'Researching Museums' seminar
University of Leicester Department of Museum Studies
November 27 2002

The virtual Aura: the technologies of exhibition and the exhibition of technologies

Susan Hazan

Abstract
As Walter Benjamin described in his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", the role of art in society and the notion that art has become modified through mechanical reproduction has engaged not only artists, but also curators and the museum public. Benjamin embraced the severing of the quasi-mystical 'aura' from the original as a potentially liberating phenomenon, both for the reproduction of works of art and for the art of film, whereby making works of art widely available, introducing new forms of perception in film and photography and allowing art to move from private to public, from the elite to the masses.

While the loss of the aura for Benjamin represented new possibilities, what was forfeited in this process, were the 'aura' and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.

Using a number of models of museum web sites each with their own metaphor for the traditional museum, I will evaluate the different ways in which museums are responding to life on the net.

While post-modernists are always lamenting the loss of something or another, we perhaps might want to think about what might be gained in this equation. Not only are we witness to a proliferation of compelling content driven museum web sites, we might also welcome the emergence of new and perhaps enchanting cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.

Keywords
Aura, Walter Benjamin, electronic, surrogate, digitally born, virtual museum

Paper
The museum is changing. Modifications to the ICOM Statutes adopted by the General Assembly in Barcelona on Friday 6th July 2001 now include

Cultural centres and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity [1].

On Monday, 10 September 2001 The ICANN Board unanimously adopted a resolution empowering the ICANN President to sign the agreement between ICANN and MuseDoma establishing dot-museum [2]. On October 17th, 2001 the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) signed a Sponsorship Agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the creation of the top-level Internet domain dot-museum [3].

The .museum top-level domain (TLD) is being created to provide verifiable means for recognizing domain names used by bona fide museums, their professional associations, and individual members of the museum profession. Special subdomains will be established for virtual museums and other aspects of museum activity conducted by agencies that do not operate physical museums [4].

The electronic phenomenon for museums is a relatively new reality, with implications both for concrete museums as well as their online electronic surrogates. Now museums can sign up and join the dot-museum online community (.museum) with their explicit professional affiliation inscribed in their online identification. As well as broadcasting the online institutional website 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the physical museum visit now typically includes, electronic kiosks in the galleries that replace wall panels and catalogs, information centers that entice visitors to sit in front of monitors during a museum visit, and electronic collections distributed beyond the museum walls. In the contemporary art gallery, some of the art works themselves are no longer a material manifestation but appear in the gallery in electronic form (see discussion NINCH Community Report 2001, Hazan, 2001) [5]. The institution of the museum is adapting, as new architectures demand new strategies.

This is also a time where (digital) history is in the making and contemporary collecting practices are being redefined. Walter Benjamin's' work Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which was seminal in bringing into focus the notion of art as politic, referred to mechanically reproduced art and has also similar implications for electronically reproduced art. This paper will illustrate the equation of what has been lost, (Benjamin suggests that it is the aura which has been forfeited) and to what in the process has been gained. Looking to the architecture of the electronic museum, through digital archives of material collections, the online surrogate museum and digitally born art, this paper will evaluate how electronic artifacts and architectures have made their online screen debut. Now that we are witness to a proliferation of compelling content driven museum web sites that iterate and extend museum functions online, we may also celebrate the liberation of these institutions from their wall-bound status, mapping how they have now become more accessible to the public and consequently more articulated in the public sphere. Of equal interest, looking to the emerging digitally born artefact, we may also welcome at the same time the emergence of new and perhaps enchanting cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.

Falk and Dierking, Directors of the Institute for Learning Innovation decry that museums are anxious if not downright spooked by the proliferations of virtual museums (Falk and Dierking: 2000, 231) and note in their key points that sum up their popular book, Learning from Museums, Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning, that one of the threats they perceive to the museum is the rapid spread of virtual experiences, virtual collections, and virtual museums which they perceive as undermining the need for real experiences, real collections, and real museums (Falk and Dierking: 2000, 234). The implications of these architectures for the institutional reality are somewhat less alarming. While electronic applications and environments could be seen to be detrimental to the intrinsic museum experience by some, I would suggest that new technologies working side by side with, or replacing the old merely represent a natural progression of display strategies that serve to enhance and contextualise the collections in the same way that museums have been doing for decades if not centuries.

