What's It Like To Run An Online-Only Gallery? A Q&A With The Founders Of Bubblebyte.org

Online-only art galleries have existed ever since artists started producing work on, for, and about the web. They had a brief golden period in the early days of net.art, which coincided with the beginning and the end of the dot.com boom in the mid-late 90s. Both artist-run sites and museum-operated channels like Gallery 9 from The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, ArtPort from The Whitney Museum, and Rhizome from The New Museum in NYC started opening their virtual doors, only to be shuttered or abandoned a few years later as interests for these kind of projects waned and budgets disappeared.

But in recent years a new class of net artists has emerged and this time their efforts possess a new level of urgency, relevance and sophistication. It seems as if net art, as a medium, has taken some time to mature, but more importantly, the climate of the web has changed—the Internet is no longer some fringe outlet for early adopters, nerds, and porn sites but now something that is not only firmly entrenched in popular culture, but one of the main agents driving it.

Accordingly, a wave of new online-only galleries has cropped up like Fach & Asendorf and Klaus Gallery, and The Whitney has recently dusted off its ArtPort site with a new commission from Ursula Endlicher (notably, Rhizome has been one of the few consistent efforts to continue covering and archiving net art).

One of the most interesting of these upstart online galleries is bubblebyte.org, which is celebrating its one year anniversary this weekend. The project was started by Rhys Coren and Attilia Fattori Franchini who’ve used it to showcase some great media art from a whole variety of artists.

Interestingly enough, they’re celebrating by bringing the gallery into the physical world and an exhibition called PRIMO ANNIVERSARIO at The Sunday Painter in Peckham, London. The show opens tonight at 6PM and runs till 12 February, so stop in if you’re passing through. We caught up with the founders to find out a bit about how their first year’s been.

The Creators Project: What's it like to run an online-only art gallery?
Attilia Fattori Franchin: Well, I would say challenging and fun. The variables you have to take into account are totally different from a classic gallery format. Time and space are less specific, like you are open 24/7 and can reach anyone in the globe but you still miss the experiential side, the physicality of the work, the contact with your audience and the artists. The majority of artists we exhibit are friends but we never meet, because they are located somewhere else in the world. At the same time, you have an incredible freedom compared to any other art format, thanks to the low costs and the easy accessibility of the work, you can propose everything you or the artists want without constrains. This is quite refreshing and makes it worth pushing exhibition boundaries.

Rhys Coren: For me, there's the website building and maintenance stuff too. It's all super simple, almost default html design, but the cross-browser compatibility and occasional server problems keep me awake at night.

How do you measure/quantify success?
AFF: Looking at bubblebyte.org now, I believe it is an interesting project able to exhibit the work of artists we extremely admire and showcase these works to a wide audience, which is getting more and more interest over time. There are so many things to do and we are excited thinking about all the artists we haven't showed yet, so I think we still have time for success.

Rhys: Compared to what's considered popular online globally, we hardly even register. We're not even a blip. But, compared to other art websites our hits are high. Compared to any other gallery that's a year old, our daily 'visits' are off the chart. How many days does a new, artist-led gallery space have 5,000 visitors from all over the world? A slow day for us is about 100 people from 20 countries. That's humbling!

What were the goals for the project at its inception and have you reached them one year later?
AFF: At the very, very start there were not too many goals apart from the desire of showing who we liked using the tools that we had in our hands: the web, a good network and no money. Looking at it one year later, I believe we have achieved that pretty well.

Video created by Lucky PDF

What happens when an online-only art gallery has a physical exhibition like the one you're planning?
AFF: Exhibiting digital art in a physical context requires lots of preparation and very specific equipment to show the work properly. Since the majority of the artists we exhibit live abroad, we are responsible for interpreting their vision about how to present their work. In PRIMO ANNIVERSARIO there are much more people involved compared to when we organise shows online and thanks to the hard work of the guys at The Sunday Painter Gallery in Peckham and all our friends lending us equipment from Seventeen, [SPACE], Lucky PDF, etc., we are able to have everything in place for the show. Every cable, every monitor, every DVD player, every projector, every laptop.

What can an online gallery give people that a real-world one can't?
AFF Be open 24/7 with the possibility of looking at the work in its primary form in the intimacy of your own space, however many times you want.

Do online galleries aspire to be real-world galleries?
AFF: Not really, sometimes they would like to migrate to the real world and see how it goes but they work on a completely different level.

Rhys: When a gallery is online it is part of the internet and a culture of sharing. Real world galleries are from a culture of commerce or they are from a culture of funding, obliged to meet certain objectives.

What are your favourite art spaces—real or virtual?
AFF: There are so many. From the New Museum and Rhizome in New York to Future Gallery in Berlin, Seventeen in London, Preteen Gallery in Mexico City and 319 Scholes in New York, just to name a few.

London at the moment has got lots of artist-run spaces like The Sunday Painter, Arcadia Missa, French Riviera and Son Gallery, which are doing amazing work for artistic promotion and support.

Rhys: Add Team, Stuart Shave and Kate MacGarry to that list.

bubblebyte.org’s participating artists: Oliver Sutherland, Rob Chavasse, Laurel Schwulst, Pascual Sisto, Sara Ludy, Duncan Malashock, Oregon Painting Society, Nicolas Sassoon, Sabrina Ratté

The Sunday Painter, 1st Floor, 12-16 Blenheim Grove, London, SE15 4QL
28 January – 12 February 2012. Thursday-Sunday, 12.00PM – 6.00PM
Private view: 27 January, 6.00PM – 9.30PM

After-party 27 January curated by LuckyPDF : Bussey Building 10PM – 4AM