Interactive Technologies in the Art Museum
Elena Stylianou2012
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
AI
AI
The paper discusses the impact of interactive technologies on visitor engagement and the curatorial practices within art museums. It highlights the shift from traditional art consumption to more participatory approaches facilitated by technology, as well as the consequences of these changes on authority and expertise in art interpretation. Key examples include cinema screenings of exhibitions and public art installations, raising questions about how technology influences the selection and dissemination of artworks, and the implications for power dynamics in the art world.
Key takeaways
- In what ways could museums enhance visitors' engagement and learning?
- In addition, museums recently seem to move away from fact and historical record to a more loosely related approach to interpretation, allowing narrative, myth and fiction into museum displays.
- In the most part, even though visitors tend to engage with virtual reality installations, museums are still skeptical about their threatening potential of taking away from the authentic experience with museum objects.
- In effect, the question whether technology is indeed useful for museums and whether its applications effectively change museum practices remains unanswered.
- Technology is not yet at the core of museum activities on site, in many cases it is dispatched to the virtual and actual periphery of museum activity: the preserve of education (itself often on the margins of museum activity/hierarchy).
Related papers
Moving image and institution: Cinema and the museum in the 21st century, University of Cambridge (6-8 July 2011)
Necsus - European Journal of Media Studies, 2012
When Art Exhibition Met Cinema Exhibition:: Live documentary and the remediation of the museum experience
Documenting the Visual Arts, 2020
This chapter explores the short-lived phenomenon of the live broadcast of museum exhibitions into cinemas between 2011 and 2014, including Leonardo Live (2011) from London’s National Gallery, Pompeii Live (2013) and Vikings Live (2014) from the British Museum, and Matisse Live (2014) from the Tate Modern. These incongruous broadcasts, part arts documentary, part promotional material for their respective museums and exhibitions, appeared at the peak of the rapid growth of event cinema that took place at this time. However, unlike theater and other live performance, museum exhibitions and cinema exhibition are two distinct very distinct “media,” visually, temporally, and spatially. This chapter argues that this intermedial incompatibility is evidenced in the broadcasts’ use of cinematography and liveness and they are also a response to questions surrounding curatorial intent in museum exhibitions.
Framing Cinema The Introduction of Cinema into the Art Museum
This paper aims to provide an overview of how the moving image has entered contemporary art spaces, since the early film societies supported by art museums to our present day. I will focus on some of the countries and scenarios in which this phenomenon has been most documented.
The Museum, Public Space and the Internet. Environments for Presenting Interactive Film
Contemporary art more and more frequently takes the form of a visual or audiovisual event rather than a permanent, stable object – an artefact. Today we increasingly encounter alongside film, the first artistic medium based on moving images, and its continuation – video, various forms of interactive media. As a result of the coexistence of these media, the temporal dimension of the work-event assumes one of two forms. In the first form, the work is linear in structure. Its time span poses a challenge to the traditional relationship between the addressee and the work of art. The addressee should in this case be aware of and accept the fact that it is not he or she who determines the time frame needed to experience a work of art, but rather the work itself. That failure in respect to this principle robs him or her of the possibility of truly experiencing the work. This challenge is one of acceptance and adaptation. In the second form, the work is nonlinear in structure. Here the temporal relationship between viewers and the work is determined by their mutual relations – that is, through a process of interaction. It is this interaction – with the event replacing the objective artefact – that in fact constitutes the experience of the work. In this case, the addressee's attitude cannot be reduced to a simple reaction to the temporal form of the work. But it is also not solely dependent on his or her decisions. It is the result of mutual cooperation between the two sides – the addressee and the work. This challenge is one of participation and cooperation. While the first type of work has found a home in the museum world thanks to the process of videofication the art world has been undergoing since the mid-1990s, pioneers of which include Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and Matthew Barney. The second type has only just begun to make its way into museums. In this chapter, I intend to propose a typology of interactive film and consider how the fates of these different varieties are tied to the institution of the museum, as well as what other environments could serve as a space for presenting it.
