Exhibition Research Lab: Ofri Cnaani, The Contactless Condition
by Annet Dekker
Abstract
Artist and researcher Ofri Cnaani, along with curator Or Tshuva, discusses her exhibition The Contactless Condition (presented at Exhibition Research Lab in Liverpool in 2024) with Annet Dekker (curator/researcher), exploring themes of distance, technology, and control. Cnaani sees ‘contactless’ not just as technology, but as a social and political condition that shifts embodied knowledge. Together they explore how contactless technology, rooted in colonialism, shapes institutional access and movement within museums, controlling freedom and enforcing selective accessibility. Along the way they touch upon notions of performative logics, the relevance of moving between nanoscale to interplanetary levels, the role of the storyteller, and the concept of digital afterness.
Keywords
digital art, decolonialism, documentation, storytelling, performance
Ofri Cnaani’s work is a bridge between the physical and digital worlds, an exploration of how technology, history, and bodies intersect in an ever-shifting landscape. As an artist, educator, and researcher, Cnaani’s creative journey has always been driven by a fascination with the invisible threads that connect data, colonial histories, and our physical experiences in a networked age. Her latest exhibition, The Contactless Condition, takes us through a series of projects that delve into these complex relationships, inviting us to rethink the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the past and the future.
At the heart of the exhibition is Leaking Lands, a monumental three-channel video installation coming out of Cnaani’s PhD work at Goldsmiths, University of London. The piece recounts a tragedy: the 2018 fire that ravaged Brazil’s National Museum, obliterating centuries of irreplaceable history. Almost nothing remains of the museum’s collection – only few digital fragments survive: a photo collection created by WikiCommons users, and a Google virtual tour that offers a fragmented glimpse of the building. These remnants become the foundation for a ‘digital séance’, a performance where Cnaani brings the museum back to life through the lens of socio-technical and political struggles. In this space, the past and future collide, and viewers are left to ponder what it means to ‘visit’ something that no longer physically exists.
In Ground Control: When The Horizon Becomes A Frontier, she collaborates with astronaut Eytan Stibbe to take visitors on a very different kind of journey – one that ventures beyond Earth’s boundaries, into the vast expanse of space. This video, made during Stibbe’s time at the International Space Station, explores the politics of this ‘new frontier’ – the rapidly privatising, tech-driven realm of outer space. What was once an unreachable horizon is quickly becoming a playground for billionaires and powerful corporations. Through Stibbe’s eyes, we are invited to reflect on how space itself is being reshaped, not by exploration but by economic and political forces. The video takes us to a place where human ambition meets technological advancement, but also where the frontier is no longer about discovery – it is more about ownership and control.
Alongside these two ambitious video works, the exhibition includes photographic and sound installations that further expand on the themes of human-machine-space relations. Each piece invites us to question our access to power, to knowledge, and to the spaces we inhabit – whether digital or physical. Together, they offer a rich tapestry of inquiry, urging us to think critically about the world we live in, the technologies we embrace, and the histories that shape our understanding of both.
In The Contactless Condition, Cnaani does not just present her work; she invites us to become part of the story. Each project is a call to reflect, to engage, and to imagine new possibilities for how we understand our world in an age defined by constant digital transformation. It is a journey that asks us to look closer, listen carefully, and never stop questioning.
Fig. 1: The Contactless Condition, Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool. Photo: Benjamin Nuttall.
Annet Dekker: The Contactless Condition shows four of your recent art installations. The accompanying leaflet mentions how contactless refers back to the pandemic a few years ago, where contact was to be avoided and a meter or two (depending on the country or culture you lived in) distancing between people was advised to avoid spreading infections. It continues with how you perceive it not merely a technical solution – which I assumed refers to wireless devices, and how all kinds of meetings are taking place online in the absence of the possibility to enter into physical buildings to meet people – but ‘as an emerging living condition’. Could you expand on the choice of the title? How does it relate to the art installations as a whole, and how do you view this ‘emerging living condition’ a few years later?
Ofri Cnaani: Contactless technology, despite its appearance as a modern convenience, is not a new invention. Based on near-field communication (NFC), it has long been a technique for managing touch, class, and social order within institutions such as museums. I began exploring the notion of ‘contactless’ before the COVID-19 pandemic, when I moved to the UK and first encountered the term in everyday interactions. One moment that stood out was working with my Goldsmiths students at the Tate, where I observed the transformation of donation boxes into sleek, contactless payment terminals. These black metal objects, positioned in the middle of the space, resembled minimal sculptures – yet, beyond their aesthetic appeal, they signified a shift in the museum’s governance.
