The opening room of the exhibition

We recently returned from the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where we had the pleasure of collaborating on the design and presentation of 404 Error: The Object is Not Online. This exhibition, a collection of material drawn from the CCA archives, considers what is lost and what is gained when we experience objects online, as compared to our experiences in the physical world.

The exhibition title text

The main exhibition space, featuring the central table seen on the website

The captions were printed on extruded forms.

Given the intent of the show, we wanted to use the exhibition website as a core component, rather than simply document the material on display. So we built the site around a live feed of the gallery, taken from a webcam placed high above the central table. The items on the table, as seen in the video feed, act as links to entries on the website. When the user rolls his or her cursor over the item, a label appears giving a brief description of the piece.

Having established the gallery and website as distinct windows onto the same body of material, we wanted to bridge the space — to flatten the distance between gallery and internet, and in doing so to reconsider the traditional hierarchy of physical over virtual.

As the online visitor uses the site, an image of the visitor’s cursor is projected onto the table. If multiple people visit the site at once, multiple cursors are seen. This is not a static projection but a real-time feed, tracking each cursor moving across the webcam and recreating it in the exhibition space.

The exhibition runs through February 13, 2011, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

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