Visible and Invisible Institutions: Cinema in the (French) Museum
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies Volume 4: Museum Media, 2015
"In this chapter, I argue the case that film, and cinema more broadly, have produced metaphorical and literal shifts of focus and frame within the museum context. The chapter initially discusses the multi-layered ways in which film, as a representational medium and as an exhibited object, interacts with its political and socio-cultural counterpart: the institution of cinema. I then argue that these focal shifts in the treatment of film in the museum, and the treatment of museums on film, potentially eliminate some aspects of the museum from cinema’s perceptual field, while highlighting others, operating as a counter-discourse to the prime concerns of museums at a given moment in time. These aspects are also subject to, and affected by changes in the tangible materiality of cinema, as an object, an experience, an exhibition space, and a cultural institution. Rather than imagining film as a ‘medium’ in the technological or communicative sense, the chapter examines the politics of film as a mediator, negotiator, or indeed critic of museum spaces and museum politics. The ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ institutions in the title of this chapter refer to these shifts in focus and frame that draw attention toward – or away from – the political and cultural contingency of film in the museum space. Cinema’s historical and contemporary privileged position in French cultural heritage suggests that thinking about French museums specifically informs an understanding of the moving image’s conceptual and spatial shift away from ‘cinema’ as such, towards a broader conception of the medium. ‘Cinema’ as we like to think about it has long since left the auditorium and found itself transmitted across multiple screen media technologies, from the handheld mobile device, to digital streaming, to large-scale screening on tower blocks: such devices have inevitably been adopted by museums as modes of education, interpretation and outreach. Increasingly, ‘cinema’, as a mutable cultural institution that defies visible definition, has made a shift into the ‘museum’: a socio-cultural institution which often courts both physical presence and virtual existence, in add-on digital apps, screen-based interpretation and online exhibition spaces. Consequently, the case studies of this chapter are situated within a French cultural context that offers concrete examples of the complex relationships between cinema and the museum. In doing so, the chapter interrogates the complex political, curatorial and broader socio-cultural concerns of the institutionalized ‘housing’ of film within the museum, both as a public space and as a political institution. "
Changing Museum Environments: Global Articulations of the ‘Video Text’ (1968–1990)
Electronic Melbourne Art Journal, 2007
This article addresses how and why video art shaped the museum environment for the 21st century. The argument tracks a period of museological innovation between 1968 and 1990. Beginning with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, changes in architectural display and curatorial focus are then examined with respect to the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the Tate Gallery, London and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. This research reveals how video art's "problematic" time-based presence and redefinition of normative spectator positions assisted in the development of modern museum environments suitable for constant modification.
Cinema and the museum: a case for partnership?
University of Roehampton, 2016
How can cinema fit into the museum? It is not always clear how film relates to the cultural institutions – such as museums – which are charged with the conservation and maintenance of the “canon” of excellence. How can film academics converge with museums?
Museums and Art on the Internet
ICHIM, Hands on: Hypermedia and Interactivity in …, 1995
Fascinating Museological Audiences, Or the Cinematic Appeal
Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, , 2022
This review of Elisa Mandelli's book The Museum as a Cinematic Space: The Display of Moving Images in Exhibitions (2019) explains how, according to the author, several viewing dispositifs, understood as a rather flexible assemblage of elements, are increasingly being used in museums to combine education with entertainment. Thus, museums are becoming "cinematic spaces" with an ideological perspective. Mandelli's approach to the projection technologies of moving images in museological venues is not only chronological but also phenomenological. A three-way interest is recognizable in the alignment of chapters, encompassing the educational value of the dispositifs, their artistic nature, and the experiential factor. As the book provides an interesting overview of two fields that usually are not taken together and contains an assortment of case studies described in detail, it should make a good addition to the fields of Museum and Film Studies.
Related papers
The cinefication of museums: from exhibitions to films. The case of Tate Modern
Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication
Since the end of the 20th century, museum institutions have been adopting the logic of communication, promotion, and administration typical of cultural industries, mainly Cinema. In 1994, Andreas Huyssen argued that the museum, as an elitist place of preservation of canon and high culture, gave way to the museum as a mass medium. Cinema became the paradigm of contemporary cultural activities whose new exhibition practices respond to the changing expectations of the public and their constant search for stellar events.Since the end of the 20th century, museum institutions have been adopting the logic of communication, promotion, and administration typical of cultural industries, mainly Cinema. In 1994, Andreas Huyssen argued that the museum, as an elitist place of preservation of canon and high culture, gave way to the museum as a mass medium. Cinema became the paradigm of contemporary cultural activities whose new exhibition practices respond to the changing expectations of the publi...