As I delved deeper, I began to approach ‘contactless’ not merely as a technological solution but indeed as an emerging living condition. It is not only an adjective that describes burgeoning technologies but also a noun – an evolving techno-financial assemblage reshaping embodied knowledge. Working with Sarah Vowden, who researches contactless payment systems, we began exploring its implications through workshops. Then, the pandemic arrived, rapidly accelerating the normalisation of contactless interactions and requiring us to expand our theoretical and practical inquiry.
In the museum, the contactless space is never a vacuum. Instead, it is a hyper-active site of governmentality without spectacle – biopolitics without a body. Through micro-spatial interventions, access is controlled, data is extracted, and movement is regulated. The presumption that mobility equates to power, that the body is a potential site of danger, and that purity is an elite condition is encoded within these gaps – what might appear as empty spaces. Within museums, contactless technology operates as part of the institution’s meaning-making machinery. The museum, threatened by the possibility of governing the living, employs contactless solutions as a ‘softer’ mode of non-touch – yet these systems remain embedded within the matrix of coloniality. Contactless spatiality is not neutral; it continues to function as a tool for managing freedom of movement, sustaining xenophobic policies, and enforcing selective accessibility.
Think of the many devices dedicated to making this space work, from wall texts to floor markings, visual signs and symbols, human guards, and technological apparatuses like security cameras and smart sensors. Or, instead, imagine the portion of the institutional budget dedicated to maintaining the legacy of such secured spaces. Touch was a significant feature of visiting museums in the past. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, visitors to the Ashmolean in Oxford or London’s British Museum were allowed to handle, rub, shake, and even taste the objects on display. Restrictions on how objects could be handled and by whom emerged over time and by the mid-nineteenth century only curators and conservators were able to enjoy physical interaction with the objects in the museum.[1] The demise of touch has been linked by some with modernity and its turn to observation, objectivity, the visual display of capitalism, and the equation of touch with ‘primitive cultures’.[2] Some argue that it is the move of museums from being restricted and elite to public and open that precipitates the prohibition of touch and brings about the reign of the visual spectacle of the museum. Touch was removed via people learning how to be ‘a museum visitor’ through taking up various prestigious bodily techniques that displayed ‘the requisite degree of cultural competence […] to stand at the correct distance from an art work, walking at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow, and knowing what to “feel”’.[3] Changes in the social class of museum visitors have also been linked to the demise of touch:
The upper classes always had license to touch and their touch was deemed rational and non-damaging. On the few occasions when the lower classes could touch museum collections it was considered unruly and dirty. [4]
In this sense, contactless is not simply a convenience – it is an apparatus that administers access. It shapes how bodies navigate institutional spaces, reinforcing systems of control even as it claims to offer ease and efficiency. Contactless always retains a critical distance from the body and a careful calculation of the threshold of touch. I approach contactless as a political condition that is rooted in colonialism and continues to adapt its properties in alignment with the current techno-political environment. Understanding the Contactless Condition requires engaging with such broader implications: as a site of knowledge production, a mechanism of exclusion, and a mode of governance that remains, paradoxically, both invisible and omnipresent. In the exhibition, this concept became a framework for organising diverse projects that engage with the politics of distance – ranging from the nanoscale to the interplanetary – within emerging technological conditions. While the works were conceived in entirely different contexts, they are brought into dialogue through this lens, hopefully allowing for meaningful interactions.
Or Tshuva: I believe what Ofri is trying to emphasise is the ways in which her works address notions of contactlessness stretching far beyond the immediate implications of the pandemic and its restrictions of physical contact. In a way, I wonder if because she was already preoccupied with these questions regardless, the pandemic was somewhat of a ‘deal-sealer’ for the works exhibited in the show – allowing time and confinement for their completion on the one hand, but also serving as a ‘threat multiplier’ pushing so many underlying socio-economic, environmental, and biopolitical issues to their capacity limit, serving as an epistemological catalyst for these various notions of ‘contactlessness’.
Personally, from the relatively short 4-5 years distance of time, and although seemingly put behind, I am still very interested in the long-term implications of the pandemic, although as a topic it might feel exhausted or overstudied. In this context, I think it is interesting to consider it not just as a standalone event but as part of an ongoing process of cascading and overlapping crises, with ongoing implications that have been informing such emerging living conditions.
