Exhibitions are not representations of the world, but foundations for developing new scenarios and model potential worlds. As such, exhibitions do not simply depict matters of concern, but operate as nonrepresentational technologies: performative constellations of actors, spaces, and materials that reverberate across aesthetic, political, and infrastructural registers. Digital technologies that skew the linearity of time make this even more pronounced, as exhibitions multiply across platforms, interfaces, and protocols, expanding the reach of their assemblies and the notion of their materiality.
Bruno Latour conceived the exhibition space as a new kind of political assembly, in which both matters of concern and the modes of their representation are brought into play simultaneously. As such, exhibitions become spaces where objects provoke thought, dispute, alignment, and dissonance; where viewers become participants navigating the complex “publics” around controversial or important matters. The curatorial act then turns into a democratic gesture—not representing consensus but exposing the multiplicity of associations and concerns.
Whether an exhibition is situated inside a brick-and-mortar museum, manifests as an assembly of works of art on the streets, or is built up from digital artworks on an online platform, it is defined more by the relations it enables than the walls and frames it is surrounded by. An exhibition, then, always functions as a “thing.” Latour mobilized this in “Making Things Public” (2005), referencing the Old Norse and Germanic word “thing” (ting, þing), which originally meant not just an object, but a gathering or assembly, such as a parliament or council.1
Cities, too, can be understood as simultaneously both networks and “things.” Exhibitions are embedded within them and shaped by them in turn. The two are inseparably entangled, but this entanglement involves a strategic reduction of materiality, as the staging of exhibitions often mimics the production of matters of fact in scientific display—sanitizing complexity and foregrounding visibility. Through this technology of selective vision, exhibitions inscribe themselves not only in urban fabric but also in epistemic and political infrastructures. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, for example, did not merely showcase objects, but rendered the world legible to imperial scrutiny, reinforcing hierarchies of knowledge and power.
The relations between exhibitions to the cities that host them varies greatly, and this relation has evolved significantly over the last two centuries. At the dawn of modern exhibition-making practices, the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was located in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, had a significant impact on the cityscape. It also led to the development of permanent exhibition venues, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, that still define the cultural scene of the city. Recurring exhibitions have also transformed their cities, like Documenta did Kassel. The first Documenta in 1955 was part of efforts to revitalize the city that was heavily bombed during World War II. It marked a cultural reawakening and was part of broader urban regeneration. Later on, works like Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (1982) permanently altered Kassel's urban landscape by planting thousands of trees paired with basalt stones, creating a living artwork that continues to shape the city.
However, the impact of an exhibition on a city can barely be measured in the amount of building material used to make it. This is especially the case if exhibitions are digital. Computer-generated networked spaces often host exhibitions, or even entire urban structures, shifting not only the locus of display but also the logic of spatial organization. Their infrastructural impact on real-world cities is less immediate and more prefigurative, redrawing social, cultural, and perceptual geographies rather than streets and skylines. Yet this prefiguration is far from immaterial: the digital restructures urban life through protocols, data flows, and platform governance, embedding algorithmic logics into the fabric of everyday experience.
Not an exhibition per se, Cao Fei’s RMB City (2007–11), for example, is an ambitious virtual metropolis created within the online world of Second Life that stands as a speculative portrayal of the way information technology encroaches on urban life. A decade before Fei’s vision, the tenth edition of Documenta (1997) featured artworks that were specifically developed for the internet and housed in a location where the real and the virtual could be mixed. Part of this was Hybrid WorkSpace, a temporary media lab that was active throughout the course of the exhibition.2 It possibly marked the beginning of the interdependence of physical and digital exhibition spaces, and started to dismantle the static opposition of the analogue meatspace and the virtual cyberspace in the context of art events.3 Such acts of spatial expansion multiply the invested labor of the participants, among other social and political questions that were systematically discussed in the lab. But challenging fixed notions of where and when an exhibition takes place questions the temporality and locality of curatorial practice and destabilizes institutional norms, amplifying, in this case, Documenta’s critical role as both a cultural and political event.
Documenta 10 intended to connect physical and digital venues, providing visitors with a sense of immediacy, much before it became the style of too late capitalism.4 For such exhibitions, a spatial structure, one that is different from our immediate physical reality, is a prerequisite. The structure they happen to inhabit is the internet; a network that, despite its elusive nature, functions as a “thing” in all senses of the word.
