Like a digital snake eating its tail, digital art now has a (digital) museum it can call home. On display IRL at Brooklyn’s TRANSFER Gallery, The Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA) is the brainchild of artists and directors/developers Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William James Richard Robertson.
In a way, this was inevitable. As Salazar-Caro and Robertson themselves — both members of the glitch, new media, and digital art scenes — would note, and as other commentators have pointed out, the idea of a virtual art space has been in development for a while.Paper-Thin, Panther Modern, and Crystal Gallery are just a few examples that mirror the gallery or museum (Panther Modern features artist shows in digital “rooms”). But looking out over the sea of development in virtual reality, digital art, and museum documentation/accessibility, DiMoDA is more like the fascinating head of a building convergence, the first of a thousand sails.
DiMoDA is a preeminent virtual institution and a virtual reality exhibition platform dedicated to the distribution and promotion of New Media Art. For it’s debut, DiMoDA will be presenting works by Claudia Hart (NY/CHICAGO), Tim Berresheim (DE) Jacolby Satterwhite (NY) and a project by Aquanet 2001 (Salvador Loza and Gibran Morgado) from Mexico City.
The atrium of the museum is architected and modeled in 3D by Alfredo Salazar-Caro. Viewers wear an Oculus Rift to enterDiMoDA, immediately approaching a number of ‘portals’ which can be used to access the ‘wings’ of the museum. Exhibiting artists have complete control to shape the virtual environment in which their works are installed inside the museum.
As a virtual institution, DiMoDA is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting and exhibiting Digital artworks from living New Media artists, while expanding the conscious experience of viewing Digital art in a Virtual space. The DiMoDA building is intended as a home for contemporary digital art and incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to the Internet’s virtual landscape.
Conceived in 2013 by Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William James Richard Robertson, DiMoDA launches in November of 2015 with its first exhibition as a pavilion in The Wrong Biennale and a physical exhibition at TRANSFER in New York from November 14 through December 19th, 2015.