Dekker: Being somewhat new to Liverpool, I remember walking down the streets following my navigation app, and getting confused how to follow the pointer. When I found the building and the entrance I was already feeling in a state of navigational loss – my (no) sense of direction surely did not help. Walking into the exhibition felt like a victory; I made it, and just an hour before the closing. The notions of navigation and time proved important, which I saw recurring in the layout of the exhibition as well as in the artworks themselves.
Cnaani: It is interesting that you mention navigation. When I worked on the digital residues of Museo Nacional, I often thought about navigation in relation to the audience. The 2018 fire that devastated Brazil’s National Museum left almost no digital traces. Among the surviving digital remnants are a collection of user-contributed images on WikiCommons and a Google virtual tour, raising concerns about corporate control over cultural heritage access. At the time of the fire, the museum itself had no institutional digital archive – what remained online had been assembled by third parties. I write more about this in one of my published articles.[5] For now, what it shows is how the withdrawal of the object opens up the possibility for audiences to disavow known methods of generating institutional knowledge, calling for a rethinking of what methods can fit the post-museum state. When all that remains are fragments of digital images, matter in different forms, a bit of metadata, and social and affective residues, how can we ‘audience’ this new condition?
Fig. 2: Leaking Lands, three screen video installation. Photo: Ofri Cnaani.
For several months I explored the virtual space that remained after the museum’s destruction, working with different groups and engaging with varied performative logics. Through this process, I suggested that the multiple interruptions enacted by the fire represent different understandings of what it means to be an audience. With no object and no subject in the conventional museum sense, and no longer a space of mediation – a key term in museum education practice – I envisioned a mutual navigation of the residual space.
Then I developed a more theoretical framework that suggests that moving from mediation to navigation means replacing the mediation of objects from an institutional collection to the institution’s public with the practice of ‘navigation without an object’. This is a transductive method of learning that embraces the uncertainty of the residual space as a shared mode of existence. I was interested in the disorienting experiences of competing realities – the tension between physical spaces and those committed to memory – and the possibility of turning this hybridity of locations and multiplicity of mental, social, and political images into an actionable space.
Dekker: Could you explain what this method of performative logic means, or what it allows you to do?
Cnaani: For instance, for one particular encounter, I would ask participants to draw a map of a route they knew by heart: a childhood walk, a daily commute, or another well-known path. They were encouraged to attune themselves to sensual memory – annotating the path through their embodied experience of light and wind, landscape, changing sounds and temperatures, and affective terrain. These maps were then used as navigation models to guide a partner through the virtual museum space. Each pair negotiated, interpreted, and found relationships by transposing spatial and orientation guidelines from another place and time. One participant held the path while the other controlled the cursor, attempting to echo the first’s described movements in the virtual space. Their navigation unfolded as a rhythm between personal, social, and technological times. Meaning emerged incrementally, as every movement became a negotiation of the relationship between memory, embodied knowledge, and a technological time that often freezes.
Fig. 3: Leaking Lands, three screen video installation (detail Google Arts & Culture). Photo: Benjamin Nuttall.
Important to mention – particularly in relation to navigation – is that the tool we used was Zoom (and yes, it was during COVID-19) and the space we moved through was a Google product. The virtual museum itself was originally founded through a colonial impulse to collect and amass objects, inextricably linked to the colonial violence enacted on other bodies, spaces, and societies. The two partners operated within corporate time, institutional time – the time of extraction, collection, and indexing. The practice of superimposing and reenacting one kind of psychogeographical knowledge onto another locale often produced meaningful juxtapositions, yet the peer navigation method was frequently disrupted. Users found themselves unable to turn toward an object, go back, or zoom in without being thrown out of a scene.
In digital navigation, the strong sensation of a familiar journey imprinted in the body was constantly refused by the technology, producing a frustrating and utterly disorienting experience of space. Tools once used to know space – embodied, intuitive – became useless. More often than not, we were zoomed out, returned to the room’s starting point, or led to dead ends where the physical space continued but the digital space did not. And of course, there was no real way to leave the institution – if a user wanted to step outside and into the city, they needed a different URL.
Dekker: To return to the current exhibition, another type of navigation happens in your installation Ground Control: When the Horizon Becomes a Frontier (2023), where the work literally moves through space and visitors can follow your communication with Eytan Stibbe. Stibbe was the first commercial astronaut aboard the International Space Station circling around earth. While he was doing some experiments related to health, agriculture, optics, and energy, you sent him three short sentences each morning from your home computer, to which he responded with a photo from space. These almost insignificant gestures signal much larger themes, such as the commercialisation of the new frontier and the (potential) resulting claims of ownership and privatisation, as well as space pollution. While these play a role in the narrative, you also bring them back on a personal scale.
