‍Overview

Adapting an Art Exhibition During the Pandemic

How to adapt an art exhibition's format and maintain its intentions? A question that emerged during COVID, this became the project’s major challenge. 

SWARM, an SSHRC-funded pilot project, was supposed to be an in-person exhibition. However, due to the pandemic scenario, it became an entirely online art exhibition with Gallery 1C03.

So the need for a digital art installation in the form of a site emerged. The website had to be customized and accessible while still transpiring the research topics behind the project, which include feminist, queer, anti-colonial, and anti-racist modes of engaging with the environment, pollinators, and human-beyond-human relationships through creative practices.

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Logo

Eco-futuristic Design

The concept of an ecological collectivist ecosystem was key. This aspect of a multidisciplinary artwork swarm informed the choice of visual elements, graphs, poetic elements, and texts as well as determined how they interconnect among themselves and as a whole.

Inspired by an eco-futuristic virtual cyberpunk aesthetic clash, the repetition of the word SWARM SWARM SWARM and the phonetic word play used in the logo reinforces the intentional background “buzz-buzz” noise generated by the choice of neon colors.

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Website

Hive-inspired interactive grid

A second challenge was to develop a website that contained images, videos, and essays portraying artworks informed by academic concepts and theories. The site had to incorporate a hive-looking grid in which each unit worked individually and collectively just like a bee hive, thus conveying the thought behind the project’s research.

Since the website design had to be accessible, a third challenge was to create a dynamic that allowed each cell formation to change according to the screen size, redistributing cells within the site’s hive as a way to represent collective experience.

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UI/UX

Non-hierarchy at the centre

The responsiveness created for desktop was transposed to its mobile version, maintaining the hive cell’s interactiveness and ability to rearrange themselves when navigated. This design aspect translates the exhibition's concept of an ecosystem in its micro and macro interdependency. 

Therefore, the website’s navigation was designed as a non-hierarchical structure to communicate that there isn't a linear way to scroll or click on the page elements: they are all interconnected, and the user will remain immersed in the navigation experience the whole time. They are both independent and interdependent cells.

Then, a second homepage was created to include text, although the website navigation remained the same and elements continued to be variable. In fact, they reorganize themselves throughout the whole navigation experience.

In summary, SWARM was a project that included visual identity and an experimental, artistic website that had to accommodate the complexities and abstract thinking involved in art research while taking into account the concept of ecosystems and collectivity, represented by bee swarms turned into a digital hive on a webpage.

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