The experience of the “(Un)Real” is interwoven with digital technology, blockchain, and AI. It is not opposed to reality but deeply embedded within it, reshaping and even replacing our known world. In the art sphere, it is shaped by virtual galleries, crypto art markets, and generative AI imaging, forming new sensory interfaces for perceiving self and society. In this context, curating — once centered on organizing objects and narratives in physical space — now navigates a far more complex arena. It must redefine its cultural and ethical role amid collisions between the virtual and physical, human and machine, and ultimately, the real, hyperreal and unreal.

This issue’s articles collectively ask: How does the practice of art-curating change through its migration into virtual spaces, cross-realities and automated scenographies? What new display, mediation and participation possibilities do digital, net-based and AI-induced exhibition formats offer? As digital capitalism fuels sensory alienation, AI disrupts creative foundations, and blockchain’s decentralized promises spawn new illusions. Can curating be turned into an art-systemic critique and practice of resistance?

The bilingual (Un)Real issue brings together diverse theoretical, practical, and empirical perspectives from researchers, curators, and artists. It was initiated as a collaboration between Comple-X.NET and OnCurating within the framework of “UN-Curating: Arts and Interdisciplinary Collaboration”— a multi-year project dedicated to examining the evolving role of art and curating across intersecting fields. The current issue is a joint publication, based on a selection of articles from the Paraverse issue of OnCurating (no. 63, ed. by art historians Birgit Mersmann and Hauke Ohls) and enriched with new contributions from Chinese curators and artists selected by co-editor and curator Xie Wen. A long-standing engagement with potential forms of collaborative futures within complex socio-technical systems directly informs her selection. The Chinese artists and curators included in the (Un)Real issue are not only deeply immersed in the global digital technology wave, but also maintain a critical awareness of China’s specific conditions, offering an indispensable critical perspective and a body of practical case studies.

Curating the digital today exceeds selecting works or crafting narratives. It must confront the fundamental shift of the unrealization of reality, as technologically enacted upon bodily experience in virtual spaces and AI-generated ecosystems. In this embeddedment, digital immersion masks crises of alienation and reification.

In (Un)Real Worlds of Digital Curating, curatorial scholars Jonny-Bix Bongers and Dorothee Richter reactivate Marxist and Situationist theories, arguing that the digital age imposes "passive contemplation," replacing sensory engagement with spectacle consumption. NFTs epitomize this by transformimg conceptually fluid digital art into speculative objects that are then displayed conservatively in white cubes for validation. The authors propose "situated curating" as resistance — emphasizing bodily presence and shared environments to re-anchor art in tangible reality, countering digital "placelessness."

Wang Yiquan’s artistic archival practice of collecting little videos as Pearls in the Digital Sea echoes the critique of the spectacle of consumption from a social-media perspective of viral video cultures. Under the moniker "ghost curator" of platform algorithms, his gathering becomes active archiving — a digital ethnography preserving memory against accelerated information erosion, revealing everyday digital alienation.

Curators are testing new display grammars and spatial logics in hybrid realms. Curator and curatorial scholar Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás discusses her international collaborative project Beyond Matter, a practice-based research on exhibition-making under virtual conditions. Beyond Matter revives historical exhibitions like Les Immatériaux digitally, not to replicate, but to reactivate their ideas. Its open-source tools suggest an AI-assisted, decentralized curating future, where algorithms dynamically relate artworks to space, challenging the curator’s singular authority.

In Ctrl + Curate: About Online Exhibitions, digital art curator Peggy Schoenegge traces the emergence and transformation of curating web-based exhibition spaces. Including projects by the curatorial collective peer-to-space, she argues that online curating is a site-specific practice enabling the creation of innovative speculative forms beyond physical limits.

The curator Nina Roehrs comprehends her exhibition DYOR—Making Sense of the Crypto Art World as a radical institutional experiment. Embracing Web3’s "Do Your Own Research" ethos, the DYOR exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthalle embedded crypto art’s decentralized, community-driven ethos into its framework. By sharing curatorial power, it became a social experiment in decentralized curating, testing new values within traditional walls.

Artificial Intelligence poses the deepest challenge for art-curating in these times, acting not only as a technological tool but also as an institutional force of system change.

Under the title Agent and Agency, the conversation between Wang Yini, curator of the exhibition Bable Bottle (2025), and artist Wu Ziwei sheds light on interactive exhibition-making with generative AI. Drawing upon the Mimicry series by Wu Ziwei, as presented in the exhibition, they discuss how AI is treated as an ALife system component, exploring "distributed agency" between humans and machines. In this line, the art system becomes an ecological field for collaboration that extends into social-media environments.

