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Papers by Stéphanie Bertrand

Frontiers in Communication

DAHJ-Digital Art History Journal, 2023

Departing from the cultural impacts of physical museums, this article explores two significant vi... more Departing from the cultural impacts of physical museums, this article explores two significant virtual benefits of online digitized art collections. Based on empirical research, it speculates that these increasingly interconnected collections have the potential to implement a new model of cultural participation able to sustain power sharing beyond public consultation, and transform the art system’s inherent stratification, viz. modulate the art world’s access barriers to institutional prestige, thus benefiting artists by levelling the playing field. The claim is that they can serve as a digital infrastructure to recruit collective intelligence on a mass scale in order to democratize culture and foster more equality and diversity in the art world. However, these impacts cannot simply be achieved by turning users into citizen curators or leveraging ‘altmetrics’ (i.e., views and likes) to influence selection and modulate order within an aggregated or distributed database. The main obstacle to these virtual impacts is not online access barriers, nor insufficient participation. Multiplying eyeballs, facilitating discovery and promoting public choices are all vital; but, these initiatives cannot hope to transform the art system if the individual judgment being captured is subject to different spheres of influence and network effects driving inequality. To overcome these effects, the article proposes a novel, choice-based, pathfinding tool designed to recruit users’ sensemaking faculty, as opposed to their personal taste, and in so doing, more effectively capture what users find meaningful (and institute a new value proposition for art).

Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2022

Contemporary art institutions' reluctance to produce virtual exhibitions has been linked to a pre... more Contemporary art institutions' reluctance to produce virtual exhibitions has been linked to a prevailing skeuomorphic paradigm in the online display of art digitizations. Yet, what has been largely overlooked in museum computing scholarship is the fact that online collection interfaces and in-gallery group shows similarly condition artistic reception owing to a shared database logic, which has resulted in a mediation paradox in contemporary culture. This article examines the effects of this logic on public engagement, and recent digital curatorial strategies that have emerged in response based on notions of the digital aura and networked co-curation. The article concludes by establishing three conditions for an alternative curatorial process capable of adequately mediating art digitizations online without sacrificing aesthetic experience to the limited affordances of screen-based ICTs.

Frontiers in Communication , 2021

The primary mission of cultural institutions, including heritage sites and museums, is to perform... more The primary mission of cultural institutions, including heritage sites and museums, is to perform and perpetuate Cultural Heritage (CH) by ideally transforming audiences into stewards of that heritage. In recent years, these institutions have increasingly turned to Mixed Reality (MR) technologies to expand and democratize public access to Cultural Heritage—a trend that is called upon to accelerate with COVID-19—because these technologies provide opportunities for more remote outreach, and moreover, can make partial remains or ruins more relatable to the public. But as emerging evaluations indicate, existing MR intangible and tangible Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) applications are largely proving inadequate to engaging audiences beyond an initial fascination with the immersive 3D visualization of heritage sites and artefacts owing in part to misguided storytelling or non-compelling narratives. They fail to effectively communicate the significance of Cultural Heritage to audiences and impress upon them its value in a lasting way due to their overreliance on an education-entertainment-touristic consumption paradigm. Building on the recent case made for Literature-based MR Presence, this article examines how the literary tradition of travel narratives can be recruited to enhance presence and embodiment, and further elicit aesthetic experiences in Digital Cultural Heritage applications by drawing on recent findings from the fields of Extended Reality (XR), cognitive literary science and new museology. The projected effects of this innovative approach are not limited to an increase in audience engagement on account of a greater sense of presence and embodiment. This approach is also expected to prompt a different kind of public involvement characterized by a personal valuation of the heritage owing to aesthetic experience. As the paper ultimately discusses, this response is more compatible both with MR applications’ default mode of usership, and with newly emerging conceptions of a user-centered museum (e.g., the Museum 3.0), thereby providing a narrative roadmap for future Virtual Museum (VM) applications better suited to the primary mission of transmitting and perpetuating Cultural Heritage.

Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games, 2020

EuroMed, 2018

Mixed Reality (MR) applications and technologies have become quite popular nowadays. They are use... more Mixed Reality (MR) applications and technologies have become quite popular nowadays. They are used in many areas (e.g. Games, Entertainment, Education , etc.). But what about Cultural Heritage? Cultural Heritage is an area that presents a great variety of opportunities for MR applications. These opportunities include storytelling (a way for visitors to learn and retain more information about the exhibitions that they explore), gamified presence (an incentivizing tool to keep them attentive during their visit) and many more. This paper discusses the creation of Cross/Augmented Reality applications for the Industrial Museum and Cultural Center in the region of Thessaloniki, and presents some early results. The region of Central Macedonia has a rich history and its Cultural Heritage is extremely significant. The local importance of Cultural Heritage can be observed in the actions undertaken by local authorities, as well as the region's participation in European Cultural Heritage projects. The creation of Cross/Augmented applications can greatly contribute to the preservation and promotion of Cultural Heritage. These technologies are not only liable to prove very popular with the public due to their current mass appeal; they are likely to shape the Virtual Museums of the future. Overall, the main contribution of this paper is to provide the first bibliographical reference to examine the implementation of Virtual Museums in Cross Reality, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality using both ARKit and ARCore's latest APIs.

The Sustainability Plan: tool-kits, 2019

The following text was commissioned by the project Artecitya. Envisioning the City of Tomorrow (2... more The following text was commissioned by the project Artecitya. Envisioning the City of Tomorrow (2014-2018), organized by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki. It was first presented publically as part of the conference " The role of culture and 'art for social change' in the sustainable development of a city " at LABattoir, Thessaloniki (2015) and was later published on the project's website: www.artecitya.gr

Winning essay for the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize, on the subject of artistic intervention seen thro... more Winning essay for the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize, on the subject of artistic intervention seen through Gaston Bachelard's notion of creative disobedience. Jury: Claire Bishop, Judith Butler, Barbara Duden, Julia Kristeva, Heike Kühn, Martha Rosler, along with Anne-Marie Oliver and Barry Sanders.

Books by Stéphanie Bertrand

Museums and Technologies of Presence, 2024

Cultural organisations increasingly turn to immersive technologies such as extended reality to cr... more Cultural organisations increasingly turn to immersive technologies such as extended reality to create more embodied and interactive experiences of remote cultural objects. Yet, museum computing's overriding focus on cultural understandings of presence in terms of objects has obscured the broader role that these systems’ reconfiguration of perception and attention play in shaping user experience.

While cultural presence generally complicates the issue of technological mediation, this chapter argues that modern and contemporary visual art actually provides a unique test case to disentangle the nexus of immersion, presence, attention, and ability at the core of these experiences. Its central claim is that the way in which wearable technologies ‘augment’ users by sensing, capturing, analysing, and processing sensorimotor action should be taken into account in the curation and design of future immersive experiences rather than assuming that the technology will eventually become transparent and ‘naturalised’.