Ethics in the Digital Age: Curating in Virtual Spaces

Author: Sarah Maria Lillig

Introduction

To speak of curating today is to speak of mediation in its most expanded form. The act of selecting, framing and interpreting no longer unfolds solely within the white cube or the museum, but within interfaces, algorithms and distributed networks. As curators have moved from the gallery floor to the digital dashboard, the ethical frameworks that once guided material practice have become increasingly porous. What does it mean to exercise care, authorship and responsibility when the object of that care is neither singular nor stable, but endlessly replicable?

This essay considers how curatorial ethics might be reimagined within virtual and digital environments. It does not treat the digital merely as a tool, but as a condition that shapes perception, visibility and value. Drawing on examples from current practice and from initiatives such as Rhizome’s Webrecorder, as well as the writings of Christiane Paul and Sabine Henzler, it argues that digital curation requires not only technical literacy but a heightened awareness of the infrastructures that underpin our cultural memory. Ethics, in this context, becomes not a fixed code but a dynamic form of attentiveness: a way of holding space for the immaterial and ensuring that access does not come at the expense of integrity.

I. The Curator in the Cloud

The contemporary curator no longer stands before the object but before an interface. Screens have replaced plinths, and platforms have become the new architectures of display. What was once the tactile handling of artworks has turned into a choreography of code, metadata and networked visibility. This shift has altered not only the logistics of exhibition-making but also the ethics that underpin it.

Curating in virtual spaces calls for new modes of care and accountability, a rethinking of what it means to hold something in trust when that something exists as data rather than matter. The digital turn in curatorial practice has undeniably expanded reach and immediacy. It promises access, participation and connection beyond geography. Yet that promise is rarely neutral. Every platform carries its own hierarchies of visibility, algorithms of recommendation and economies of attention. The ethical question, therefore, is not only how to show art online, but how responsibly to situate it within systems that are both commercial and extractive.

II. Accessibility and the Illusion of Openness

Virtual exhibitions are often celebrated as inherently democratic. They appear to dissolve the boundaries of geography, inviting anyone with an internet connection to engage. Yet this rhetoric of openness conceals a more complex reality. Digital access presupposes stable connectivity, functioning hardware and a degree of digital literacy that cannot be universally assumed. The result is a new form of exclusion, one that replaces architectural thresholds with infrastructural ones.

True accessibility must extend beyond technical availability. It demands attention to design, translation and context. An online exhibition may be available to all, yet remain legible only to those fluent in the languages and codes of contemporary art. To curate ethically in the digital realm requires a balance between conceptual rigour and clarity, allowing entry without erasing complexity. Accessibility becomes an act of cultural translation, not merely a technological provision.

In this sense, curatorial ethics begins where universal access ends. The curator’s task is not to flatten meaning for the sake of reach but to provide interpretive bridges, to ensure that the virtual remains porous without becoming homogenised. As theorist Sabine Henzler reminds us in Curating Digital Heritage (2021), the ethics of accessibility lie not in simplification but in invitation: an openness that respects the integrity of both the work and its audience.

III. Digital Sovereignty and the Right to Context

In digital environments, authorship and ownership become fluid, easily detached from their original settings. Images circulate freely, often stripped of the frameworks that once anchored their meaning. The curator’s task is no longer confined to mediation but extends to safeguarding context. To share is to expose, and every act of exposure entails responsibility.

The work of Lawrence Weiner offers a lucid precedent for thinking through this tension. His declarative sentences, installed on walls, printed in books or projected in public spaces, exist as instructions that may be enacted anywhere. They exemplify how meaning depends not only on content but on place, form and intent. Weiner understood circulation as both opportunity and risk, a transfer of agency that demands care. His practice demonstrates that dissemination and integrity are not opposites but parallel concerns, and that curators working online inherit the same ethical obligation to preserve conditions of context.

