Closed Galleries List
CLOSED GALLERY #22 (Galeria Felicia Hall)
CLOSED GALLERY #33 (Galeria Juan Amiano)
CLOSED GALLERY #08 (Galeria Baculo)
@closedgalleries
Closed Galleries found by google search engines
Closed Galleries
Closed galleries is an ongoing web-based project consisting on the acquisition of former art galleries domains.
So far, there are 41.
Due to the last economic recession, a lot of businesses were forced to close and this affected to the art world as well. Around 224 art galleries closed in spain since 2007. Most of them closed its physical space and continued with its activity in their website. Still, there are a crescent number of galleries that closed both their physical and their virtual spaces, however, any search in the web suggests the opposite, showing all the data stored throughout the years about artists, exhibitions and press articles as if they were still going on.
Unlike what happens in a city, where it is easy to perceive the changes of the economy and market trends by seeing the presence of vacant spaces corresponding to former businesses, the reality of the internet functions in a different way. For the search engines, the same businesses are still alive and the more people look for them the more alive they are. These virtual spaces seem to be doomed in a permanent state of vigency.
This project seeks to make visible these closed art galleries by playing the same game, which is adding new data to the web so that search engines can finally find those spaces. Empty, after all.
The functioning of the project is as follows: whenever it is detected that an art gallery has closed its web site, its original domain is purchased. Subsequently, the gallery web is activated again with a very simple content remarking the number of the closed gallery and redirecting it to the project home page: closedgalleries.com where the whole work is explained. Once here, there is an access to the list of all purchased domains, each one of them linked back to its own website, creating a loop inside the web.
As the intention of the project is making these closed spaces become visible on the web, it has been necessary to play with the same rules as the internet functions, so key words, meta-tags and image descriptions have become the main tools of the work and internet promotion has turned into art.
So far, there are 41.
Due to the last economic recession, a lot of businesses were forced to close and this affected to the art world as well. Around 224 art galleries closed in spain since 2007. Most of them closed its physical space and continued with its activity in their website. Still, there are a crescent number of galleries that closed both their physical and their virtual spaces, however, any search in the web suggests the opposite, showing all the data stored throughout the years about artists, exhibitions and press articles as if they were still going on.
Unlike what happens in a city, where it is easy to perceive the changes of the economy and market trends by seeing the presence of vacant spaces corresponding to former businesses, the reality of the internet functions in a different way. For the search engines, the same businesses are still alive and the more people look for them the more alive they are. These virtual spaces seem to be doomed in a permanent state of vigency.
This project seeks to make visible these closed art galleries by playing the same game, which is adding new data to the web so that search engines can finally find those spaces. Empty, after all.
The functioning of the project is as follows: whenever it is detected that an art gallery has closed its web site, its original domain is purchased. Subsequently, the gallery web is activated again with a very simple content remarking the number of the closed gallery and redirecting it to the project home page: closedgalleries.com where the whole work is explained. Once here, there is an access to the list of all purchased domains, each one of them linked back to its own website, creating a loop inside the web.
As the intention of the project is making these closed spaces become visible on the web, it has been necessary to play with the same rules as the internet functions, so key words, meta-tags and image descriptions have become the main tools of the work and internet promotion has turned into art.
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