and interfaces that accurately reflected curatorial visions. While this approach resulted in more complete, aesthetically cohesive experiences, it also required significant additional development time. The exhibition itself often became an artwork in its own right—a factor that should be carefully considered in the project planning stages.

In addition to their initial research and direction, our guest curators were also essential intermediaries between the development team and the artists. Their role in facilitating communication and understanding between these groups cannot be overstated, as they shared in imagining the overall picture that the developers were working to build. Curators with a technical understanding of the project (in addition to the conceptual or curatorial frameworks) may be able to assist in answering some of the questions levied at developers, leaving more time for the developers to spend on exhibition development.

The DETAIL project was about creating many unique templates for digital art exhibitions and resulted in highly customized exhibition projects. A more efficient option for curators would be to be able to re-use a digital exhibition space, mounting new works within the highly customizable templates. This would also expand the DETAIL templates to different curatorial models, such as networked or horizontal curation.

Developers are usually engaged in two contexts: exhibition development and individual artwork installation.

Exhibition developers focus on creating and maintaining the overall platform, while artwork-specific developers might be artistic collaborators or hired technicians. When working with artwork-specific developers, it’s essential to incorporate their consultations into the planning schedule and coordinate effectively between all technical teams.

Ideally, any developers involved in the project should be present at early meetings. Depending on the relationship of the developer to the artwork, their full participation may vary in necessity. For example, a work that was originally built as a web app but is being reconstructed in Unity as an interactive 2D game would not necessarily require the participation of the web developer if the artist can provide adequate explanation of the mechanics.

If there are multiple developers on a project, version control must be established at the inception of the project and carefully maintained.

If the exhibition is designed to be viewed in a browser, considerations should be made for the development of the website. If working with an external web developer, understanding their timeline alongside the exhibition’s development timeline is critical. It is helpful to push an early build of the exhibition for testing with various web browser limitations.

Digital exhibitions can benefit from various design specialists.

User experience (UX) designers should be involved early to help shape interfaces and interaction patterns, working closely with technical teams. UX decisions are likely to impact the overall exhibition experience and may drastically alter the way a user interacts with an artwork, in order to maintain a cohesive exhibition flow.

Level designers and 3D artists handle spatial design and environment creation and can be a great support for the developers and curators. Often, participating artists with relevant experience are interested in fulfilling these roles. When hiring artists as designers, it is important to keep the expectations of the design contract distinctive from their overall participation and artist’s fee.

Narrative designers can be necessary for lengthy, text-based interactive experiences. When working with narrative designers on exhibition development, it’s important to include them in your version control workflow, typically by setting them up with Git access and appropriate repository permissions. This allows them to collaborate effectively with developers, track changes to narrative content, and maintain different versions of exhibition text alongside other project assets.

Graphic designers contribute to exhibition materials and promotional content and their work potentially extends into the exhibition itself, through the use of consistent colour palettes and typography choices. A comprehensive design document can help align all these elements. If you have institutional partners, they may have existing branding conventions the designer should be aware of.

Physical exhibition designers can also positively impact the direction of a digital exhibition. If the exhibition designer is not familiar with the process of digital exhibition development or digital UX experience, communication between these groups should be supported. Most importantly, limitations on developer time should be clearly expressed.

Collaboration with institutional partners requires careful attention to timelines and capacities.

Successful projects must coordinate across various departments: communications, marketing, contracts, administration, curatorial, visitor services, leadership, and possibly others. Identifying core team members early—particularly institutional curators and communication representatives—helps establish clear channels for decision-making and information flow.

When collaborating with institutional partners, it is important to be aware of organizational standards and mandates. This could include:

• union regulations for staff;
• CARFAC standards and other necessary funding regulations;
• organizational mandates around inclusivity;
• accessibility standards.

The maintenance and archiving of the exhibition should also be approached early in discussions with any institutional partner. Questions to ask include:

• What is the expected lifespan of the project?
• Who will oversee the project’s archiving?
• Are there resources available to support its archiving or ongoing maintenance?
• Will the framework of the exhibit be re-used for a new purpose in the future, or is it intended to be a one-off experiment?

The chosen development platform for DETAIL, the proprietary game engine Unity, offers many advantages, like extensive community support, third-party assets, and a large pool of potential developers.

However, relying on proprietary software creates certain vulnerabilities, as platform changes can affect project viability. In terms of publishing, Unity maintains a free license that supports educational and independent development, and it supports a variety of imported media, making it an excellent choice for a multimedia digital exhibition. But Unity’s affordances are all created with game development in mind and developers need to get creative when using it for digital exhibition development.

Open-source alternatives, like Godot, offer more control and potentially better long-term viability, though they might require more technical expertise to implement.

Proprietary distribution platforms, like Steam or mobile app stores, provide broad audience reach and built-in features for payment, updates, and discoverability. The regulations around these platforms are often challenging and a developer with appropriate experience should be involved. These regulations for approval can significantly delay launch dates. These platforms also demand regular updates to your project, making one-off projects difficult to maintain in the long run. The DETAIL exhibitions were hosted on Itch.io and embedded on the MacKenzie’s website.

When selecting platforms, consider both immediate needs and long-term sustainability. The ideal choice balances accessibility, technical requirements, and project longevity while remaining within institutional and budgetary constraints.