NEW YORK—At “Not Your Parents’ MTV: Music Videos From Hell,” a recent show at Manhattan’s Postmasters gallery, one work drew particular attention to itself. Karaoke Deathmatch 100 (2007), a video projected across the space’s back wall, featured the two members of the New York-based collective MTAA taking turns stepping up to the mike and trying to out-sing each other with karaoke staples from “We’ve Only Just Begun” to “Stairway to Heaven.” The work’s 50 rounds of intense crooning were originally presented (and contained) online, but in the gallery the sound spilled across the space to affect the viewing of the other eight videos in the show.

The phenomenon demonstrated by MTAA’s piece—the leaking of sound from an audio or video work into adjacent areas commonly referred to as noise “glare”—is just one of many complications that “media work” (a broad label that includes everything from single-channel video to interactive software-based work) has introduced to exhibition design. Every media work carries its own potential for interference, and over the years, numerous curatorial strategies have been developed to neutralize them—from using headphones and sit-down computer kiosks to dividing galleries into small screening rooms—some of which are more distracting than the works themselves. But curators and dealers are discovering that rather than attempting to reduce “glare” and other installation challenges, some of the most successful exhibitions take advantage of media work’s idiosyncrasies, using them to craft the overall experience of the exhibition.

A Room With Many Views
While Postmasters has developed a reputation for showing technology-based work by noted artists such as Jennifer and Kevin McCoy and Omer Fast, it also displays more traditional media. "I don't want to have a gallery that is exclusively devoted to digital media," said co-founder Magdalena Sawon. "I think it unnecessarily ghettoizes it."

In its shows, the gallery has attempted to equalize the relationship between new and "old" media, and it has tackled some challenges of designing media exhibitions in the process. At a time when the majority of video and computer-based work was being shown screening-style, with multiple works playing in succession on a single monitor, Postmasters’ watershed 1996 show "Can You Digit?" displayed roughly 30 screen-based works side by side, each on its own screen. It was a largely unprecedented move for a commercial gallery, and it allowed relationships between the pieces to emerge the same way they would in an exhibition of paintings. "The questions you ask yourself are the same as with traditional media," said Sawon. "What do you see first? What is the relationship between the pieces? Do you emphasize sameness or break down monotony?"

For Sawon, however, the list of questions does not stop there when it comes to displaying media work. Factors such as whether to show a video on a flat screen or as a projection, for example, or whether audio should be played through speakers or headphones inevitably arise.

The gallery has put those decisions to creative and sometimes risky use over the years. According to Sawon, “Not Your Parents' MTV” is a perfect example of how noise glare from one piece can actually benefit another. Instead of drowning out the adjacent work, she believes that MTAA's karaoke showdown added a playful cohesiveness to the entire show, encouraging viewers to find similarly raucous threads in the other pieces.

The Geek Factor
It doesn't take an engineering degree to curate an exhibition of digital media—a willingness to collaborate is much more important, according to Amanda McDonald Crowley. Formerly the director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, Crowley has been director at Eyebeam, a workshop and gallery for media art in Manhattan, since 2005. Structured like an atelier, the nonprofit space hosts a group of artists-in-residence who share equipment and know-how to realize work that is frequently exhibited in the attached gallery.