Venice as Operating System

Venice begins with friction.

Before the pavilions, before the dinners, before the politics, there is the sound of suitcase wheels clinking against wet cobblestone; the calculation of vaporetto schedules; the anxiety of missing the last boat home; the psychological negotiation between distance on a map and distance inside the Venetian lagoon.

The Biennale begins with logistics, not art. The logistics may be the first real exhibition.

By the second day, it became clear the 2026 Venice Biennale was not simply about art objects, but about the movement of bodies through weather, architecture, luxury, exhaustion, and attention.

The rain. The lines. The boats. The bridges. The waiting. The scrolling. The wandering.

It was a singular choreography.

Venice compressed the experience into something emotionally and physically dense. Unlike sprawling art fairs spread across highways and convention centers, Venice remains contained. Bodies pile into narrow pathways and vaporetto docks. Crowds bottleneck beneath umbrellas. VIPs who normally bypass friction are forced into public negotiations with weather, time, and other people. The common enforcement of lines became performance art.

You could feel the psychology of status in real time. Collectors, curators, journalists, artists, influencers, students, and tourists all compressed into the same circulation systems. Some attempted to negotiate access. Others hovered near entrances hoping to avoid the wait entirely. Umbrellas collided. Shoes became soaked. Tote bags absorbed rainwater. People speed-walked across bridges in designer shoes while pretending not to be lost. At one point, it felt like people were checking vaporetto schedules more than artwork labels.

This year also seemed noticeably younger; that brought an exciting energy and revealed the economic absurdity of Venice. Flights, hotels, water taxis, dinners, transport. Behind the polished Instagram stories is the reality that many attendees are likely sharing rooms, sleeping outside Venice proper, or racing against transportation schedules each night.

The Biennale increasingly operates like a cultural pilgrimage where aspiration collides with infrastructure.

Students and younger curators refreshed Instagram Stories while standing in line. People exchanged locations constantly. Sometimes you would see someone’s post from two buildings away and still never actually run into them. Others navigated Venice almost entirely through screenshots, pinned locations, and group chats. The Biennale unfolded simultaneously in physical and digital space.

Bodies moved physically through Venice while images, locations, recommendations, and reactions circulated continuously across digital networks. Documentation was no longer separate from spectatorship. The exhibition expanded through phones, platforms, and overlapping systems of circulation operating alongside the physical city.

At night, the city revealed another layer of tension. A hotel outside Venice may appear close on a map, but once the vaporetto schedules slow down, the entire geography changes. Conversations ended abruptly because someone had to catch the last boat. People left dinners early not because they wanted to, but because transportation dictated movement.

Venice is one of the few major art events where public transit schedules shape social life as much as invitations do. After the previous edition’s intense discourse around identity and representation, 2026 felt less focused on who was included and more focused on what was included. Materials replaced declarations. Tactility replaced spectacle. Across the Arsenale and Giardini, there was a noticeable return to texture, scenography, rhythm, and spatial atmosphere.

Corrugated cardboard appeared throughout the exhibition, not hidden as temporary infrastructure but intentionally exposed. You could see the inner ridges and raw edges. Wall labels, benches, podiums, partitions, and architectural extensions all carried this visible material honesty. Things felt provisional, tactile, and familiar.

Inside the Arsenale especially, these structures extended upward into the massive industrial architecture itself, creating sectional environments rather than simple partitions. Instead of one vast uninterrupted hall, the space became rhythmically segmented. Viewers moved through emotional chambers rather than rows of booths. The architecture itself slowed you down and the exhibition design became inseparable from the artwork. This was especially visible in the way spaces were fashioned around rest. Seating became one of the most important curatorial gestures of the Biennale. People sat everywhere: older visitors recovering from the scale of the exhibitions, younger visitors scrolling on their phones, others quietly reflecting, researching artists, sharing images, documenting what they had just experienced.

At first, seeing people on their phones inside exhibitions can feel like disengagement. Increasingly, it may be the opposite. Contemporary spectatorship extends beyond the artwork itself. The viewer is simultaneously observer, archivist, researcher, messenger, and distributor. The seated visitor becomes part of the exhibition ecology itself.

At one point, someone sitting beside an artwork almost appeared to become part of the installation. The boundaries between viewer and viewed felt increasingly blurred. People removed wet jackets, compared notes, zoomed into installation details on Instagram, looked up artists they had never heard of moments before.

Dana Awartani’s Saudi pavilion was among the strongest examples. Technically sophisticated yet deeply handmade, the presentation carried an unusual calmness. Thousands of fragile clay forms stretched across the floor in an environment that felt almost archaeological. At the end of the space was ample seating, almost stadium like, allowing viewers to sit for extended periods and absorb the atmosphere. In a Biennale defined by overstimulation, this gesture became incredibly powerful. The pavilion asked visitors to remain. The seating fundamentally altered the energy of the room. People lowered their voices. Conversations softened. Some sat silently for long periods simply watching the installation breathe through light and texture. It felt less like an exhibition and more like a contemplative environment.