In All that is solid is melting, art historians Birgit Mersmann and Hauke Ohls explore the (un)real conditions of curating and exhibiting AI art in physical space. They also discuss the institutionalization of AI art curation and academic research in China in conversation with Li Xi, art director and co-founder of the Aiiiii Art Center in Shanghai.

According to curator Ma Nan, the “Future Art Ecosphere,” a landscape of art and advanced technology, exposes the brutal logic of automated (AI) art: human time compressed and culture reduced to algorithmic "illusions." Under these conditions, Curating as Resistance in the Age of AI means creating fissures — introducing error, delay, and uncertainty — shifting curating from organization to ecological critique.

Collectively, the contributions in this issue chart a collaborative curatorial future defined by sober negotiation with technology. The (Un)Real credo thus evolves from condition to methodology — a form of curation that navigates between worlds, making critical interventions into its core principles. In this future of collaborative co-creation, the curator becomes a synthesizer of roles: setting markers in algorithmic seas, creating pauses in accelerated cultures, and reaffirming human agency amid automation's tide.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to all authors and interview partners for their insightful and enriching contributions, to Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb, chief-editors of the journal OnCurating, for their continuous editorial support, and to the Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council for its generous financial support to enable this open access publication.

Birgit Mersmann is Professor of Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her interdisciplinary research covers modern and contemporary Western and East Asian art, global art history, migratory aesthetics, museum and exhibition studies, digital art, image and media theory, visual cultures and visual translation, interrelations between script and image, and history and theory of photography. Recent book publications include: Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst (ed. with Hauke Ohls, Lüneburg 2024); Image Controversies. Contemporary Iconoclasm in Art, Media, and Cultural Heritage (ed. with Christiane Kruse and Arnold Bartetzky; Berlin/Boston 2024); Okzidentalismen. Projektionen und Reflexionen des Westens in Kunst, Kultur und Ästhetik (ed. with Hauke Ohls, Bielefeld 2022); Über die Grenzen des Bildes. Kulturelle Differenz und transkulturelle Dynamik im globalen Feld der Kunst (Bielefeld 2021); Bildagenten. Historische und zeitgenössische Bildpraxen in globalen Kulturen (ed. with Christiane Kruse; Paderborn 2021); Handbook of Art and Global Migration. Theories, Practices, and Challenges (ed. with Burcu Dogramaci; Berlin/Boston 2019). 

Hauke Ohls is a postdoctoral researcher with the Chair of Contemporary Art and Digital Image Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research focuses on theoretical, sociological, and philosophical questions of modern and contemporary art with particular emphasis on eco-relational art and ecological aesthetics,neo-extractivism, ecofeminist, pluriversal, posthuman theory, the discourse on objects, materiality and images, as well as the relationship between art, economy, and neoliberalism. Additional areas of interest include the intersection of art and music, artists’ writings, media art, and transcultural art history. Recent book publications include: Kritik des Neo-Extraktivismus in der Gegenwartskunst (ed. with Birgit Mersmann, Lüneburg 2024); Many-Valued Aesthetics. Interconnections in the Work of Mary Bauermeister (Bielefeld 2024); Okzidentalismen. Projektionen und Reflexionen des Westens in Kunst, Kultur und Ästhetik (ed. with Birgit Mersmann, Bielefeld 2022); Objektorientierte Kunsttheorie. Graham Harmans spekulative Philosophie im Kontext einer (nicht-)relationalen Ästhetik (Hamburg 2019).

Xie Wen is art-transdisciplinary researcher. Proceeding from art, she is dedicated to building collaborative networks that respond to social complexity. Her recent focus lies in art-driven social innovation and the co-construction of knowledge and ecological connectivity within global-local contexts. As the founder of the Comple-X.NET® , she has established a platform that equally emphasizes action and research. Through the “art-transdisciplinary workstation” model, she fosters in-depth dialogue among art, technology, ecology, and social issues: For example, the "Green Meets Blue" she curated in 2024 conducted an inter-city research tour, using mangroves as a medium to explore cross-cultural emotions and ecological connections; in 2023, as a joint component of the World Laureates Forum, she initiated the "Question Accelerator" project, introducing artistic thinking to catalyze socially transdisciplinary discussions on global scientific issues; and recent projects like "DAO Garden" and "Herewell Time" explore the integration of art, technology, and sustainable care pathways within elderly communities.