Falk and Dierkings also argue that the battle over the virtual versus real experience, has already been won and that that people will readily choose the real experience over the virtual every time (Falk and Dierking: 2000, 231). However in post-modern society, our participation in the public sphere, understanding of current events, entertainment and life long education have come to depend more and more not only on mediated resources rather than first hand, getting our boots dirty experience that the engagement with the 'real thing' is a luxury that not everyone can find the time to enjoy even though we are all aware of the many ways in which they evoke wonder in us. For the majority of society, without the capital to surround themselves with the original, the museum, the zoo, and the botanical garden offer a public space to languish in the authentic. However with leisure time a limited asset, we depend more and more on the mediated experiences and the surrogate to fill in the gaps. Second hand virtual narratives either from television or digital interaction cause us not merely to take pleasure in or reflect on these kinds of engagement but to actively construct our daily lives through them.

We cannot be physically present at every national celebration and we do not want to be present in a war-zone. We are content to let the camera be our eye and the anchorman our mouthpiece. Where much of our life is lived through mediated rather than through first hand experience, much of our daily interaction is becoming more vitreous than visceral. Over the last 40 years, most of the world's populations have since spent countless hours watching the world, in vivo, in vitro on screens in their living rooms, bedrooms and classrooms. Content to watch live sporting events from the comfort of an armchair; we receive the daily fix of news on the allotted time slot and as faithful voyeurs of other people's lives, some real, some not, playing out on weekly dramas on the screen. Marc Auge reminds us of

'The false familiarity the small screen establishes between the viewers and the actors of big-scale history, whose profiles become as well known to us as those of soap-opera heroes and international artistic or sporting stars' (Auge: 1995, 32).

Walter Benjamin's discussion in his famous and much quoted essay The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, although often quoted in the context of photographic or film practice, reveal that his arguments also have compelling implications for the electronic duplication for the digital image. Benjamin, writing against the backdrop of the Nazi era in 1936, described the role of art in society and the way that art had become modified, through mechanical reproduction. Benjamin embraced the severing of the quasi-mystical 'aura' from the original as potentially liberating phenomena. By making works of art widely available, it opened new forms of perception in film and photography, and the accessibility of art could move from private to public, from the elite to the masses. While at the same time questioning the need for authenticity, Benjamin welcomed the close-ups and slow motion of the moving image in that they opened up new values for art that were no longer so dependant on cult values or ritual. Thus Benjamin's' work was seminal in bringing into focus the notion of art as politic. This, insight according to Benjamin meant that

For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual (Benjamin: 1935, 1992, 218).

What had been forfeited in this process, were the 'aura' and the authority of the object, scarred, yet also embellished with the patina of time and prismatic with the marks of human endeavour. It was the aura that contained within it the value of cultural heritage and tradition. Even though loss of the aura for Benjamin meant the loss of the original, the transformation or liberation of the art object to the ordinary represented a gain. For Benjamin, what had then replaced the original was the illusion of the moving image and duplication of the photograph. For post-modern society, we are concerned with the digital image, which, in the same way that the mechanically reproduced object is accessible to others outside of the traditional 'art elite', the ubiquitously disseminated digital image may be celebrated as a liberating phenomenon even though what Benjamin referred to as the ethereal aura that has clearly been forfeited (Hazan: 2001).

