'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
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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
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