Final Project -- Mahnoor

The Digital Museum

For my final project, I will consider the evolving relationship between the museum, as cultural institution and physical space, and the digital or virtual realm. More and more museums are digitizing not only their collections but gallery space itself. Not only can you browse a museum's collection through a slideshow function on its website, you can virtually meander through it. Here, for example, is a gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago. On a personal level, I was initially delighted to "walk through" the Art Institute. But as I continued to move from room to room, I came to the eerie realization that the space felt wrong. There is not another visitor in sight. Virtualizing the museum space certainly has upsides--it makes visiting a museum more accessible. However, at the same time, it alters the nature of the space completely, morphing a communal experience into a solitary one.

Further, while virtual museum spaces may be more accessible, there are still pitfalls. Digitizing collections, for example, has reinforced hierarchies of art rooted in imperial modes of cultural consumption. There was an interesting article published last year analyzing how the Google Arts and Culture platform, on which one can find the virtual Art Institute, has enacted “an unintentional digital amplification of conventional traditions of art collection and interpretation that dominate museum displays in larger Western cities” (Kizhner et al.). This digital re-inscription of harmful conceptions of the Other is something we have seen in Chun, Crawford, and many other scholars we have read this semester.

I am also interested in other topics within the broad umbrella of "The Digital Museum," which is one of the reasons I have decided to format my project according to the third provided project option, a three-article series written with the intention to submit to platforms like mediacommons or Flow Journal. While my first article will focus on the Google Arts and Culture platform, I also plan to explore the effect of the pandemic on museum spaces and the emergence of websites like VOMA, a virtual museum with no physical site whatsoever. Can a space like this, so radically different from a brick-and-mortar museum, even still be called a museum? Or is one's visual and tactile engagement with it more like one's engagement with a video game or a film? Is it a different kind of space, a new kind of medium or platform, all together?