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    STUDIA SOCIOLOGIA - Issue no. 1 / 2009  
         
  Article:   SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE DIGITAL ART GALLERY 115.

Authors:  DANA IONESCU.
 
       
         
  Abstract:  The present article investigates the local relations of power established among the social actors that interact within the social space, the creators of digital art and the curator of the only digital art gallery from Eastern Europe, 115. Such inquiry occasions a reflection on the gallery as a place that stabilizes, gives durability and structures the relations that come about in the physical space between social categories while opening a new empirical space to explore the incentives that determine the producers of digital art to move their creations inside the gallery 115. Despite being recognized in the virtual space, characterized by Internet pages or loggings as members in virtual communities dedicated to digital art, the newly formed cultural expression becomes real the moment it is exhibited, as it is assimilated, recognized, identified by a wider range of individuals as a legitimate means of creation. Hence, by exhibiting digital art in a gallery, by being printed and mechanically reproduced, an upgrading from a deviant one, a construction of behavior and appearances take place. The analysis suggests that the creators of digital art engaged in an exchange process of social memories, interpretations and representations are a mixture of these different spaces - physical and virtual. The issue of social space is tackled, throughout the paper, as a means of production, control, and domination (Lefebvre, 1991), as a facilitator of network creation (Gieryn, 2000) or as a social construction (Low, 1996). Finally, understanding the links between the symbolic experience of the social space and the cultural meanings ascribed to 115, will help specify the curator as one that possesses the ability of encompassing the features of a legitimised force of power.

Keywords: digital art gallery; social construction and social production of space; legitimization; need of physicality
 
         
     
         
         
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