World[build]ing Online Exhibitions, Or Trying to Resist Zombie Curating

In the context of contemporary art, online exhibition practices are increasingly challenging conventional notions of space, time, and curatorial roles. The artist duo New Scenario (Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig) are known for their innovative online exhibitions such as Body Holes (2016) and H O P E (2017). Using the web not merely as a distribution platform but as a site of production, their pioneer-ing formats defy the spatial and institutional constraints of traditional gallery systems, and their exhibitions operate at the intersection of curatorial exper-imentation and narrative architecture. However, the conceptual frameworks available to analyse such practices often lag behind technical and aesthetic in-novations. Specifically, there remains a need to distinguish between the static models of digital world-building and the more fluid, networked approaches of worlding that account for relationality, (non)human entanglement, and various forms of interactivity to embrace new ways of creating worlds. In this essay, I examine how these approaches to world[build]ing are manifested by focusing on space, time, and curating, and illustrated through imaginary scenarios involv-ing an observer, a player, and the characters within the exhibition, to explore how the artist duo New Scenario constructs and builds, or worlds, their online exhibitions.