Photography long left behind the notion of the photograph as historical document, and through aesthetic appreciation, the photograph has come to represent a theoretical object, attaining a status of its own as an autonomous art form. This ontological evolution has taken almost a century and we now recognize the capacity of the photographic image to stir emotions and cause wonder. Roland Barthes suggested that photographs contain 'aura' [6] the aura of the lost in me and of lost memories much in the same way that Proust's textual reminiscences of the Madeline pastry [7] and the potency of it's wafting odour served to evoke buried memory. In Camera Lucida, Barthes distinguishes the "punctum" as that accident of photographic detail that pricked him, bruised him and was so evocative to him that it induced an almost transcendental experience, conjuring up poignant, lost memories of his mother.

My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother was seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing...she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera...she was holding one finger in the other hand as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister had posed, side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden...I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother (Barthes, 1981).

The potency of the Winter Garden Photograph, for Barthes, lay in its ability to mediate the palpable essence of his mother, telescoped both distance and time across not only across Barthes' own lifetime but also across his mother's lifetime. To return to Benjamin's' essay and the compelling experience of watching a film, he comments…

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.

The inclusion of video art and digitally-born art in the gallery (as opposed to the digital documentation of the material collections) may be perceived by some as a challenge to the traditional mandate of the institution of the museum, to collect and exhibit singular and valuable material objects for their audiences. The new, ontological space that the digitally-born art pervades might easily be perceived as being just as singular or as valuable when framed in the gallery as art or artifact, once delineated by the framing device of the gallery and enhanced by ambiance of the museum. Could the reality of the digital image also be incomparably more significant than that of the painting as Benjamin noted with film, as it permeates reality with electronic equipment and in some form challenges the monopoly of the material artifact through close ups and juxtaposition of new combinations? As Benjamin noted, enlargement or slow motion, can capture images, which escape natural vision. Could the singularity and emotive poignancy imbued in the un-natural vision of digitally-born art be a way of recapturing some of the lost aura, so infusing the digitally born artifact with its own, and no less compelling virtual aura?

The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology (Benjamin, 1936, 1997).

The museum experience is far more complex than the relation between immediate reality and artifice although the museum is probably the best place to seek out reality in a media-saturated society.

 



The real thing, photo of poster in Green Park underground station, London, © Hazan, 2002



While the museum entices its audiences with alluring promises of the real thing, its sum parts are more than simply the encounter with the original object, the dissemination of knowledge or even constructivist the educational scenario . Sometimes the museum visit is simply about the social benefit of identifying with, or visiting inside a culturally robust institution as Flora Kaplan reminds us…

Elites as well as competing mobile groups, vying for power, have always used objects, collections, and public displays as a means of differentiating themselves, and legitimating themselves in a social hierarchy. Museums offer the opportunity to do just that - and exhibitions constitute a major method (Kaplan, 1995: 39).

At the same time that audiences avail themselves of the prestige and power drawn from the physical museum, they are also appropriating museum quality intellectual assets in electronic form from spaces other than the traditional museum, such as on television and over the Internet. When visitors physically come into the bricks and mortar museum, the strength of culturally robust objects, lie in their power to encapsulate cultural discourses and serve as referents to historical processes, yet, as potent as this might be, the museum experience's sum parts is more than simply the encounter with the auratic object. Museums are also about the dissemination of knowledge and the active process of the identification with narratives, other cultures and other histories, all articulated in the constructivist educational scenario [8]. Now audiences are appropriating museum-like collections and museum-like educational encounters in electronic form through spaces other than the traditional museum such as on television and over the Internet. The traditional gallery talk, for example, can easily be replicated through a television program or online presentation. Exploring what can be defined as the museum experience and mapping how museum collections and experiences have made their screen debuts it is interesting to note which have failed in their bid to extend the museum beyond the museum walls and which have succeed in their celebration of a liberating phenomenon. This paper will turn to a number of examples of electronic museum web sites in order to explore the new realities of museum dissemination in a bid to illustrate the emerging phenomena of the virtual aura.


