<h3>The extensive restrictions imposed by the corona crisis that broke out in 2020 still have a significant impact on almost all areas of society that the state has not classified as systemically relevant.</h3>
The cultural institutions &#8211; museums, concert halls, cinemas &#8211; were particularly affected by the measures, as a physical presence of visitors, which had been obligatory until then, was no longer permitted. &#8216;Systemic relevance&#8217; became a kind of buzzword and gave rise to discussions about the significance and social position of the cultural fields. Did the pandemic show that aesthetic experiences can indeed be neglected in times of crisis?
The answer is no, because it quickly became clear &#8211; quite the contrary &#8211; that this calculation was not so easy to make in practice. The reality of the &#8216;corona&#8217;, the domestic quarantine in which much of European society found itself, revealed a gap in the online landscape that needed to be filled by cultural education and leisure activities. It was an error of thought to detach museums from the overall social context and to deny them a relevance for social well-being. Social distancing cannot function without cultural distancing.
Already in the last pre-Corona years, museum institutions have been making efforts to digitize their mediation services and make them accessible online. In this context, most of the collections were digitized, and work was done on presentation formats for artistic projects that were from the outset located in virtual space. Up to now, interest in such a form of translation has mainly come from specific circles of experts who, within the framework of academic discourses, have investigated the conservational, documentary and, not least, mediating potentials of new media technologies. The project Beyond Matter &#8211; Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality is one of these few initiatives that was already working on the implementation of corresponding formats before the Corona crisis.
The lockdown has now shown that the digitization of museums not only meets a need of the museums themselves to find new ways of mediation and distribution in order to remain accessible, but that it has also been demanded and gratefully accepted by the public.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">1</a>
Corona brought to light a social need for cultural education, consumption of and exchange about cultural productions so clearly that even relatively small cultural institutions are now making their online presence more conscious and interactive.
The Corona pandemic can therefore be seen as a catalyst, which on the one hand promoted the sensitization for and the need for digital formats.
Many museum institutions either showed initiative or quickly followed prominent examples in order to conduct virtual exhibition tours, discussions, guided tours, film streamings etc. online. Since this &#8216;acceleration&#8217; has resulted in a large number of contributions, most of which did not originate from a research intention, but nevertheless reflect an interesting current trend, we would like to present the results of our partner institutions here and thus provide an excerpt of the strategies of virtual events developed in response to the sudden emergence of a &#8220;long-distance society&#8221;.
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Cf. Hartmann, Stefan: Museen, Covid-19 and digital heritage, Augsburg 2020, p.5: &#8220;As a rule, the expansion of online offerings corresponded to the increase in user numbers. [&#8230;] 50 percent of the institutions provided at least two different online services. These were institutions with at least 5,000 to 10,000 visitors*. A good half of the museums were able to notice an increase in the number of users of the online services; for the rest, the user figures were either not collected or no comparison with previous user numbers was possible. In ten percent of the museums, the user numbers did not increase.&#8221;
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Miltos Manetas, « jacksonpollock.org », 2005 © D.R.

Centre Pompidou online, 19 May – 19 November 2021
The web browser presents several affinities with the canvas, simultaneously playing the role of the frame and of the “open window” on representation, granted to painting by the humanist Leon Battista Alberti during the early Renaissance. Readily borrowing from a vocabulary of open spaces and exploration (from the Net “scape” browser of the 1990s, to Internet “Explorer”), its primary purpose is to be an interface onto the external world. However, it has often been used by artists, sparing all references to the world that surrounds us, to produce purely abstract works, in the lineage of pioneers of computer-assisted drawings like Vera Molnar or Manfred Mohr.
This online exhibit groups 9 creations, from the 1990s – that saw the first “net art” artists develop the idea that a website could be a work of art in its own right – to today. It invites you to explore this form of digital creation, whether built in reference to the history of painting or by exploring the specificity of digital tools.
Created solely for the space of the browser, this exhibit without walls invites you to consult these works just as they were conceived by the artists, on the original URL when it is still available. Some works, interactive or otherwise, were created before the development of touchscreen technology used by smartphones and tablets: a full-screen computer experience is therefore advised.