The Internet as a Thing: An Armada of Nihilism
Graham Harman indicates that Heidegger acknowledges a narrow selection of objects as things, while technical objects, among others, remain outside of the remit: “All technical objects are reduced to an armada of nihilism; a horrific parade of non-things, all of them on exactly the same footing as the others.”5 Harman argues that this is a mistake, positing indirectly that technical objects, like the internet, are actual things. As soon as Web 2.0, and thus user co-production, became possible, the internet’s role from being a tool of accessing information evolved into a multiplicity of assemblies. Thus, it inevitably transformed into something inherently political. Alongside being an interconnected space of utopian and dystopian imaginaries, the internet is a platform for political expression, and many other things. According to Tiziana Terranova:
If the Internet appears to us as such a key global communication technology, it is not because of overwhelming numbers or mass appeal… It is rather because … it has been conceived and evolved as a network of networks, or an internetwork, a topological formation that presents some challenging insights into the dynamics underlying the formation of a global network culture.6
Even if Terranova was describing the “Internet” twenty years ago, the structure of Web 2.0 still largely rules the network, while Web3, the decentralized, non-semantic web, is still only on the horizon. The internet is also a documentation technology with normative force. It records, indexes, and operationalizes interactions at scale, shaping both what is visible and what remains obscured. Through its algorithmic infrastructures, it makes decisions about relevance, legitimacy, and inclusion, silently enforcing protocols of participation. This renders the internet not merely a neutral platform but a pervasive and largely invisible actor in contemporary life. Its infrastructural ubiquity intensifies the invisibility of its agency, embedding itself within our habits, choices, and cultural institutions—including exhibitions—without ever needing to declare its presence.
As Terranova pointed out, the internet of today resembles a city structure: both are highly entropic systems determined by the grid of their neighborhoods, streets, and protocols. Both are decentralized yet hierarchical, and both suppress, control, and contain space under the homogeneity of a grid: a structure of utopia and dystopia at the same time. Both hold up platforms and enable assemblies. Both are things.
Another Network: Ideas and Materials on the Same Level
The curatorial concept of “Making Things Public,” like many other Latourian ideas, is rooted in actor-network theory (ANT), elaborated by Latour and his colleagues at Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at Mines Paris already in the early 1980s.7 Actors, actants, and their relations determine this influential onto-epistemology, which formally resembles a decentralized internet to-come. ANT relates to exhibition practices in encouraging the analysis of how space reflect and reinforce power relations. In other words, exhibitions are perfect playgrounds for ANT experiments. In such a setting, by examining the network of actors and their interactions, we can understand how certain actors have more agency and influence than others in shaping space and its uses.
ANT is foundational to Bruno Latour’s curatorial trajectory. It not only shaped his curatorial projects, but his early work in the sociology of science and provided the conceptual groundwork for many of his later projects across other disciplines. “Making Things Public” was the second exhibition he conceived and realized with Peter Weibel at ZKM in Karlsruhe. It engaged with representation in the political sense of the word. The first attempt to unfold the notion of representation (its other meaning, to be precise) was set up three years prior, under the title “Iconoclash.” As its curators emphasized, the exhibition was not iconoclastic, but rather an assembly of scientific exhibits, documents, and artworks about iconoclasms. It was a thought experiment that had assumed the form of an exhibition, a so-called Gedankenausstellung.8 As such, it called its visitors into action to perform the “parliament of things”: a metaphorical model for a non-modern democracy, one that refuses the Enlightenment-era divide between facts and values, science and politics, nature and society.9 “Making Things Public” was structured around controversies and modes of assembly—mimicking the forums, courts, markets, parliaments, and laboratories where disputes over facts and values unfold in public life.
ANT also had a wider impact on curatorial practice, beyond Latour’s own exhibitions. Beatrice von Bismarck conceptualizes the exhibition as a collective constellation of diverse actors and actants. This approach underpins not only curatorial practice, but also the broader theoretical contributions to the discourse on curating.10 Exhibitions can thus be defined as “spatiotemporal social fabrics” that make visible and intelligible the negotiation of values and stakes within the artistic field.11 For von Bismarck, curating involves a constellation of objects, actors, and variously defined spaces—whether aesthetic, social, discursive, or functional.12
A crucial implication of this framework is its flat ontological structure, in which all participants—human and nonhuman, including the curator—are treated as equal entities within the network. Consequently, the curator is not positioned above or outside the system, but is instead one actor among many. Within this model, the curator's role is not to impose a singular interpretation but to remain implicit, allowing the relational dynamics among the exhibition's elements to emerge organically.13
Where the Two Networks Clash
Nearly two decades after its original presentation, ZKM undertook a practice-based research project, Beyond Matter, to reimagine “Iconoclash” as a digital exhibition to explore how spatial, curatorial, and conceptual qualities could be translated into the online realm.14
Rather than presenting a flattened archive, the digital version maintained the show’s rhizomatic structure: a nonhierarchical, networked space responsive to visitor interaction. The scenography—originally a spatial articulation of curatorial intent—was reinterpreted through real-time spatial reconfigurations and dynamic soundscapes, underscoring the exhibition as a performative, individualized experience.
