A space to engage with digital art at the comfort of your home.
Together with friends, while apart.
A place for discussion, critique, or just to hang out.
Emphasize scale, context, understanding, and connection.
During the pandemic, demand for art shows online has surged. Many of these exhibitions try to recreate the 3D model of museums to navigate on 2D screens to view 2D paintings. The experience is incomplete, distracting, and non-interactive. An analogy would be if Amazon had tried to recreate the experience of wheeling your cart through isles at the supermarket to shop online.
Even after the pandemic, the question remains, why do we still need to travel to key cities and countries to see new exhibitions when many works could be both easily accessible and better viewed and interacted with online?
Moreover, for digital media like photographs, short films, video games, and other interactive digital art, the physical museum or gallery may not be the best place to show them. A video on YouTube can reach a much larger audience than in a white box, and more people can play an online game than queueing in a museum to play for only a few minutes.
Unmute is an online art exhibition platform to showcase art in better ways than physical museums, democratize curation, and let art reach many more people. We are not trying to replace physical museums but to complement them, like Amazon to shopping malls or Netflix to movie theaters. Our platform allows artists to explore their work in alternate ways which are not dictated by space and monetary limitations.
See which friends are in the exhibition right now,
or what shows have they been to.
Hover to preview the exhibition.
Enter full screen, sit back, enjoy.
Hear the voice from artists and curators,
Pre-recorded or live tour.
We feature works that fit showing on screens.
We take advantage of the 2D screen and make the experience easy to navigate, intuitive, fun, and immersive.
Go Together with friends,
See where they are.
Move closer to discuss, like in real life.
Discuss in the lobby at the end of the exhibition.
Sound is spatial here — you can hear where voices and sounds are coming from. And if you need a quiet moment, simply step away.
Make a Private Room when you want a private conversation. What happens in the private room stays in the room.
Use Loudspeaker in the center to broadcast your voice at full volume across the entire lobby. For moments when you need everyone's attention.
Game! Play here
Right away!
Skip the queue.
Skip the rush.
Save the search.
We got them all here.
3D content?
Put them in your home.
360 view for 3D sculptures and installations.
Or view them in AR on your phone to see them in full scale and reposition them in different context.
Three platforms
Web browser on computers for the serious art lover
Phone App for people on-the-go
TV for viewing in 1:1 scale
The vision of this platform is to democratize museums, art exhibiting, and curation. Museums have been the cultural gatekeepers of fine art for hundreds of years. Since the arrival of the internet, we have observed the fall of the few TV channels as gatekeepers and the flourish of Netflix and Youtube. Many fear the algorithms, but the loss of gatekeepers in these domains have meant that many independent filmmakers have been funded to make localized content for Netflix and many lucky individuals have built independent careers producing content for Youtube. The same is true for everything from news to books to music. We no longer filter ideas through cultural gatekeepers like publishers, editors, and producers, yet people still want high quality content. At the same time, most democratic governments do not control what is allowed beyond the broadcast media. But for art, the gatekeeping power is still in the hands of a few prestigious world-famous museums and their affiliated curators. New ways of approach are needed to bring equity and inclusion to our collective history. Decolonizing the museum can only be successful through the re-examination of collecting policies and how access is granted, and to whom. Our platform democratizes museums from the few powerful institutions and makes art viewing and learning more accessible.
We seek to provide independent curators a platform to showcase their visions without worrying about the budget or being limited to institutional requests. Physical exhibitions are expensive and not many curation proposals can be awarded. Yet online exhibitions have very low fixed costs since our platform already has the infrastructure ready. Curators will also have more space to experiment.
Emerging artists will have a new platform to reach their audience. Recognition of a powerful institution should not define or confine whose art is great art. Furthermore, the profit from each exhibition on our platform will go to the creators and artists, giving more support to independent artists and curators.
This platform is being built by artists and curators for art lovers of all kinds, especially those interested in digital art forms like short films, video games, graphic art, collaborative art, participatory art, and the likes.
Art should not just serve the rich. VIP view, galas, auctions, the premium experiences of the privileged patrons are not for the majority of art lovers. Art should be accessible to everybody who wants to see it, especially when it is funded by public institutions. Moreover, not all art lovers can afford to fly to a city or overseas just to see a new exhibition. Our platform makes it cheaper and easier to view, understand, and appreciate art.
Our lobby encourages open discussions that help blur the boundary of opposing opinions. At the same time, it enables curators and artists to manage discussions and set up lecture-like events with question asking time.
Online exhibitions have zero waste. We facilitate the commissioning of art that will be presented and preserved for generations with the opportunity for it to be recontextualized in future curations. We save tremendously on emissions related to the travel of the artists and visitors and the shipping of the artworks.
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