Turn That Damn Sculpture Down!

NEW YORK—At “Not Your Parents’ MTV: Music Videos From Hell,” a recent show at Manhattan’s Postmasters gallery, one work drew particular attention to itself. Karaoke Deathmatch 100 (2007), a video projected across the space’s back wall, featured the two members of the New York-based collective MTAA taking turns stepping up to the mike and trying to out-sing each other with karaoke staples from “We’ve Only Just Begun” to “Stairway to Heaven.” The work’s 50 rounds of intense crooning were originally presented (and contained) online, but in the gallery the sound spilled across the space to affect the viewing of the other eight videos in the show.

The phenomenon demonstrated by MTAA’s piece—the leaking of sound from an audio or video work into adjacent areas commonly referred to as noise “glare”—is just one of many complications that “media work” (a broad label that includes everything from single-channel video to interactive software-based work) has introduced to exhibition design. Every media work carries its own potential for interference, and over the years, numerous curatorial strategies have been developed to neutralize them—from using headphones and sit-down computer kiosks to dividing galleries into small screening rooms—some of which are more distracting than the works themselves. But curators and dealers are discovering that rather than attempting to reduce “glare” and other installation challenges, some of the most successful exhibitions take advantage of media work’s idiosyncrasies, using them to craft the overall experience of the exhibition.