After reading a number of articles about virtual reality and its potential value for the museum world, I found myself wondering about the nature of museums themselves. Maurizio Forte–after exhausting his readers with jargon-packed musings on the “ecology of the Virtual” (brave his article Ecological Cybernetics, Virtual Reality, and Virtual Heritage if you want an explanation)–posits that museums already act similarly to Virtual Realities. He suggests that by taking artifacts out of their original contexts, museums become neutral, social spaces where visitors can develop their own understanding of the objects. Although historians and curators attempt to provide as much historical context and cultural information about the pieces in their collections, the museum gallery inherently provides a different setting in which visitors will observe and scrutinize artifacts.
What do you think about the museum as a supposedly neutral space? Do you think virtual reality could enhance your museum experience by providing a different sort of context for artifacts?
Interesting question. I don’t think a museum is a neutral space. Curators and exhibit designers deliberately select the objects for display. They may create the overall space first and then select the objects. Or they may have objects for display and design the space around said objects. Either way, the goal is to create an evocative experience for the visitor. Yes, the object isn’t in its original location; that’s an unrealistic standard. Or what about a house museum? Is that the halfway point to virtual reality? How can you design a virtual reality for an object that is thousands of years old?
Actually, museums have used dioramas and painted backdrops to create context for objects. Maybe virtual reality is merely a scrim.
To say a museum is a neutral space does go against the grain of the general wisdom in this week’s articles. In many ways, it should follow from Forte’s ecosystem analogy that virtual heritage would be superior to cultural heritage in its ability to capture not just the context but the contingency of that context (not that he uses that word, but it is implied by his emphasis on the need for a self-produced and self-producing virtual environment).
Despite my doubts about museums using digital media to attempt to recreate reality (as seen on Colin’s blog), it can also be argued that a digital version of an exhibit could in fact be more neutral. Of course the public would still be getting material that was curated but a digital object on a white background in the middle of cyberspace and perhaps labeled with some basic meta-data for identification, as opposed to an object in a glass case, juxtaposed with other objects and perhaps other written content…it seems a bit less interpreted to me.
I don’t think virtual reality will greatly enhance the neutral space of museums. If anything, they could lead to greater anonymity between museum guests, which makes for an impersonal experience. You don’t really know for sure if the people you’re interacting with are the real deal or if they have created an artificial persona for themselves. When your identity is anonymous, you are allowed to do things you normally wouldn’t do in public (saying racist things in an online forum, or game, is different from saying racist things out loud in front of real people).
I don’t know what kind of virtual gallery museums have in mind: are they trying to go for immersion, or just the recreate the gallery for the convenience of remote access outside the museum environment? One benefit I see to virtual galleries is that you no longer deal with the hassle of the crowd; you could enjoy the entire gallery alone and at your own leisurely pace. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think that virtual reality could ever out do the “real” artifact. There’s something about physical presence that computer software can’t emulate.
I think I may have needed to give this post another glance before publishing it. Neutral, definitely a charged word, isn’t exactly what I meant. Though I do appreciate the discussion here.
It’d have been more accurate to say unnatural–in that the object is taken into a foreign space. Forte notes that we learn by observing differences, and this makes the unnaturalness of a museum space an excellent arena for education. When we move into the realm of Virtual Reality, the context is replaced and (with some serious stretch of the imagination) when VR becomes so advanced that it feels truly real, how will we learn about objects as those “differences” are no longer as apparent.