Digitization’s Impact on the Design of Art Museums
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Date
2020-09-01Type
- Book Chapter
ETH Bibliography
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Abstract
The paper sheds light on digitization’s impact on the architecture of art museums. The ancient Greek etymology of museum (‘μουσεῖον’) – denoting the house of the muses, the daughters of ‘Mnemosyne’ (‘Μνημοσύνη’), the goddess of memory – implies the museum’s inherent tension between documenting the past and engaging with the present. My objective is to reflect on how the emergence of new media has transformed the status of this tension.
The phenomenon of using digital materials provokes a democratization of access to primary sources, transforming museums’ relations to the public. Digitization does not have an impact only on access to artworks through digital collections but is also related to the emergence of new art forms known as “digital-born media art”. Both phenomena – the artworks’ democratization due to the proliferation of digital collections and the emergence of various forms of digital-born media art – foster new demands in the design of art museums. This paper examines these new demands, diagnosing the current tendencies related to the above-mentioned phenomena, which are also related to the trend of appointing “digital directors” in art museums, and to the overgrowing role of digital curatorship in museum studies. The common denominator of the new demands related to these phenomena is the intensification of interactivity.
Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies such as tracking and mapping are used not only in the spatial organisation of exhibitions, but also in media art, making interactive media commonplace. Interactive digital interfaces are major components of this reorientation in the design of art museums. Special attention is paid to the enhancement of art gallery experiences due to the design of interactive interfaces, and to analysing the specificity of the blend of art and technology in the case of ARTLENS Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) (2017-), and Asymptote’s Guggenheim Virtual Museum (CVM) (1999), which was conceived as a virtual museum dedicated to exhibiting and showcasing internet art, providing an online digital archive for all other forms of new media art. Show more
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Book title
CASALEZZA: una finestra sul mediterraneoJournal / series
casalezzaVolume
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
Istituto per l'Architectura MediterraneaSubject
Digital Curation; Museums and Exhibition Design; Curatorial Practice (Art); Exhibition Design (Architecture)Organisational unit
09643 - Avermaete, Tom / Avermaete, Tom
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG
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