Figs 4, 5: Stills from Ground Control, single screen video installation. Photos: Ofri Cnaani.
Cnaani: Yes, it connects to the method I just mentioned. I think that was a pretty powerful experience of disorientation, crafted by the need to move between incommensurable elements. It sheds light on how we compose and inhabit spaces – the qualities, rhythms, relations, and movements that exemplify how forces take form as worlds. Moreover, navigation was important when considering the post-museum state and the audience: What happens to the audience after the museum? Now that it is no longer the audience of a collection, can the audience recollect itself elsewhere? The withdrawal of the object opens up the possibility for audiences to disavow known methods of generating institutional knowledge and to rethink what methods fit the active network of residues. The multiple interruptions enacted by the event of the error activate the potentials of afterness, reordering knowledge and reconfiguring the audience’s role.
I proposed a shift from mediation – a key term in museum education practice – to mutual navigation of the residual space. This transition involves replacing the mediation of objects from an institutional collection to the institution’s public with a practice of navigation without an object – a transductive methodology of learning that embraces the uncertainty of the residual space as a shared mode of existence. This is not to suggest that mediation at large is obsolete, but rather to argue that it becomes defunct in the residual space. Hence, I use the term ‘transductive navigation’ to describe a future-oriented method that seeks to free the political imagination while situating local forms of knowledge. The travel between various physical and digital terrains responds to the infrastructural conditions of the state of afterness. Through this speculative methodology of audiencing, we access afterness not only as a space of unlearning but also as a site for relearning.
Dekker: To briefly stick with the notion of navigation, one thing that I think is interesting in Ground Control is how you are trying to create and navigate a virtual landscape comprised of the photos, while taking on the narrative of a tour guide. One of the things that stuck with me was how you mention that we all have a ‘Geoffness’ when it comes to the planet. Bringing in the travel guide writer Geoff Crowter who has become known for writing the Lonely Planet travel guides; luring the ‘hippy crowd’ backpackers into taking the off-beaten paths, even though by the time you visit the places, these would usually be overtaken by commercialism and many other travelers. While you emphasise the entanglement between commercialisation, curiosity, and imagination depicted via mathematical protocols and fictioning, where does this leave the role of the storyteller in these power dimensions?
Fig. 6: Ground Control, single screen video installation (still). Photo: Benjamin Nuttall.
Cnaani: Hahaha, such a great question! Especially your focus on the ‘Geofness’ – a detail I’m sure many people would have missed. Even though the part you mentioned ended up as ‘Day 4’ in the final edit, I wrote it months earlier as ‘Chapter 0’ – a kind of preface, or a ‘promo’ for the project. Before watching Stibbe launch, my main question was: How do you visit a place you will never see? What kind of guide should you buy? I thought of everything from classic travel guidebooks to digital platforms like TripAdvisor and asked: What review should you read to ‘know better’? To ‘go better’? How do you look at Earth from space without ever leaving Earth? My plan was to create a guided tour to a place (almost) no one can see. At first, I wrote: ‘What Lonely Planet should you read when travelling to space?’ I enjoyed the irony, but then I started reading more about Geoff Crowther and the way he ‘makes or breaks’ worlds with words. I went down the rabbit hole: moving between Stewart Brand, Buckminster Fuller, LSD, ‘official’ narratives, and popular alternatives to tools and knowledge – in other words, all sorts of trips to all sorts of worlds. However, none of it made it to the final cut. During the research I kept thinking – can anyone truly say they understand the universe better than a Rumi poet or a Hawaiian Aliʻi do? So instead I chose to focus on minor and poetic gestures and not ambitious research experiments.
However, the figure of the storyteller lives on by my choice to weave together fact and fiction, the personal and the scientific. In the end, I was interested in developing a conceptual navigation methodology rather than directly engaging with space. A travelogue format allowed me to move back and forth through the history and theory of space colonisation – from O’Neill to Bezos, from Apollo 17 to Trump, while inserting a few reminders that in non-Western cultures the ancients did not ‘reach’ or ‘occupy’ space but rather travelled to the stars and came back. Here I was thinking of Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada’s fabulous text ‘We Live in the Future. Come Join Us’ (Kamaoli Kuwada 2015). During the process, I chose an ambivalent position. I am complicit in the very structures I was critiquing by taking on such a project, but also limiting my access by insisting on being bound to my ‘homeworld’, to use Ursula K. Le Guin’s term (Le Guin 1980). In the final edit, I tried to acknowledge that everything I know about the ‘Big world’ and its current politics must pass through the power structures of my small world. My feet never left the ground. My hands never left my desk.