The archived collection


Much effort has been invested by museums across the world to digitalise assets and to showcase collections from archived databases on their web sites. This is a logical outcome from the collections management databases that have been development as curatorial management tools across the institution of the museum. With the addition of new interfaces developed for the information kiosk or study room in the museum, these databases could be easily re-purposed for public access either in the museum or beyond the museum walls. Many spectacular interfaces have been especially designed for public interface, such as the Turning the Pages [9] project at the British Museum. Visitors are welcomed to virtually "turn" the pages of manuscripts on touch-screen technology where they can zoom in on one of the convincingly presented electronic manuscripts, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Diamond Sutra, the Sforza Hours, the Leonardo Notebook, the Golden Haggadah, the Luttrell Psalter, Blackwell's Herbal, the Sherborne Missal and Sultan Baybars' Qur'an, with an online version of the last two also available on the British museum web site. Turning the Pages facilitates a new different kind of museum experiences, which not only preserves the original from unwanted handling it also grants the visitor new kinds of meaningful access not previously possible.


Screenshot of 'Turning the Pages', British Library web site

 

A critical mass of searchable objects for the public is also available on online collections such as the Compass project at the British Museum, and the Thinker ImageBase, [10] from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor), USA. Both institutional websites translates the traditional museum metaphor into the digital, through a comprehensive showcase of functionalities in electronic form, highlighting the dynamic of museum activities: visitor information, membership, education experiences and online shopping at the museum store. At the same time, the sites offer the visitor or surfer access to a critical mass of the digital holdings of the real museums allowing for browsing and the selection of digital objects over a self-defined path through the collections. While facilitating active construction of new connections and combinations, the Thinker ImageBase also allows visitors to produce their own exhibition from the vast holdings using the especially designed, online interface.

While the de Young Museum is closed to the public until spring, 2005, the database provides authoritative background material both on the exhibitions on display as well as the collections behind the scenes. According to the web site, the collections belong to the public and because the museum is able to show less than 5% of the collections in the galleries at any given time, they feel a special responsibility to make them accessible in other ways. The Thinker ImageBase is a fully keyword searchable database, containing 110,000 images from the collections and is promoted as an expression of the museum's mission to provide meaningful public access to the collections and behaves more like a resource and less like a repository. The online collection offers a compelling educational experience, and recalls Andre Malraux's message of universality in his "Museum Without Walls." Just as Malraux predicted and applauded the globalisation process that was yet to evolve, both he and Walter Benjamin would undoubtedly have celebrated the unrestricted distribution of art resources that are now freely bestowed upon remote visitors by such museums over the Internet.

While the potential educational value of such a site is commendable, in that it effectively replaces the traditional learning tool of slides or exhibition catalogue through a network distribution, I would question the notion of 'meaningful access.' Not all media make their debuts online equally well. While it is difficult to distinguish a digitally rendered film from its analogue counterpart, or is a photograph in its electronic manifestation ontologically separable from its paper cousin, other media do not translate quite so well. Museums limit their online images to low resolution of their collections quite correctly due to copyright property issues yet the reduction of the electronic representation, of a scanned photograph representation of, say a Leonardo Da Vinci Last Supper on the wall of the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy, or Marsyas, Anish Kapoor's sculpture in the Tate's Turbine Hall, embedded in a web page and seen perhaps from one angle does little service to the auratic original object. At the same time, web authors invest considerable time and energy in making images speedily accessible through limiting to low resolution and cropping. It is precisely this immediacy of access that makes the process so alarmingly effortless. The speed factor, the 'click to go' phenomenon, may actually act as a disservice to the collections and act as the antithesis of the enchantment of technology, that in fact causes the disembedding of cultural systems.



