Robert P. Taylor's : Fountain: Reflections of 3 Dancing Maidens
A piece of art selected for exibition in a traditional museum or gallery must be installed in a given physical space and location within that space. A visitor to the exhibit therefore sees that work in one and only one context relative to other works in the exhibit, a context typically fixed for the life of that particular exhibition. Ironically, the criteria used for selecting the works to be included almost guarantees that each work included is related to a number of other works in the same exhibit, in various interesting ways. For example, painting F may be closely related in some important thematic and revelatory way to paintings A, B, C, D, and E, and in a completely different way to paintings G, H, I, J, K, and L. At the same time, no single room available for the exhibit can accomodate more than eight paintings. In such a typical case, the organizers of the exhibition must decide upon one context or the other for painting A, as they can not have both.By exhibiting images in digitized form and using the fundamental properties of a computer-based medium like the web, this age-old exhibition dilemma can easily be transcended. In effect, the webbery can install a work analogous to painting A in both exhibits at the same time, and make it simple for the visitor to view each work in either or both contexts, as desired. In fact, any number of "simultaneously available" alternative exhibits of the same images can be set up. Any visitor can then visit as many of these exhibits as he or she wishes, as many times as he or she wishes, in the order he or she chooses, and can explore each to the degree of comprehensiveness desired, thereby using this unique concurrent availablity to enrich understanding of a particular work, of a particular exhibit, or of the entire collection.
Comparing exhibit titles (see Index to all Exhibits below) in Fountain makes obvious some of the exhibiting concurrency it employs. For more on how the site's many accessible exhibits embody concurrency, see Simultaneous concurrent exhibiting in Fountain below.
Simultaneous concurrent exhibition in Fountain Rationale for this site Index to all Exhibits Comments Main Page