Slow Life. Radical Practices of the Everyday

The idea of the exhibition Slow Life. Radical Practices of the Everyday was conceived two years ago and the Ludwig Museum’s curatorial team has been working on the preparation and implementation of the exhibition for months. At the time, we could not have guessed that with the nearly five-month exhibition and program series scheduled for April 2020, we would be dealing with topics that would become imminently close and pressing as a result of the global Covid-19 epidemic caused by the coronavirus. ‘Slow-life’ has all of a sudden become an everyday reality, a forced way of life in the global world.
As we put it in the introduction to the exhibition, “The slow approach represents a need to rethink existing structures and reorganize established practices in the fields of society, economy and everyday life alike. Its essence can be best expressed by consciousness and a critical attitude, from ethical consumption and voluntary simplicity to the concept of a no-growth economy”.
The exhibition Slow Life. Radical Practices of the Everyday was conceived by the curatorial team of the Ludwig Museum Budapest. The current situation also had an impact on the preparation and realization of the exhibition, that it could initially only take place digitally in Budapest. Due to the changes of the program in Budapest the exhibition is at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz and will be shown in Budapest in July 2021. In a special way, aspects of sustainability, the distribution of resources and “slow life” also come together in this partnership between the two befriended Ludwig Museums.

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The exhibition Computable – Incomputable at ZDF Digital Art Hall showcases software-based digital artworks in a computer-generated environment. A digital copy of an atrium at ZKM | Karlsruhe is populated by multiple cellular automata, generated completely algorithmically. The exhibition support structure, just like the artworks it displays, reflects upon its apparatus and medium: the computer.
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The ZDF Digital Art Hall was founded this year as a reaction to the first lockdown period in Germany by ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen / Second German Television) a German public-service television broadcaster, and is being hosted on the website of ZDF.
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Computable – Incomputable, featuring born-digital artworks largely from the ZKM collection, offers insight into artistic and scientific responses to the questions, whether we can imagine the universe as a computer, a conglomerate of cellular automata, and whether this implies the computability of the human subject, besides shows how computers help visualize alternative worlds that can become new realities.

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<h3>The Opening Weekend via Livestream</h3>
Fri, 22.05.2020 – Sun, 24.05.2020
For a long time the reactions of Earth to our human actions remained unnoticed, but in recent times with the protest movement Fridays for Future climate crisis has moved into public consciousness. The thought exhibition »CRITICAL ZONES« invites us to deal with the CRITICAL situation of the Earth in various ways and to explore new modes of coexistence between all forms of life.
The exhibition »Critical Zones – Observatories for Earthly Politics« is about the critical situation of the Earth. Due to the Coronavirus it is also taking place at a critical time. A new Earth policy also requires a new exhibition policy: We are broadcasting!
On May 22, 2020, from 6 pm, the exhibition opened with a Streaming Festival lasting several days and spanning the weekend of May 22–24, 2020. The program consisted of streamed guided tours through the virtual spaces as well as through the real, but not publicly accessible exhibition, and included interviews and lectures.
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#MUSEUM FROM HOME

ONLINE CONTENT OF THE LUDWIG MUSEUM FOR THE DURATION OF THE QUARANTINE!
The current situation poses new challenges to all of us. Instead of the three-dimensional material world, the physical connection, we enter into a new type of distance-connection with each other, or with art. The Ludwig Museum is physically closed, but here we have gathered all the content in one place.

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Screenshot 2020-10-27 at 12.24.33

SLOW DOWN!

MICROSITE OF THE SLOW LIFE EXHIBITION
Slow Life. Everyday Practices Radically Reshaped is a group exhibition with an international scope, a commitment that reflects on today’s pressing global issues. The current logic of our world, the existing social &amp; economic system and the market-consumer culture have caused serious environmental problems.

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Screenshot 2020-10-27 at 12.25.54

VIRTUAL TOUR IN THE EXHIBITION: IMAGINARY CAMERAS BY TAMÁS WALICZKY

The Ludwig Museum continues its practice of presenting the Hungarian exhibition of the Venice Biennale to the public in Budapest. In 2019, Tamás Waliczky’s exhibition Imaginary Cameras was on display at the Hungarian Pavilion (curated by Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák).

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FREE OSTÁSTKA COLORING BOOK

A COOPEARTION BETWEEN ZSUZSI MEDVE AND LUDWIG MUSEUM 
As a cooperation between the museum and FREE OSTÁSTKA, the brand new downloadable coloring book was made by Zsuzsi Medve. It is an OSTÁSTKA version of nine well known artworks from our collection.

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Screenshot 2020-10-27 at 12.28.10

LISTEN, LOOK

ARTIST INTERVIEWS, VIDEO MESSAGES
How other artforms can connect to the museum in the online space? Musical, literary, performative reflections of well-known performers on the reality of the present and contemporary art through their own creative “glasses”. Live check-ins, &#8220;room concerts&#8221;, readings.

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Screenshot 2020-10-27 at 12.29.05

IMMERSE!

ARTIST PORTRAITS, COLLECTION SELECTIONS 
Get to know the classics of pop art, conceptual art, our new compositions. Our collection consists of nearly 800 works of art with works created from the 1960s to the present day.