Digital exhibitions, far from immaterial, rely on complex infrastructures and serve as platforms for relational, data-driven encounters. Composed of interactive constellations, they preserve and extend curatorial meaning while reshaping how works of art are accessed and experienced. The online model becomes a platform of interactions between a single user and the nonhuman actors of the exhibition constellation: the artworks, the algorithm steering them, and the sounds they generate. Ultimately, “Iconoclash” in its digital form exemplifies how exhibitions become “things” in Latour’s sense: relational assemblies that generate new publics—both conceptual and infrastructural. The digital exhibition of “Iconoclash” becomes a manifestation of actor-network theory even more visibly than a physical exhibition with static objects. The algorithm at play points to the malleability of space that is defined by relations more than the actual location of the physical objects in it. The digital exhibition also becomes a platform and thus an assembly beyond the physical and palpable space of a museum, situated in a city. However, its existence does have a material prerequisite.
What Matter in an (Art) Object
To return to Harman’s critique of Heidegger’s approach to things:
There is no philosophical difference for Heidegger between submarines, the Internet, a nuclear plant, cigarette lighters, Segway scooters and concentration camps. There is no need for Heidegger to study in detail the specific features of a mass transit vehicle, since the result would be the same for this object as for any other: All technology reduces objects to mere represented objects of availability, to stockpiles of present-at-hand material, to a planetary “en-framing” (Ge-stell) promoted by Americans and Soviets alike.15
Harman’s proposition here is to understand technological objects differently, not as a “sheer compound or aggregate” but as a legitimate part of the family of objects. Being objects, they are material; thus, in one way or another, they have weight. In the 1985 exhibition “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Pompidou, its curator Jean-François Lyotard emphasized the new materiality of information technology as generating a new metaphysics, a new fundamental characteristic of reality deriving from the “immaterial material”: “A metaphysics in which, precisely, man is not a subject facing the world of objects, but only … a sort of synapse.”16
“Les Immatériaux” was a pioneering exhibition that interrogated the impact of emerging technologies and new materials on art, language, and perception.17 Conceived as a “manifestation” rather than a traditional exhibition, it unfolded across a labyrinthine scenography structured around five etymologically linked concepts—medium (matériau), code (matrice), hardware (matériel), referent (matière), and origin (maternité)—each corresponding to components of a communication system. Drawing on Lyotard’s critique of meta-narratives and the postmodern condition, the exhibition highlighted the shifting boundaries between body and code, presence and representation, or origin and simulation. It did not present a unified thesis but rather sensitized visitors to the disorienting effects of technological transformation, offering an immersive, multi-sensory experience that blurred disciplinary boundaries and anticipated the deeply networked and mediated condition of the digital age.
Since Lucy R. Lippard’s influential Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1997), the concept of dematerialization has been closely linked to conceptual art, which emerged alongside the introduction of computers into the visual arts. In the decades that followed, artists increasingly used computers not only to calculate and generate images, but also to construct virtual spaces and ultimately augment reality and build new worlds. Information technologies have reshaped how we represent and understand the human body, subtly in the 1980s and now more overtly and pervasively.
Much like today’s digital production, conceptual art was once viewed as immaterial. Yet today, we can witness a reversal: the dematerialized art object is undergoing a process of re-materialization. This shift is driven by the material demands of planetary-scale computational infrastructure and supported by recent philosophical paradigms, such as new materialism, which emphasizes the tangible nature of computer-generated digital objects.18 The weight of digital objects may not be as immediately apparent as that of, say, a painting. The oil, canvas, and frame used to create a painting remain materially constant until they deteriorate, as does the quantity of resources required for their production. Digital objects, by contrast, generate ongoing emissions simply to be maintained. Rather than being weightless, they grow heavier with each passing day.