The digitally- born museum

A museum that does not exist in objective reality and is exclusively constructed electronically on the World Wide Web is the MUVA, El Pais Virtual Museum of Art [11]. This museum is a virtual fabrication, and maintains only a tenuous connection to reality. MUVA utilizes a 3D technique, Web2mil, to conjure up a magic environment. Alicia Haber, the Director of the museum, welcomes visitors to the museum, which specializes in contemporary Uraguayan and Latin American art, and hosts extensive collections of paintings by leading Uraguayan artists. Four architects, Jaime Lores, Raul Nazur, Daniel Colominas and Marcelo Mezzottoni were commissioned to prepare the plans for the building, on Avenida 18 de Julio, the main artery of Uruguay's capital, Montevideo. They created a fine arts museum, consisting of galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as spaces for informal shows, sculpture garden, restoration workshops, and administrative service areas. The building has five main floors where galleries are open to the public, twenty-four hours a day... virtually that is!

 

Screenshot - MUVA, El Pais Virtual Museum of Art

 

Some sixteen graphic and web-designers, programmers, photographers and system managers modeled textures of the walls, stairways, windows, sidewalks, roofs and elevator, pixel by pixel, to provide a sense of 'reality' for the visitors. Intuitive navigation tools, allowing for fluid exploration around the galleries and collections, were studiously hung and discretely lit. Through embedded 'hot-spots', in the paintings, click-able links refer to in-depth studies of the artist's work, biographies and further information on the thematic presentation of the exhibition.

In order to construct the same museum in concrete, steel and glass, it would have cost over 100 million dollars, a prohibitive sum for the Uruguayan reality. Due to the efforts of this highly motivated and imaginative team, Uruguay's artists can now show their works collectively, substituting that impossible museum with their own virtual museum. This echoes Gell's comment that the essential alchemy of art is to make what is not out of what is, and to make what is out of what is not. In this case one is not describing an art object, but an entire museum. But we might also be reminded of Lash, Urry and Giddens' dubious implications for society and discern that the virtual metaphor of a museum might be a reflection of the emptying out of subject and object. Even so, while we do recognize a substantial loss, we might also side with Benjamin that, in this loss, there is also a welcome gain. With the liberation of the original object and its distribution over the Internet, this opens up, for the first time, the availability of Uruguayan art for remote visitors and the opportunity for these artists to reach a broader audience.

Virtual reality art, cyborg sculptures and other technological creations

Since the Duchamp benchmark, artworks have slipped out of the painterly horizon or sculptured form and there probably isn't a substance on the planet, animal, mineral, or vegetable, legal or illegal that hasn't been incorporated into a contemporary art exhibit at one time or another. On January 1st, 2001 SFMOMA, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art launched 010101:ART.IN.Technological.Times, [12] with the gallery component that opened on March 3, which according to their web promotion was to be one of the most ambitious exhibitions in its history, a show filled with animated "paintings," virtual reality art, cyborg sculptures and other technological creations. From the moment it opened, one minute after midnight on the first day of the new millennium it proved to be a popular show, with audiences forming long lines at the front doors. In spite of the fact that some of the interactives, interacted less satisfyingly than the producers had intended, most visitors seemed to find the show novel and engaging, with some even going as far to say that it was an exhilarating experience (see Medium Isn't the Message; Art Is by Jason Spingarn-Koff) [13].

Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, [14] curated by Steve Dietz, of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and curator of Beyond Interface and Shock of the View produced a travelling show of some 40 works by 25 artists that opened on its first leg of the tour at the San Francisco Art Institute on February 7 in the same year. "About half the works are world premieres", said Dietz, "and many of the others are classics which are rarely seen". The web-site reflects not only the real and the hybrid elements of the gallery space, but also places the cornucopia of net works of the emerging net art medium into historical context. As the new millennium gather speed, BitStreams was unveiled in March in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art, including some 30 sculptors, painters and video artists, as well as 15 to 20 sound artists exhibited in especially designed sound stations. This type of project was not new to the Whitney who in 1994, was the first major institution to collect a work of Net art, with Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence [15] and is an institution that has showcased such projects over many years.

Just as a fish cannot live out of water, so digitally born art/web projects are not able to breath outside of their natural medium, the World Wide Web. When a project is dependent on a series of networked computers for its intrinsic content as The World's First Collaborative Sentence was, (with hundreds of active users across the net each making their own contribution to the sentence), this makes more demands not only on the curatorial staff, the exhibition development team but also challenges the very institutionalism of the institution itself.