Dekker: You mentioned briefly how many of your projects engage with the politics of distance, from the nanoscale to the interplanetary. This is indeed obvious in the installation Ground Control: When the Horizon Becomes a Frontier, which we just talked about, but also in your other work Leaking Lands (2022), which moves between different scales and ways of storytelling: from the intimate and personal stories of the various workers in the museum, to the indexing system and industry standards that are used in the museum, and the forms of governing they imply. Also, in the third screen it shows the collaboration with the artist Luciana Achugar whose ‘pleasure practice’ emphasises a healing process that decolonises the body – seen as a repository of transgenerational trauma – by focusing on pleasure. Similar to the other installation, you mix different registers in an attempt to open up additional ways of doing and thinking. At the same time, across from the three large screens hangs a series of six small screens showing Testimonies of Things (2022). Here the politics of distance is storied from the perspective of the things: those of a meteorite, water, ashes, skins (tattoos), jpeg, and cursor. I thought the space between these two installations was also interesting and made me wonder what happens in between the nanoscale and the interplanetary – what is the politics of the ‘middle space’?
Figs 7, 8: Testimonies of Things. 6 videos. Photos: Benjamin Nuttall.
Cnaani: The residues that survived the museum fire serve as examples of uncertain spatiality, existing somewhere between the molecular and the computational network. Yet, they inhabit an incomplete space – one of total collapse and disappearance. The exhibition space, on the other hand, always insists on ‘critical distance’, which is also a ‘safe’ distance. In that sense, these residues were originally part of the exhibitionary ‘middle space’, subject to its order and frameworks. But after the fire, they collapsed into disordered entities, inhabiting many spaces yet belonging to none. However, by giving them attention and working with them as the subject matter of an artwork, they are once again drawn into the logic of the gallery’s ‘middle space’, restructured by its ordering mechanisms.
Here I am once again part of the very structures I am critiquing :-). The only thing I can say with certainty is that I have presented The Testimonies of Things in multiple formats. In my PhD, it was a written work, each text aligned with an image. Later, I developed a full text and image installation based on the same project. When I exhibited Leaking Lands at Rampa, Porto, we printed the ‘testimonies’ texts as posters that were mounted on the wall. At SUBTE Montevideo Arts Center and MAC Chile, the project took shape in a printed format. In many ways, this project is also insatiable in its format, constantly shifting in relation to the main video work. I suppose each manifestation offers a different relationship to distance, reconfiguring its spatial and conceptual presence with every iteration.
Tshuva: Having worked with Ofri for some years now, she really excels in challenging and reframing institutions and their politics through the personal perspectives of the individuals who occupy them or with which they engage. In one of her earlier performance works Frequently Asked (2015), in which she worked with a group of museum volunteers, I remember taking a tour with a museum volunteer based on a trajectory entirely shaped by her own personal preferences, memories, and personal experiences. In this tour, Picasso was interwoven with memories of the volunteer’s teenage years in the city and the joy of finally giving birth after years of failed attempts – and they were all equally important. It was a highly emotional experience that stayed with me for a long time.
This practice of taking something as minor and allegedly irrelevant to the meta-narrative and turning it into the entry point through which we engage with global and political urgencies is something that comes back in Ground Control for example, when the colonisation of space is discussed in the same breath with the lament over broken marriage; as well as in Leaking Lands where climate crisis, slow violence, institutionalised neglect, and the tragic loss of cultures are told through the fragmented memories and experiences of former workers or a little girl on a family fun day. Testimonies of things, which as you mentioned, is displayed on the wall facing Leaking Lands, was created in the same context, but in some ways it takes this practice even one step further, attempting to narrate these events from the entry point of non-human entities like water, meteorite, or cursor, leaving somewhat symbolically the physical presence of us as individuals at its middle.
In some of our conversations throughout the working process on the technicalities of this exhibition, Ofri would often state that for her ‘everything is always personal’, or operates on a personal level. In a way, bringing this back to your question about the politics of distance, I think that while this form of creative practice is to some extent a product of limitations and absence, its product is this very fine attunement of ‘thinning down our skin’. In a crisis-informed reality that celebrates resilience and constantly demands us to ‘thicken it up’, I think of it as a subversive gesture.
