Mindfulness and the Museum: Can Digital Delivery of Cultural Heritage Contribute to our Wellbeing? (original) (raw)
Open-air museums: digital cultures, aesthetics and everyday life
Vista, 2021
At a time when everything becomes art, art no longer belongs to itself, to the point of overflowing from the frames that have enclosed it for several centuries-museums, galleries, churches-with unprecedented effects not only in the field of aesthetics, but above all in ordinary life. To understand this in depth, it is necessary to take into account the digital reproducibility of the work of art as a dynamic that upsets the relationship between work and spectator, subject and object, politics and everyday life. From the second half of the 18th century onwards, we saw a dynamic of "aestheticization of the public" parallel to the birth of the cultural industry and, therefore, the transformation of culture into merchandise. It is an ambiguous process, as it implies the emergence of the mass as the central subject of our culture, but also its definitive reification. What about aesthetics in such a condition? This study explores the genology and history of this process by updating Walter Benjamin's thinking in relation to the cultural emergencies of our time. In particular, it seems essential to understand what happens to the aura in the context of a condition in which the aesthetic object, the work of art and, more generally, the area that concerns beauty is available, used and consumed in everyday life, to the point of placing our cities as "open air museums".
2019
The distinguishing characteristic of digitalism is its focus on human behavior in cultural and social contexts. When we think of the developments of computer science and “information theory” that spawned the digital revolution, the focus generally defaults to digital tools and technology, as opposed to its effects on human life and culture and how advances in computing, digital communications and technology are transforming our ways of doing, seeing, knowing, learning, living and loving, to name a few examples. The impact of digitalism is all encompassing, touching all disciplines and human pursuits. How will museums change and transform themselves to connect in authentic ways with their communities while remaining relevant in a world transformed by digital culture that is moving full speed ahead, advancing in a state of constant change and development? While museums have been cautious and relatively slow to challenge traditional ways, they are surely noticing that we are reaching a...
Art, Museums and Digital Cultures → Rethinking Change
2021
Barranha, H. and Henriques, J. S. (eds.) (2021). Art, Museums and Digital Cultures – Rethinking Change. Lisbon: IHA/NOVA FCSH and maat. DOI: 10.34619/hwfg-s9yy [EN] Following the International Conference on Art, Museums and Digital Cultures (April 2021), this e-book seeks to extend the discussion on the concept of change that is usually associated with the relationship between culture and technology. Through the contributions of 32 authors from 12 countries, the book not only questions how digital media have inspired new artistic and curatorial practices, but also how, conversely, critical and creative proposals in the fields of art and museums have opened up alternative paths to technological development. Acknowledging the different approaches to the topic, ranging from retrospective readings to the analysis of recent issues and projects, the book is divided into seven sections and a visual essay, highlighting collaborative territories and the crossovers between different areas of scientific knowledge. Available in open access, this publication is the result of a collaborative project promoted by the Institute of Art History of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University of Lisbon and maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology. Partner institution: Instituto Superior Técnico. Sponsor: Millennium bcp Foundation. Media partner: Umbigo magazine. [PT] No seguimento da Conferência Internacional sobre Arte, Museus e Culturas Digitais (Abril 2021), este e-book pretende aprofundar a discussão sobre o conceito de mudança, geralmente associado à relação entre cultura e tecnologia. Através dos contributos de 32 autores, de 12 países, questiona-se não só a forma como o digital tem motivado novas práticas artísticas e curatoriais, mas também o inverso, observando como propostas críticas e criativas no campo da arte e dos museus têm aberto vias alternativas para o desenvolvimento tecnológico. Assumindo a diversidade de perspectivas sobre o tema, de leituras retrospectivas à análise de questões e projectos recentes, o livro estrutura-se em torno de sete capítulos e um ensaio visual, evidenciando os territórios de colaboração e cruzamento entre diferentes áreas de conhecimento científico. Disponível em acesso aberto, esta publicação resulta de um projecto colaborativo promovido pelo Instituto de História da Arte, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa e pelo maat - Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia. Instituição parceira: Instituto Superior Técnico. Mecenas: Fundação Millennium bcp. Media partner: revista Umbigo.