As Lyotard suggested in the conceptual matrix of “Les Immatériaux,” any reality can be taken as a message, and in the case of digital works, the medium, code, hardware, referent, and origin are all inseparably intertwined.19 Digital exhibitions, then, are not dematerialized escapes from material constraint, but assemblages of encoded signals, infrastructural dependencies, and continuous labor of programming, hosting, and interpretation—each component contributing their own conceptual and physical gravity.
Exhibitions Multiply Networks
In tracing the shifting ontologies of exhibition spaces—from monumental world expos to networked, digital platforms—curatorial practices respond to, reflect, and shape broader societal and technological structures. Whether physically embedded in a city or situated online, exhibitions operate as “things” in the Latourian sense: assemblies where multiple actors—human, technological, conceptual—interact in complex constellations.
Actor-network theory offers a framework for understanding exhibitions not as isolated displays but as dense relational fabrics. This perspective dissolves the boundary between material and immaterial, treating digital infrastructure, curatorial concepts, and audience agency as equally weighted elements of the exhibition ecology. Digital exhibitions, in this sense, are not disembodied but grounded in material processes, environmental demands, and socio-political stakes.
“Weight” thus becomes a unifying condition: not only for the infrastructural mass behind seemingly ephemeral digital works, but also for the conceptual density and public responsibilities borne by curatorial practice. Exhibitions today function as reflexive assemblies, where the city, the network, and the works converge—not as static representations, but as dynamic negotiations of value, access, and meaning. Curating, in this light, becomes an act of composing relations, assembling human and more-than-human actors into temporary publics that reflect the entangled realities of our digital-urban condition.
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel eds., Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 22. The following footnote was added to the above quote: “See the Oxford Dictionary: “ORIGIN: Old English, of Germanic origin: related to German Ding. Early senses included ‘meeting’ and ‘matter’, ‘concern’ as well as ‘inanimate objects’.” Martin Heidegger, What is a thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., Vera Deutsch, Regnery, Chicago, 1968.”
“Fifteen groups consisting of artists, activists, critics and their guests presented their work, produced new concepts and started campaigns that developed and continued long after the gathering.” – This quote is taken from the archived website of Hybrid WorkSspace: ➝, accessed Last download June 18, 2.06.2025.
The etymology of both terms takes us back to the 1980s and ’90s. The terms cyberspace and meatspace emerged in contrast to each other, reflecting evolving understandings of physical and digital realities. The former was coined by William Gibson and published in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” referring to the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks, while the latter emerged around a decade later in hacker culture and cyberpunk discourse.
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London: Verso. 2023).
Graham Harman, “Heidegger on Objects and Things” in ed. Latour and Weibel Making Things Public, 271.
Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 41.
The best known summary of ANT by Latour can be found in: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An introduction to actor-network theory (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Coined by Weibel and Latour, the term Gedankenausstellung means a line of thought that proposes hypothetical “what if” scenarios, like the thought experiments of Galileo Galilei and Albert Einstein. Rather than mere visualizations of ideas, Gedankenausstellungen are parkours that involve visitors in an exploratory and participatory exhibition space. A Gedankenausstellung comes into being when science escapes its empirical boundaries and unfolds in the realm of ideas, and when art evades its functional and purpose-oriented roots in techné and allows itself to become scientific.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
See Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022). This book is the most recent publication that elaborates on the concept of constellation and that refers to ANT as a basis to define the nonhierarchical, constantly evolving relation between actors and actants. Various other texts preceding The Curatorial Condition engage with curatorial constellations with a reference to ANT.
Beatrice von Bismarck, “The Exhibition as Collective” in ed. Beatrice von Bismarck et al., Cultures of the Curatorial (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 291.
Beatrice von Bismarck, In the Space of the Curatorial (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 43.
Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 452. Kindle edition.
The exhibition model is available online: ➝.
Harman, “Heidegger on Objects and Things,” 270.
Jean-François Lyotard, “After Six Months of Work …,” 1984 in 30 Years After Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory, ed. Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann (Lüneburg, Germany: Meson Press, 2015), 36.
A digital model of the exhibition “Les Immatériaux”— similar to that of “Iconoclash”—was created under the title “Les Immatériaux: A Virtual Exhibition” as part of the same practice-based research project, Beyond Matter, in collaboration between the ZKM and the Centre Pompidou. Both were featured as part of the ZKM exhibition “Matter. Non-Matter. Anti-Matter” (2022–23), which explored the role of digitality and computer-generated environments in reshaping our material understanding of art production and its presentation.
See Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2005); Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Jean-François Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux: Une exposition expérimentale,” in Les Immatériaux (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985). Exhibition Catalog.
