Damon Zucconi’s Multiple (2013), an original work for the New Museum’s First Look series, offers a depiction of New Museum’s institutional memory through pictures in time – through a more abstract mode of quantifying an organization’s history and impact. The piece—a website—connects all programs catalogued in the New Museum online archive (including exhibitions, talks, or screenings) to duration. The title of each event links to a counter that presents the years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds that have passed since the event ended. All are presented on a monochromatic background determined by the random combination of two hexadecimal values.

For example, at the time of writing, 18y 0m 2w 2d 16:55:54 have lapsed since Adrian Piper’s two-part retrospective; 36y 2m 3w 0d 16:56:37 since the panel “Homosexual Sensibilities: Is there a Homosexual Sensibility in Contemporary Art?”; and 9y 2m 2w 0d 16:57:50 since “Case, a reading and re-enactment of William Gibson’s Neuromancer” by the artist Brody Condon.  The durations suggest new, if untenable, ways to situate oneself in relation to the past and to the present. They also provide a sense of historicity that is, simultaneously, completely precise and totally elusive.  

The first in a series of First Look projects that examine archives, Multiple offers a depiction of the New Museum’s institutional memory through pictures of time—a sequence of durations that stretch out from the past like colored lines laid across a page.¹  

Established in 2012 and co-organized by the New Museum and Rhizome, First Look is a digital art commissioning and exhibition program representing the breadth of art online—from interactive documentary, to custom-built participatory applications, to moving image-based works, and art for mobile VR. Encompassing a substantial array of work that continues to expand, First Look explores the formal, social, and aesthetic possibilities of emerging technologies on the web.