The Museum in the Digital Age. New Media & Novel Methods of Mediation
The Museum in the Digital Age. New media & novel methods of mediation, Bonnefoit Régine and Rérat Melissa, eds, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd, 2017
The current "digital revolution" or "digital era" has affected most of the realms of today's world, particularly the domains of communication and the creation, safeguarding and transmission of knowledge. Museums, whose mission is to be open to the public and to acquire, conserve, research, communicate and exhibit the heritage of humanity, are thus directly concerned by this revolution. This collection highlights the manner in which museums and curators tackle the challenges of digital technology. The contributions are divided into four groups that illustrate the extent of the impact of digital technologies on museums: namely, exhibitions devoted to new media or mounted with the use of new media; the hidden face of the museum and the conservation of digital works of art; cultural mediation and the communication and promotion of museums using digital tools; and the legal aspects of the digitalisation of content, whether for creative purposes or preservation. Hardback and e-book: 2017 Paperback: 2021
When digitization is not enough. A perspective from the museum field in the digital age
Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2020
The inclusion-exclusion of visitors in museum spaces since the introduction of digital devices has its correlation with the narratives that give origin to the Mexican museums, which are institutions with roots so deep that perceive the changes as a prosthetic element that is added to the already proven formula of making and understanding the (traditional) museum. In that sense, this text seeks to identify the narratives and the political, social, economic and communicative implications that the introduction of digital devices as interpretative tools in museum spaces has. The results obtained from a job carried out at the International Baroque Museum in the summer of 2019, in which a series of interviews were applied to the visitors and museum staff, as well as participating in observation exercises which will serve as a reference to illustrate the statement that museums are institutions that try to maintain the traditional relationship between visitors and museums despite the introduction of digital devices, reinforcing the exclusion by maintaining the forms of expression inherited by the colonial past of the museum.
Renewal of the Museum in the Digital Epoch
The Future of Museums
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, digital technologies are radically changing the way young people communicate, learn and spend their free time. Museums, in order not to lose the next generations as visitors, must conform to the new expectations and needs. On a large scale, the museum must address young people, provide a forum for self-expression and participation and advertise itself by new means. On a smaller scale, the style and means of individual exhibitions must change, providing space for activity, emotions and multiple modalities besides text, personalized visits, interactive explorations and self-expression, evoking emotions but meanwhile also fulfilling educational objectives. Digital technologies-by the yet smaller, cheaper and more and more pervasive devices and services-provide ample means to reach these goals. In our article first we provide a conceptual framework, focussing on the Internet generation as new audience and traditional and new functions of museums. We show how digital technologies may be used to reach six major and general goals. For each issue, we discuss concrete recent examples, from international and own projects. Finally, we address the roles in the complex process of design, development and daily operation of digital applications, in the context of a digital strategy for the museum.
HANDS-ON! Subverting Museum’s Untouchability though the Digital
2022
Let's Get Digital embraces the timely opportunity to critically reexamine the impacts of digital technology and the barrage of information on our perceptions of reality. Specifically, this panel focuses on digital art, emergent platforms, and forms of creative care and curatorial strategies. In bringing together a panel of artists, scholars, and curators, we hope to collectively reflect on our present post-internet age, to borrow Byung-Chul Han's term, 'the age of like', and what it means to engage with the digital realm, over half-a-century since its inception. Part 1 looks at the transformation or augmentation of analog collections to digital forms of expression, the considerations, challenges and breakthroughs, and how the recent pandemic acted as an impetus. Part 2 examines and draws on examples of the use of digital platforms as a means to share, advocate, connect, and communicate art, ideas, and creative practices.
Emerging Technologies and the Digital Transformation of Museums and Heritage Sites, 2021
This paper will explore fresh insights into the ways we negotiate our ideas about the digital being. I suggest that digitization needs to be understood in the broader context of ontology from a phenomenological point of view, and is also crucial in curatorial practice. I find that the potential and challenges arising from the use of technology, and the value of the virtual gallery object, emphasise the need to recast traditional notions of digital ontology, digital materiality and aura, as normally detracting from authenticity.
Exploring the Digital Atmosphere of Museums: Perspectives and Potential
Technologies
This paper contributes to the field of museum and visitor experience in terms of atmosphere by discussing the “museum digital atmosphere” or MDA, a notion that has been introduced and found across museums in Greece. Research on museum atmospherics has tended to focus on physical museum spaces and exhibits. By “atmosphere”, we mean the emotional state that is a result of public response adding to the overall museum experience. The MDA is therefore studied as the specific emotional state caused by the use of digital applications and technologies. The stimulus–organism–response or SOR model is used to define the MDA, so as to confirm and reinforce the concept. To that end, a qualitative methodological approach is used; we conduct semi-structured interviews and evaluate findings via content analysis. The sample consists of 17 specialists and professionals from the field, namely museologists, museographers, museum managers, and digital application developers working in Greek museums. Ult...
Of Museums and Digital Culture: A landscape view
Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2018
A book on Museums and Digital Culture, edited by the two authors of this paper, is planned for publication in 2019. The book is structured in ten parts, typically with around three contributed chapters in each part. This paper will survey each of these areas to provide a landscape view of the overall topic, together with some personal conclusions and views on future directions by the authors. What distinguishes this museum book from others, is its focus on digital culture and art, digital behaviour, and the interaction of real and virtual life, and how this increasingly impacts museums as they move into the future. We trace the development of digital culture from its foundations in the 1940s with the work of Shannon, inventor of information theory and Turing, father of computer science, to present. A key concept is to bring diverse perspectives and voices on the 21st century museum, from inside and beyond the museum walls, of artists, academics, and professionals, as museums transform into the digital future.