Screenshot of Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence


If visitors could just as easily access some of the components of the hybrid gallery experience, such as the web projects from their own homes or office computers, why would they even need to come into the museum at all? The cusp of the new millennium ushered in the institutionalising of what was once perceived as Alternative Museum projects [16], brazenly walking through the front doors of leading institutions around the world and bringing hundreds of visitors in their wake. Enticed by the dazzle of the medias' hype of the new, and specifically to a new medium and presumably new kind of art experience, some of the visitors to these block busters perhaps had never come to a museum before. Clearly other block busters have marked this phenomenon, often when there is an impressionist ring to the title or a titillating theme such as Body Worlds exhibited in Berlin and London in 2002 [17] but also surprisingly with such shows as the Art of the Motorcycle, exhibited at the Guggenheim in 1998 [18].

Now that digitally born art projects, exhibited as hybrid experiences combined with the material artefact integrated into the electronic counterpart have now become fairly mainstream in international art museum, so have their counterpart on the institutional website. Sometimes the website is the only space available to the institution to exhibited collections. At the time of writing this paper (Autumn 2002) the Tate was promoting its new exhibition space, a surprisingly ingenious location for not only collections, but also for curators and display.

"In order to fulfil their mission to extend access to British and International modern and contemporary art, the Tate Trustees have been considering for some time how they could find new dimensions to Tate's work. They have therefore determined that the next Tate site should be in space. At this stage a number of practical aspects of the project are being tested and an early pre-opening programme is being taken forward. This will clearly continue the Tate tradition of innovation and exploration, and provide a radical new location for the display of the Collection and for educational projects.

We are very pleased to announce the launch online of our Tate in Space programme." [19].

There have been many interesting developments at the Tate web site recently. "Uncomfortable Proximity" one of the first net projects this institution hosted and served to shake up the very institutional nature of the Tate itself. Where the 'real' Tate provided floor plans for traditional and contemporary collections, the Tate Mongrel Project, created by Harwood, took visitors under the floor of the Tate below the floorboards.
The Tate's scrapbook of British pictorial history has many missing pages, either torn out through revision or self-censored before the first sketch. Those that did make it created the cultural cosmetics of peoples profiting from slavery, migrant labour, colonisation and transportation. Clearly the images in the historic collection and the image of the Tate itself are pregnant with the past's cosmetic cultural surgery made ready for the shopping lists of the future (Uncomfortable Proximity, 2000).

"Uncomfortable Proximity" was a project created by Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective with critical texts by Mathew Fuller, all fully commissioned by the Tate. The texts and images introduced visitors to the precarious foundations of the Tate galleries, the Millbank penitentiary, the filth of the Thames and the hidden history of the slave trade. The accrual of wealth through the slave trade, had implications for generations of British aristocracy that inevitably translated into the currency of art, some of which found its way into the Tate collections. The web site was accessed via the main Tate site, (no longer linked) where it kind of sneaked up on the surfer with what appeared to be a clone of the specific page you intended to visit on the Tate web site. The extra windows need no invitation. They unscrupulously appear on the browser in the background as you clicked your way through the site, and took you into the underbelly of Britain's national heritage and the decaying matter of the 20th century. This challenge to the very institution that was partner to the project and acted as host to the scathing message wais remarkable in itself. However, what this project illustrated was not simply the dubious underbelly of the museum but also the very foundations of the Tate cathedral, the circulatory system of art in society, and specifically the sacredness of the British art system. The use of this media is resourceful, perniciously using the electronic stage to challenge all that is embedded in the mythological nature of the circulatory art system, and symbiotically located inside of the very fabric of its embodiment, the official web site.

