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Entertainment

The Widget Art Gallery: Net Art For Your Mobile Device

For the discerning art lover on the go.

Art galleries are often a strange experience—a place where we’re meant to have a private interaction with a work of art but are surrounded by crowds. For a long time, they held the monopoly on curated, publicly accessible art. But the internet gave them a run for their money with web-specific online galleries that re-imagine the nature of the gallery and the exhibition, and turn websites into curatorial spaces for commissioning and showcasing new work. These spaces are still publicly accessible—even more so, because they don’t require an admission fee and are not location-specific—and we can interact with them in a more private, one-to-one way thanks to our ability to view them from our own personal devices anywhere we have an internet connection.

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As we drift towards our mobile future where laptops will soon become just a nostalgic indulgence, our digital galleries appropriately reconfigure themselves to suit our new handheld needs. Artist Chiara Passa has created The Widget Art Gallery, which opened, it seems, this October. The WAG (as its called, although that acronym has a different connotation in Britain) is a “nano virtual gallery-room” that shows a different solo exhibition every month on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. You can access it on your phone by pasting the following URL into the address bar: http://www.chiarapassa.it/wag/mobile/. Then you just wait for the new artwork to come each month, delivered straight to—and created to fit the boundaries of—your device.

Gif installations seem to be the favored art form, but then again, there’s only been two exhibitions so far. Currently it’s showing the site specific One and Four (below) by Anthony Antonellis where “three 10-second animations are looped within a fourth”.

And previously it played host to Lorna Mills’ “found gif collage” Operatic Narcoleptic (below). Who knows what December may hold?