A Narrative Review of the Ecological Turn in Digital Art Curation

Abstract

Digital art exhibitions increasingly behave like ecosystems. Research on their curation, however, remains scattered across single technologies and single cases, so the long-term evolution of curatorial logic is poorly explained. This article reviews research literature and verifiable practice materials on digital art curation published between 2005 and 2025. The method is a theory-driven integrative narrative review. The review follows six recurring questions, which concern artwork form, media and infrastructure, curatorial workflow, communication and governance, authorship and roles, and preservation and maintenance. Four successive and overlapping phases emerge from the comparison. During Technological Accommodation, curators dealt mainly with display conditions and technical dependency, and preservation became a curatorial concern in its own right. During Platformed Participation, platform communication and participatory culture turned exhibitions from single events into relational fields that run continuously. During Immersive Systematization, exhibition spaces were organized as controlled system environments that demand constant operation and teamwork across disciplines. During Ecological Governance, hybrid operation and artificial intelligence raised governance and lifecycle management to core curatorial competences. The article then distills these findings into a Curatorial Ecology Framework. The framework groups the six questions into three layers of technological systems, social networks, and audience participation. Each layer can be traced back to the evidence assembled in the review. The framework offers a historical reference for comparison across phases, a checklist that helps practitioners locate failures of experience, collaboration, or maintenance, and a structure that future case studies can test. The article closes with limitations and directions for research on generative artificial intelligence in museums.