I am delighted to launch this exhibition; Explorations in Drawing, Painting, Mixed Media, and Technology; at The Best Little Virtual Gallery hosted by Artsteps. As a peer critique group, we have been meeting monthly on Zoom to present and discuss our work and support each other through what is a very long period of study with many ups and downs. Our degree specialisms are Drawing and Painting but we have all branched out to include, for instance, stitchwork, homemade pigments and textural materials, and digital apps such as Procreate that allow experimentation outside the physical environment. The exhibition also includes work using generative artificial intelligence and augmented reality. This openness to new media has proved characteristic of OCA’s attitude to student development.

For my part, I am grateful to my peer colleagues who have provided me with their work and helped me with their observations and requirements to learn how to curate, hang (if that’s the word here) artwork, and pull together an exhibition. They noticed things I hadn’t seen; found they wanted to include different works in different layouts once they could visualise the environment; and created the text and descriptions for their work.

Uniquely, a virtual gallery permits resizing of work to scales beyond the physical reality, as long as the photos are high resolution. It also allows for positioning away from the wall and in the open space – and for losing pieces of work through a wall, the floor, or the ceiling. They’re retrievable but sometimes I didn’t know where they had gone till I took the aerial view.

This link will take you to the gallery where it will run in your browser. But if you are viewing on a smart device, it’s best to use the Artsteps app which is free from your usual store. https://www.artsteps.com/view/63cc2133ab6da6cded3e1619. You don’t need an avatar and you won’t meet anyone else in the space as each instance of the gallery is generated for each unique visitor, although there may be many simultaneous live instances.

If you are not used to manoevering in 3D space, there is a tour that takes you round the whole exhibition. You can stop and start this as you wish, and also get up close to the artwork. Your ‘landing point’ on arrival is the doorway, which is where the tour begins. Look for the controls at the bottom of your screen.

The Artsteps platform is free although it is possible to subscribe to a particular template which gives you use of a professionally designed environment for three years. Any gallery you put together in any number of instances will then be available for a further two years. Prices vary.

I found building the gallery relatively easy due to some familiarity with virtual environments, but it is not always intuitive. For instance, scaling and positioning has to be done visually as there is only one guide (a horizontal eyeline) for placement with no way of making accurate alignments between or among exhibits. Ensuring items are presented consistently, see Martin Hoare’s series for instance, is done ‘by eye’ from various positions in the space and can be foxed by finding that one or more items is some distance from the wall.

There are file size limits of 4MB, which includes video material, although for my work I have been able to bypass this by using images embedded with augmented layers accessed via the Artivive app and played on a device outside the VR environment. Paid-for templates allow links directly into YouTube, something I hope to try out with the environment I have bought for one part of my degree show.

This has been a really valuable experience for me, and I hope for everyone else, as it’s the first time some of us have exhibited formally and had to choose (curate) our own work and then have it curated by someone else. We were not at all comfortable with describing ourselves and I made the decision to remove the need for third-person pronouns by manipulating the language slightly. We used ChatGPT to help us with the title; the one we chose is an edited version of an AI-generated option.

This gallery has allowed our geographically scattered group to present work which has grown through mutually supportive online meetings and which could never have happened had we been wholly reliant on the physical world. This is important to me because we have grown ourselves through the security of being able to give and receive honest peer appraisal, to revive a flagging spirit, and to know when the best thing in the world is a good laugh.

Please come and visit, there is a comments section below the active gallery window – let’s call it a ‘Visitors’ Book’.

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

23/06/2023