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The Homage to the Moving Image World of the Bauhaus, which opened at the ZKM in February, was only accessible online due to the Lockdownsituation. At the beginning of July, the physical exhibition &#8220;bauhaus.film.expanded&#8221;, curated by Markus Heltschl, Thomas Tode and Peter Weibel, was reopened at the ZKM | Karlsruhe until 23.08.2020.
&#8220;bauhaus.film.digitally.expanded&#8221;, initiated and curated by Teresa Retzer, presents a large part of the exhibition films online and also expands them programmatically through expert talks, which will be transmitted via the ZKM livestream. The Bauhaus films and the recordings of the talks can be found below.
Many of these films were considered lost and have not yet been shown true to the original. Some of the works have been newly digitized and restored for the exhibition and can be seen for the first time in their original screening speed, colors, and sound.
<a href="https://zkm.de/en/event/2020/04/digital-opening-bauhausfilmdigitallyexpanded">Link to the digitized Bauhaus movies</a>

Rahmenprogramm: Symphonie Diagonale Revisited

Rahmenprogramm: Filmmusik, Stumm- und Tonfilme

Rahmenprogramm: Das Vorführen und das Erhalten historischer Bauhausfilme 

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<h3>A few years ago, the Estonian Ministry of Culture declared 2020 the year of digital culture. The recent worldwide pandemic and ensuing crisis accelerated the digitalization of the arts worldwide, with people confined to their homes turning to online content with museums, cinemas, theaters, concert halls closed.</h3>
Museums and galleries immediately began offering virtual tours. Here at Tallinn Art Hall, we offered a solution in the works already since fall 2019. We wanted to give our differently-abled visitors and those living in other parts of the world the opportunity to experience our art content from their homes. The new social distancing regulations catalyzed the development of the platform, spearheaded by former director Taaniel Raudsepp, in collaboration with designer and programmer Sven Erik Raju, director and cinematographer Elen Lotman, video operator Ivar Taim and video producer Madis Tüür. As the shooting of exhibitions happened during the pandemic, the filming crew had to work remotely through live streaming themselves to adhere to social distancing rules.
The goal was to create a very easy to use, intuitive, and manageable interface which viewers could use without going through a webinar on how to navigate it. The resulting interface responded to the necessities of showing art exhibitions when travel was not possible and to making exhibitions more accessible. As one of the oldest art institutions in Estonia, Tallinn Art Hall has been putting together international exhibitions since 1934, and the virtual exhibition platform will bring our programming even closer to the global audience. When conceptualizing the interface, it was essential to think about how it could give viewers the fine details of the artwork and the experience of the space they were in. How to give viewers the impression that they could almost touch the exhibits?
The solution was inspired by the cinematography of Jim Jarmusch&#8217;s films, where the director begins by showing an overall view with a slow-moving camera. By filming the exhibitions so that they would give the impression of an exceptional experience, and overlaying this with an interactive system that was easily accessible, the team created a prototype that had both a minimal amount of user interface and showed all the details of an exhibition. The navigation buttons are overlaid on top of the video, which allows the viewer to select the language (offering Russian, Estonian, English, and Estonian Sign Language) and move through the different sections of the exhibition. Since Tallinn Art Hall exhibitions are very different from out another, the resulting interface had to balance different layers: between the navigation, wider shots of the room, views of an artwork or a series in its entirety and closeup shots, showing the texture and material or giving the viewer the option to play embedded videos.
The interface experience resembles an actual visit to our exhibition space, and for this, the inspiration provided by films was vital. The best films enhance human perception, and the goal here was not to create another work of art but to create access to art, to make it accessible to everyone so that it would also be sharable, scalable and open to be repeated in any art institution in the world. For this, the cinematographer translated depth cues and her knowledge of human perception into camera movement. Creating a very smooth camera movement, the team did not want to add anything herself, but to make the exhibition as accessible as possible. The result was a series of high-resolution video walkthroughs, shot from fixed positions, creating spaces as by moving a camera similar to a film or a video game.
Transcending space and advancing the possibility of allowing people to be in spaces they cannot travel to, our virtual exhibitions platform is a project that continues to be open for further development and collaboration. Our ultimate goal is to publish the cinematography guide and code with free access, which could be used by any cultural institutions worldwide who may be interested.

Crisis Special

Introduction

Sans objet. 9 abstract works made for the web browser

Slow Life. Radical Practices of the Everyday

Computable – Incomputable: ZDF vs. ZKM

ZKM | Karlsruhe Critical Zones Streaming festival

LUDWIG MUSEUM BUDAPEST #MUSEUMFROMHOME

ZKM | Karlsruhe bauhaus. film. digitally. expanded

Tallinn Art Hall Virtual Exhibition Platform