Nearby in the Giardini, the Qatar pavilion curated around Rirkrit Tiravanija offered another counterpoint. Designed with architect Lina Ghotmeh, the maroon open air structure referenced the traditional Middle Eastern majlis, a space centered around gathering, hospitality, and exchange. Wrapped in a mashrabiya like surface that filtered light and allowed bodies, sound, and atmosphere to move through naturally, the pavilion resisted the closed logic of the traditional exhibition container.

The pavilion operated less as a static exhibition and more as a living social environment. Food circulated. Music drifted through the structure. Collaborators including Tarek Atoui, Sophia Al Maria, Alia Farid, and chef Fadi Kattan activated the space through sound, conversation, and shared meals. The pavilion became a social organism. People lingered, not just to view art, but to inhabit the atmosphere.

Walking from Qatar into the American pavilion felt like moving between competing visions of contemporary culture itself.

The contrast with the U.S. pavilion was striking. Entering the pavilion felt strangely similar to entering a corporate hotel lobby or luxury residential development where a percentage of the budget had been allocated toward public art. The biomorphic sculptures by Alma Allen and the smooth architectural finishes all carried the flattened language of corporate placemaking. Neutral. Decorative. Emotionally familiar in the way luxury developments attempt to appear culturally elevated without risking discomfort.

And yet perhaps that sterility was not entirely unsuccessful.

In a Biennale increasingly defined by emotional intensity, social activation, and atmospheric overload, the pavilion’s smooth neutrality almost became clarifying. Beside Qatar’s porous communal energy, the American pavilion reflected another dominant contemporary condition: frictionless corporate aesthetics engineered for comfort, circulation, and broad acceptability. It almost could have been titled Lobby.

Some spaces prioritized contemplation, ritual, tactility, and emotional pacing. Others reflected systems of luxury, placemaking, and institutional neutrality. Venice compressed all of these competing ideologies into walking distance from one another.

Elsewhere, some of the most compelling work dealing with digital culture moved beyond screens entirely. The Taiwan pavilion by Li Yi-Fan approached digital life psychologically rather than technologically. Installed inside the former prison of Palazzo delle Prigioni, Screen Melancholy combined game engine animation, LED video, and oversized 3D printed body fragments scattered throughout the space. A strange avatar moved through synthetic environments delivering tutorial like instructions on image making, animation, and perception.

The work carried a quiet anxiety about living inside contemporary image systems, where spectatorship, production, identity, and mediation increasingly collapse into one another.

Similarly, Strange Rules at Palazzo Diedo, organized through Berggruen Arts & Culture and curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli, became one of the intellectual centers of Venice. More than an exhibition, it functioned as an evolving research environment exploring AI, governance, participation, and what the curators termed “Protocol Art.”

Rather than focusing on artworks as isolated objects, Strange Rules examined the invisible systems that increasingly govern how culture is produced, distributed, perceived, and circulated. Algorithms, platforms, artificial intelligence models, computer protocols, and technological infrastructures became artistic material themselves. The exhibition shifted attention away from the singular object and toward systems, networks, collaboration, and human machine co-creation itself.

Artists including Ayoung Kim, Trevor Paglen, Simon Denny, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Harold Cohen, Avery Singer, Stephanie Dinkins, Philippe Parreno, and Joshua Citarella & New Models contributed to a broader atmosphere in Venice where digital practices increasingly focused on worldbuilding, speculative geography, collective intelligence, and emotional infrastructure.

What made Strange Rules especially compelling was that the exhibition did not end with the artworks themselves. Lectures, screenings, workshops, symposiums, and performances operated as extensions of the exhibition’s central logic. The ground floor functioned almost like a live social interface where discourse, participation, and activation continuously reshaped the space itself.

The exhibition shifted constantly between research platform, public forum, performance environment, and experimental laboratory.

At moments, it almost felt as though the exhibition itself was testing its own title. (Almost no rules).

The strongest digital works in Venice functioned less as technological demonstrations and more as systems for examining mediation, participation, memory, governance, and collective behavior.

Technology throughout the Biennale felt softened, almost romantic.

Screens glowed against centuries old architecture. Phones illuminated dark alleyways after dinners and openings. AI and computational systems quietly shaped the emotional texture of contemporary life throughout the Biennale.

That logic extended into Marina Abramović’s presence in Venice as well. At the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Transforming Energy continued her long exploration of endurance, ritual, and presence, while TAEX’s digital extension of her practice through avatar and blockchain systems suggested another form of performance beyond the physical body. The body, so central to Abramović’s work, also existed as a distributed image, a digital proxy, an afterlife of performance moving through systems of ownership, circulation, and participation.

The boundaries between art institutions, luxury brands, fashion houses, and immersive cultural environments also felt increasingly blurred throughout Venice. Exhibitions were no longer confined to museums or national pavilions. Luxury spaces increasingly operated as parallel cultural infrastructure.

One of the clearest examples was Lu Yang’s exhibition DOKU The Illusion at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia near Piazza San Marco. The project occupied an upper floor exhibition environment within Louis Vuitton’s Venetian cultural space. LED installations, sculpture, immersive sound, AI generated imagery, and Lu Yang’s ongoing DOKU avatar universe transformed the space into something between spiritual installation, gaming architecture, luxury environment, and cinematic worldbuilding.

