Freelance writer, Rebecca Hardy Wombell, asks about the role of digital in building the slow art movement in her recent article for MuseumNext, where she also documents the history of Slow Art Day and our relationship to the Internet.

We originally launched Slow Art Day as an antidote to the negative effects of the Internet – effects I had already begun to see in 2008 while running a digital consulting firm helping companies like Apple and Facebook. For years since then, our rule at Slow Art Day has been simple: we can use the Internet to evangelize slow looking, but the events must be in museums and galleries and definitely *not* online.

Of course, the pandemic forced us to go online and so we pivoted and quickly taught museums how to use Zoom and the basics of how to run slow looking sessions virtually.

From there, many galleries and museums all over the world used their creativity and ingenuity to design Zoom-, social media-, video-based and hybrid events, as well as some in-person sessions where possible (all of which Wombell documents, and which our 2021 annual report will summarize when it’s released in February).

Best,

Phyl, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Ashley

P.S. You can read Wombell’s full article – Can digital technology help us to learn to look slowly? – on MuseumNext, or visit her website, Words of Art, to learn more about her.