Conclusion

Through the examples of different kinds of websites hosted by museums it is interesting to see how new media is impacting the institution of the museum and how the different kinds of museum experiences have made their stage debuts. This has implications for how new technologies are being taken up by the museum, already with fervor all across the world, both within the galleries and beyond the museum walls. It is important to look at these experiences critically in order to ascertain whether new media architectures afford new opportunities to meaningfully enhance and interpret the material collections for the visitors or actively contribute to engaging experiences in new ways that successfully extend the museum mandate. Alternately, museum websites and electronic architectures will only serve to diminish the encounter with the auratic in the museum causing a disembedding of the culturally systems imbued within the original object.

This paper has attempted to map some of the ways that new media interventions have provided new and promising interpretations of the museum model through the electronic surrogate and digitally born, which may in Benjamin's terms, celebrate the liberating nature of electronically reproduced artefact while suggesting new cultural options, such as the virtual aura imbued in newly emerging artistic practice.



1.<http://www.icom.org/statutes.html>

2. Electronic correspondence, Mon, 10 Sep 2001
Sender: Museum TLD News and Announcements <MUSEDOMA NEWS@MUSEUM.ORG>
From: Cary Karp <ck@nrm.se>
Subject: ICANN Board takes final action on .museum

3. The full text of this agreement is available at <http://www.icann.org/tlds/>

4. <http://musedoma.org/general_principles.html>

5. NET>COM.ORG.MUSEUM
COMMUNITY REPORT 2001 - In 1998, NINCH invited leaders in the field to submit statements on the best achievements to date in arts and humanities computing in order to develop an argument to include humanities computing in significant Federal funding for information technology research.
<http://www.ninch.org/programs/report/hazen.html>

6. Camera Lucinda: Reflections on Photography, 1981

7. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, 1922

8. Hein, George, E., 1998, Learning in the Museum, Routledge

9. <http://www.bl.uk/collections/treasures/about.html>

10. <http://www.thinker.org/f>

11. <http://www3.diarioelpais.com/muva2/>

12. <http://010101.sfmoma.org/>

13. <http://www.wired.com/>.

14. <http://telematic.walkerart.org/>

15. <http://ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/davis/Sentence/sentence1.html>

16. <http://www.alternativemuseum.org/>

17. The Body Worlds exhibition was been seen by over eight million people in Japan, Germany, Austria and Belgium and London http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

18. < http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/>

19. <http://www.tate.org.uk>



Bibliography
Auge, M. (1995), non-places, Verso, London, New York
Barthes, R. (1993), The Imagination of the sign, A Barthes Reader
Barthes, R. (1999), 'The Rhetoric of the Image', Visual Culture, Ed. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall
Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucinda: Reflections on Photography, Vintage, UK
Benjamin, W. (1997), The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Illuminations, Fontana Press
Falk, J. and Dierking, L.D. (2000), Learning from the Museum, Visitor Experience and the Making of Meaning, AltaMira Press
Hazan, S. (2001), The Virtual Aura, Selected Papers from an International Conference, Museums and the Web 2001 - Seattle March, 2001, Edited by David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, USA,
Hein, G. E. (1998), Learning in the Museum, Routledge
Kaplan, F. (1995), Exhibitions as communicative media, in Museum, Media, Message, Ed. Hooper-Greenhill, E. Routledge, London and New York
Malraux, A. Museum Without Walls,



Susan Hazan is the Curator of New Media at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Her masters is in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University London and is currently in the final year of her doctoral studies at Goldsmiths. Her research, The Virtual Aura, focuses on the technologies of exhibition and the exhibition of technologies: an exploration of electronic architectures in the contemporary museum and the impact of new media on the institution of the museum.

Hazan has published several publications in new media in education, art, and museums and has presented at numerous international conferences. Since 1999 she has sat on the program committees of both ICHIM and Museum and the Web conferences and in 2001 was keynote speaker at the Museum and the Web conference. She is currently guest lecturer at the Computing Department, teaching the module Web Design for the Cultural Sector, The course emphasizes the correlation between cultural theory and contemporary practice.
http://www.shazan.com/home