"Film Forum, XXV International Film Studies Conference Exposing the Moving Image: The Cinematic Medium across World Fairs, Art Museums, and Cultural Exhibition"
Cinéma & Cie International Film Studies Journal , 2018
'The Blockbuster Exhibition' by Emma Barker in 'Contemporary Cultures of Display'
Essay for the Art & Museum culture module, 2012
The exhibition 'Manet: Inventeur du moderne' attracted 470,000 visitors at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The term blockbuster derives from the military vocabulary, but in the American slang of the fifties, it has traditionally been associated to the commercial success of a play. Nowadays, we use it as related to the entertainment industry, though it is more common to hear it when we talk about a film with a large budget . What is noticeable is the size and scale of this phenomenon, its promotion and press coverage. Only recently, the term has been employed to characterise highly popular exhibitions attracting wide audiences. This expression might seem surprising since these exhibitions mostly feature high or fine art paintings, while the term blockbuster used to refer to more 'popular' forms of entertainment. Accordingly, Open University lecturer Emma Barker, in her essay 'Exhibiting the canon: the blockbuster show', investigates the popularity of such events. Her article, published in Contemporary Cultures of Display, is devised for students who undertake a distance-learning course in art history; it is therefore well structured and quite accessible.
Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? edited by Angela Dalle Vacche
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2015
Between “White Cube” and “Black Box”: Urban Screening and Other Notes on Exhibiting Video Art Today
Los Americanos/ exhibition e-catalogue, 2013
While looking at Rene Magritte's famous painting Le Blanc-Seing i (The Blank Cheque, 1965) as a viewer from the 21 st century, one may easily assume it is an image projected on tree trunks. The woman on the horse appears to be digitally projected deep into the forest because Magritte accurately interweaves particles of the foreground with objects in the distance. We can assume that it happens due to the transparency of a projected image and the permeability of the surface where the image is projected. In an attempt to think about Magritte's painting as a proto-video piece, we notice that there is an inner rhythm in the composition of the painting, which gives it a .gif or moving image feeling. Despite the fact that Magritte's primary explanation had no relation to technological issues, this painting allows the viewer to see it as multiple images within a single frame.
‘Thoughts About Curating Moving Images’, Mousse Magazine 38, April 2013: 56-61 (published in English and Italian).
Filipa Ramos: Why do you think that, after more than a century of relation to the moving image, and after many intensive forms of dialogue between the cinema and the contexts and venues of art, there is still an urgency to define the terms of the presentation of the cinema within the museum/gallery space? Erika Balsom: The tremendous enthusiasm for the moving image in contemporary art belies the fact that much of the history of cinema in the museum is a history of institutional unfriendliness. After founding the Museum of Modern Art's film library in 1935, Iris Barry remarked that the relationship of the film library to the rest of the museum was like the "slightly ambiguous position of the adopted child who is never seen in the company of the family." I think that this statement can be generalized to speak of the broader condition of the moving image in most museums until the early 1990s, when projection becomes the dominant mode of presentation for video and art's infatuation with cinema finally begins to take hold. The severe belatedness of the institutional acceptance of the moving image is a key part of what generates the feeling of urgency to think through the relationships between art and cinema today: there is a whole history to recover and contextualize that has still not received adequate consideration, as well as a proliferation of vibrant contemporary practices. Moreover, during the same period digitization has made the moving image transportable across formats and exhibition spaces like never before, radically altering the possibilities of presentation and prompting a reconsideration of established display contexts like the movie theatre. In the wake of such immense transformations, an imperative arises to take account of the new role of screens within the museum and gallery, especially as these spaces are increasingly the institutional site of many practices that would have (or in fact did) exist in the movie theatre in the past.
The Commercial Film for the 15th Istanbul Biennial as an Example for an Interactive Art: #Biennialinthecity
Differing Outlook of Contemporary Advertising, Peter Lang Publication, 2019
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.