What felt especially significant was not simply the work itself, but the ecosystem surrounding it. Chanel dinners, artist awards, branded residencies, immersive installations, collector events, and luxury sponsored cultural programming increasingly operated alongside the Biennale rather than outside it. Fashion houses increasingly behaved like cultural institutions themselves.

Beyond the official pavilions, Venice itself increasingly became part of the exhibition structure. Offsite presentations scattered throughout the city extended many of the Biennale’s strongest ideas into palazzos, churches, courtyards, and historic buildings. One of the most compelling was Maps Through Time, part of A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World, presented by the Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia, which explored mapping, geography, navigation, and spatial memory across historical and contemporary practices.

What made the exhibition especially resonant was the juxtaposition between old and new systems of orientation. Historical maps, archival materials, tactile cartographic objects, and older navigation technologies existed beside contemporary explorations of AI, gaming environments, speculative geography, and digital worldbuilding.

Seeing Nasser Al Salem’s suspended calligraphic sculpture within the open atrium of a historic Venetian building carried a completely different resonance than seeing similar works elsewhere in the Gulf. The work interacted with light, sky, shadow, and void simultaneously. Arabic letters expanded beyond language into architecture itself. The sculpture extended upward into the open atrium, allowing light, sky, and architecture to become part of the composition.

Nearby, works by Basma Felemban used AI, gaming logic, and speculative environments to map imagined worlds and alternate spatial realities, extending the exhibition’s cartographic language into digital space. Alongside these were works by Tavares Strachan, whose practice often explores hidden histories, navigation, migration, and systems of knowledge production.

Walking through the exhibition, it became difficult to see mapping as neutral. Whether through ancient trade routes, hand drawn cartography, language, gaming environments, AI systems, or speculative digital worlds, maps remained tools for imagining how humans orient themselves within physical, cultural, and emotional space.

In Venice, this felt especially powerful. The city itself operates through constant acts of navigation: bridges, canals, vaporetto routes, hidden alleys, shifting crowds, and temporary pathways formed during opening week.

The Uzbekistan pavilion extended this atmosphere further. Developed through a curatorial residency model involving younger and emerging curators, the pavilion embraced process, dialogue, and collective authorship over rigid national presentation. Within it, works by A.A.Murakami exploring shells, pattern systems, textiles, and algorithmic repetition became one of the more memorable intersections of craft and computation. The computation was tactile and strangely ancient.

Elsewhere in the Giardini, the Japan pavilion by Ei Arakawa Nash transformed participation into something physical and collective. Grass Babies, Moon Babies invited visitors to carry baby dolls throughout the pavilion and beyond, turning caregiving into a shared social choreography. Hundreds of dolls moved through the Biennale in the arms of strangers, producing an atmosphere that felt simultaneously playful, unsettling, communal, and deeply contemporary. Participation was the medium.

Political tension remained impossible to ignore throughout Venice. Protests, gestures of solidarity, institutional statements, and difficult conversations unfolded across the Giardini and beyond. Even when not directly addressed within the exhibitions themselves, geopolitics shaped the emotional atmosphere surrounding the Biennale.

Questions surrounding the body, participation, endurance, and spectatorship surfaced repeatedly across the exhibitions themselves.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was Austria’s pavilion by Florentina Holzinger, which became one of the most divisive presentations of the Biennale. Unclothed performers suspended from bells, aquatic choreography, bodily endurance, and shock driven spectacle transformed the pavilion into something closer to confrontation than contemplation. The pavilion's insistence on participation was exhaustive.

Like much of Venice itself, the work revealed how contemporary cultural experiences increasingly blur together performance, overload, participation, and spectacle.

The Biennale unfolded as a cultural operating system distributed across the island city. Bodies moved through overlapping networks of architecture, logistics, luxury, diplomacy, technology, media, and spectatorship. Artists, curators, collectors, students, journalists, tourists, and staff became temporary participants within the same circulating structure. The Biennale itself became a form of temporary cultural architecture, a living system of movement, exchange, visibility, friction, aspiration, and collective navigation.

And over all of it hovered the memory of Koyo Kouoh, the Biennale’s late curator, whose death before the exhibition opened gave the entire event an unexpected emotional weight. Many works throughout the Arsenale and Giardini carried a quieter tone: less spectacle, more reflection; less declaration, more texture; less speed, more duration. The city itself seemed to slow down.

Even the rain became part of the system. Wet stones darkened the city. Vaporetto schedules dictated movement. Phone screens glowed against centuries old architecture. Bodies rested, scrolled, waited, wandered, documented, and moved again.

Venice functioned less as a singular exhibition than as a living circuit of images, logistics, conversations, performances, architectures, and emotional exchanges unfolding simultaneously across physical and digital space.

Perhaps that is why the Biennale continues to endure; not because it offers clarity, but because it repeatedly forces people to navigate complexity together.

And maybe by the next trip, the code becomes a little easier to crack.