Art, Museums and Digital Cultures – Rethinking Change, 2021
This paper addresses the conceptual similarities between the ongoing digital project of the Catalogue Raisonné Graça Morais, developed in the Laboratory of Arts in the Mountain – Graça Morais and the concept of the “virtual museum”. Both the digital catalogue raisonné and the virtual museum are bringing together agents who organise and disseminate information, eliciting meaningful narratives. We note that digital projects can draw on their tools and characteristics, assembling diverse types of documentation in the same platform, regardless of their original nature, and encouraging innovative and non-linear narratives about the exhibited objects. Ultimately, these projects contribute to the creation of a new heritage – “digital heritage”. In addition to these issues, this paper also seeks to contribute to the debate about the challenges of gathering analogue and digital ways of thinking and acting, and about the epistemological questions that emerge when the Social Sciences and Humanities are combined with the digital and virtual sphere.
2022
When visiting cultural heritage sites and museums, we rely on our senses in perceiving the world around us, especially architectural and artistic sensations. Even though empirical foundation can often be deceitful, it represents the stimulus we form a response to and what ultimately becomes our memory of the space. With our whole world being constantly digitalised, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, our personal and work relationships mostly became linked to technology. The aim of this paper is to question new technologies' use (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Natural Interaction, Metaverse), values and dangers recently underlined in the public discourse, as well as whether heritage sites and their users thrive in virtual surroundings at all. Using the Stimulus-Organism-Response model, this paper investigates whether the past still has a future in the traditional, formal sense. The main question is: What is the cultural significance of heritage in a virtual world and is digital heritage possible, or is this an oxymoron? The conclusion suggests that new technologies' use should be carefully and moderately carried out and limited to several situations.
The case of the MoRE Museum: The Digital Museum for Unrealized Artwork
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE - THE ART MUSEUM IN THE DIGITAL AGE January 10 - 11, 2019 at Belvedere 21, Vienna
The MoRE Museum (the Museum of Refused and Unrealized Art Projects) is a digital museum that collects, preserves and exhibits refused and unfinished art projects of the 20 and 21st centuries. The MoRE Museum, born in 2012, from the collaboration of two Italian researchers, Elisabetta Modena and Marco Scotti, was recently awarded the Italian prize I8 for independent art spaces and was “exhibited” at the MAXXI in Rome. In the wake of the virtualisation process, which has led to the advent of virtual works and exhibitions (The Gallery of Lost Art, Tate Gallery, London, 2012), the MoRE Museum is not the digital platform of a real museum. On the contrary, it is a virtual institution which has appropriated the digital language to make it a heuristic device. By insisting on the hybridisation of the museum process, generated by the virtual nature of this museum, the paper aims at a critical rereading of some key concepts: archives, projects, artwork, collection, in a contemporary, digital perspective. From the ontological change experienced by the idea of project (which loses its nature of preparatory work to acquire the very status of artwork), we will go on to question the virtual modalities of spectatorship apprehension and experience, until the point of probing the very condition of this museum, exhibited as artwork, inside another museum.
Museums and Digital Culture: From Reality to Digitality in the Age of Covid-19
Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. We investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We find that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation. We believe that museums must be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched.
The Museum’s Mind: A Genetic Code for Cultural Exhibitions Maurizio Forte, Eva Pietroni
Abstract. “Without context there is no communication” is one of the basic principles of the Bateson’s cybernetics; one needs to contextualize information for interpreting all the relations and processes of an environment (real or virtual). Hence without the creation of contexts through rules of difference there cannot be an informative exchange. The rules of difference manage the activities of interaction and learning between us and the environment, real or virtual; the more we create difference between us and the ecosystem, the more we learn. In addition, the “map is not the territory” (Bateson, 1972) it means that a code is required for perceiving and elaborating information. According to Bateson the map is “a sort of effect which sums up the differences, which organises the information about the territory’s differences”. So, in cybernetic sense, is the museum, and the dynamics of exhibition, a map or a territory? It can be a not-coded territory because it removes objects, artefacts, signs from the original context, but it is also a map because it re-contextualizes information/items according to new alphabets, relations, hierarchical contents. This map represents the codes of the exhibition in terms of topology, semiotics, relations, and connections of information. This cyber-network is the museum’s mind. The museum’s mind is the result of a design project, of cultural communication systems and of the autopoietic (in ecological sense) values/relations of the artefacts. This cybernetic mind is the mean through which the visitors learn to perceive and to interpret exhibits, to storytell their experience, to interact with the artefacts, to create a self-sense of place. In the next future, we would like to create a virtual reality system dedicated to the reconstruction of the museum mind’s: a simulation environment of artificial life for investigating all the cybernetic relations produced by cultural exhibits. This simulation could be the first step for studying shapes, geometries and ways of the cultural transmission and communication
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.
Digital technology and the art museum: a case study
Digital technology and the art museum: a case study 1 The use of interactive technology in the modern art museum has empowered the visitor, transforming them from a mere browser and observer to an active participant. It is a mode of viewing that is public, and sees art as an experience rather than something to look at, and in doing so diminishes the audience's understanding and interpretation of art. 1 Moreover, digital technology has been used very effectively to control how we interact with art through changing the physical environment and the way in which art is 'hung'. In this essay, Gallery