Emerging technologies such as blockchain appear to restore provenance and decentralisecontrol, but they also reproduce asymmetries of access embedded in the systems they aim to reform. Ethical curation in virtual spaces requires navigating such contradictions without assuming that technical tools can replace human discernment. The curator remains a mediator between visibility and vulnerability, between the desire to share and the duty to protect.

IV. Caring for the Intangible

Preservation in the digital realm is a paradox. The very technologies that allow art to be disseminated also render it fragile, dependent on servers, file formats and interfaces destined for obsolescence. The challenge lies not in preventing disappearance but in understanding how to accompany it. Projects such as Rhizome’s Webrecorder, first released publicly in 2016 by the New York-based organisation devoted to born-digital preservation, reveal how conservation itself can become creative. Rather than freezing a work as a static record, Webrecorder captures the experience of digital art as it unfolds in real time, maintaining its interactivity and temporal character. This model shifts preservation from a defensive act to an interpretive one. To curate online, then, is to acknowledge the temporality of the medium, to care for what is ephemeral without imposing permanence as a universal standard.

Such questions of stewardship extend to inheritance. When artworks are stored in the cloud, who ensures their continuity when platforms dissolve or ownership changes hands? The curator’s ethical horizon must encompass not only the present exhibition but also its afterlife, both material and conceptual. Caring for the intangible thus becomes a practice of anticipation, documentation and narrative continuity.

V. Curating as Critical Infrastructure

To curate ethically in digital space is to think infrastructurally. Every hyperlink, algorithm and data trail forms part of the curatorial frame. The challenge lies in making these invisible architectures visible without collapsing their generative openness. Ethics becomes an ongoing negotiation rather than a codified principle. It demands humility, transparency and a willingness to let the virtual remain indeterminate.

As Christiane Paul observes in Digital Art (2023), the curator in the digital age is both archivist and systems designer, mapping not only artworks but the structures that sustain them. The digital exhibition is not a static container but a network of relations, social, technical and affective. Understanding these relations is central to any ethical framework, for they determine how cultural meaning is distributed and who has access to it.

The ethical curator thus becomes a kind of critical cartographer, tracing the boundaries between art, code and community. To curate online is not only to display but to design visibility itself, to decide what is foregrounded, what is concealed and what circulates. In doing so, curators help construct what might be called critical digital heritage, a living record of how culture is mediated, shared and transformed under technological conditions.

VI. Conclusion

Curating in virtual spaces does not absolve the curator of ethical responsibility; it amplifies it. The disappearance of the physical object does not signal an end to care, but rather a transformation of its terms. Ethics in the digital age invites a redefinition of authorship as collaboration, preservation as participation and access as an act of translation.

To curate online is to operate within infrastructures that are as political and economic as they are aesthetic. The task is to navigate these systems with awareness, to build frameworks of visibility that neither exploit nor obscure. Ethical curating does not depend on technological novelty but on attentiveness: a sensitivity to context, to fragility and to the unseen labour that sustains the digital realm.

Recent discussions within the Curatorial Ethics Network (2025) emphasise that ethical practice today must extend beyond exhibition-making to include infrastructural awareness. Responsibility resides not only in the framing of artworks but in the maintenance of the systems that make those artworks visible. This broader horizon reframes the curator as both caretaker and participant in the technological ecologies that define contemporary culture.

Ultimately, curating in the cloud is less about mastering tools than about cultivating judgment. It requires the same patience, precision and empathy once reserved for handling fragile artefacts. In this new terrain, ethics becomes a creative intelligence: the measure of how thoughtfully we construct meaning together when matter itself has turned to data.

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

Bibliography

Curatorial Ethics Network (2025). Available at: www.curatorialethicsnetwork.org

Henzler, Sabine. Curating Digital Heritage. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2021.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. 4th ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2023.

Rhizome. “Rhizome Releases First Public Version of Webrecorder.” Rhizome Blog, 9 August 2016. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/09/webrecorder-public-release/

Weiner, Lawrence. Statements. New York: Primary Information, 1968.