Dekker: Finally, you mentioned the notion of ‘afterness’, which reminds me of Rebecca Schneider’s ‘performing remains’,[6] a concept that she uses to discuss the tension between theater and its documentation, exploring how performances leave traces that can be revisited and reinterpreted. In what ways does afterness reflect similar concerns?
Cnaani: I use the term ‘Digital Afterness’ in both theory and art-based research to examine how the loss or removal of physical artefacts can both engender and reveal intricate frameworks of lingering colonial residues that proliferate throughout the technosphere.[7] My work explores how the demise of cultural collections due to climate crisis, governmental apathy, and political violence can be traced back to the colonial practices that originally gave rise to their conditions of existence. I hope this term is useful as part of a much larger discussion that interrogates how culturally-situated knowledge, once diverse and context-specific, is increasingly reduced to abstract, data-driven processes that replicate the colonial mindset and marginalise alternative ways of preserving and disseminating cultural knowledge. My research focuses more specifically on the digital afterlife of cultural objects under conditions of mass destruction. I ask how can the digital residues of cultural knowledge be reimagined and engaged through artistic practices to challenge the colonial structures embedded in both digital and physical spaces of knowledge dissemination. In a way, in this interview it also plays a role, as it is interesting for me to notice the way you navigate the exhibition brings new connections that I am only now able to see.
Authors
Ofri Cnaani is an artist and researcher working across performance and media. She is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Visual Culture, TU Wien, Austria, and she was an associate lecturer in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been presented at Tate Britain, UK; Venice Architecture Biennale; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; PS1/MoMA, New York; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Chile; Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki; Kiasma Museum, Helsinki; BMW Guggenheim Lab, New York; Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Moscow Biennial; The Kitchen, New York; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Kunsthalle Wien, among others. Since 2021, Cnaani has co-organised Choreographic Devices, a three-day choreographic symposium at ICA, London.
Or Tshuva is a curator, researcher, and cultural organiser based in Manchester. Her curatorial projects and writings have been featured internationally at institutions including the National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi), Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Liverpool School of Art & Design, Jerusalem Design Week, Stedelijk Museum, and more. She earned her Master’s degree in Visual Cultures with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London (2013). Her current research examines the implications of the ongoing Polycrisis within the arts, suggesting that beyond operational challenges its induced volatility reshapes epistemological and methodological notions of publicness, sustainability, and social responsibility within organisational and curatorial practice. She is co-editing The Contactless Condition with Ofri Cnaani, forthcoming from Open Humanities Press.
Annet Dekker is a curator and researcher. Currently she is Associate Professor of Comparative Cultural Analysis and Archival and Information Studies at University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She has published numerous essays and edited several volumes, including Documentation as Art (co-edited with Gabriella Giannachi; Routledge 2022) and Curating Digital Art: From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curating (Valiz 2021). Her monograph Collecting and Conserving Net Art (Routledge 2018) is a seminal work in the field of digital art conservation.
References
Candlin, F. Art, museums and touch: Rethinking art’s histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.
Cnaani, O. Digital afterness. London-New York: Routledge, 2025 (forthcoming).
_____. ‘Leaking Lands: Museum Documentation Without Digitization’ in Documentation as art: Expanded digital practices, edited by A. Dekker and G. Giannachi. London-New York: Routledge, 2023.
Howes, D. and Classen, C. Ways of sensing: Understanding the senses in society. London-New York: Routledge, 2014.
Howes, D. ‘Introduction to Sensory Museology’, The Senses and Society, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2008: 259-267.
Kamaoli Kuwada, B. ‘We Live in the Future. Come Join Us’, Ke Kaupa Hehi Ale (blog), 3 April 2015: https://hehiale.com/2015/04/03/we-live-in-the-future-come-join-us/ (accessed on 19 March 2025).
Le Guin, U. The left hand of darkness. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Schneider, R. Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenactment. London-New York: Routledge, 2011.
[1] ‘In-Touch: Digital Touch Communication’, IN-TOUCH Project at the UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London (blog): https://in-touch-digital.com/2016/11/28/a-renaissance-of-touch-in-the-museum/ (accessed on 19 March 2025).
[2] Howes & Classen 2014.
[3] Howes 2008, p. 261.
[4] Candlin 2010, p. 9.
[5] Cnaani 2023.
[6] Schneider 2011.
[7] Cnaani 2023, 2025.