Bside

bside is a virtual platform developed as a final project in the MA programme in Policy and Theory of the Arts at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. It is presented through an app in the permanent exhibition of Israeli art at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The platform is curatorial and built on augmented reality, and it sets out to examine what room for action museum visitors actually have, by looking at the power held in the phone in their hand.

Photographing on a phone has long since become a practice inseparable from the experience of visiting a museum, with the phone camera serving as a kind of third eye: a doorway into a virtual space that holds a reduced, processed version of the museum and the works shown in it.

bside sets out to enter that virtual space and use it critically, as a way of examining how the digital object produces a new relation to physical and human space.

Using bside depends on visitors taking an active part, since it asks them to look at the exhibition both through the devices in their hands and without them. Adding and removing the virtual layer is what makes the looking multi-layered.

The visitors' bodies become part of the exhibition too, as it is their movement that activates the body of works living in the virtual layer.