Behind HOP

The idea for HOP's online gallery experience was born 20y ago during founder Adam Heft Berninger's time as a founding partner at Tender Creative – a multidisciplinary agency that worked with industry-leaders like MoMA, Nike, Rolex, Google, M·A·C, and startups like the first digitally-native online art auction platform, Paddle8. In early 2022, Adam founded Heft – a contemporary gallery that operates online, at leading international art fairs, and now in its space at 300 Broome Street, in the Lower East Side of NYC. Heft showcases a critical generation of artists who both use, and address, the ubiquitous systems of contemporary life. This program exists to connect artists and collectors: fueling the collector experience, deeply supporting artist growth through an active role, and building the movement around new systems artists. Over recent years, the desire by communities of art lovers to share their collections – of all types – has continued to escalate. Solutions have come and gone, and many tactical challenges have remained, but the core of HOP's proposition is a better way to experience galleries online. Fast, focused, simple to manage... rigorous, elegant, extensive in features... fun to experience, inspiring to explore, and serving the people that want galleries most. Give it a try with your arrow keys to start, for an intuitive and snappy way to quickly see a lot of art without sacrificing the respect for viewing, and the intriguing relationships between works that sit next to each other – so easily lost when rapidly scrolling a vertical page. While nothing makes the side of images inherently relate better to each other than the top and bottoms, humans have evolved with a horizontal ambulatory scroll that crosses landscapes, buildings, and walls – resulting in an innate comfort in digesting the relational pairing of one thing next to another. But the internet is not our physical world, and HOP is no simulation of another thing – it’s explicitly in the language of the Internet, native to its usage and protocol. Here, the scroll bar is not about up and down, but more intentionally forward and backwards. The keys allow for progress on a path and quick return – unlocking visual exploration on two axis, breaking through all sides of the browser window. This approach to experience utilizes the language of today's internet in ways that are native to the emergence of a Web 4.0 - node based, focus-fixing, intuitively sophisticated, gestural, ai assisted, embracing of complexity and our ability to understand it, hyper navigable, and connective across its underlying webs. HOP is human created and coded by Anthropic's Claude, which has now made possible the realization of this decades-old vision, once discarded with the death of Flash. Now it is part of the budding Web 4 generation of sites that embrace, and hopefully transcend, the aesthetic and vast functional capabilities of sites built using these tools.

HOP is made in New York by the team at heftgallery.com.