Author Archives: Arielle Orem

Final Essay: The Google Art Project, A Virtual Museum

Arielle Orem 

Introduction

Engineers and developers are constantly trying to innovate ways to bridge the gap between physical space (reality) and virtual space (virtual reality).  Overcoming this divide is also becoming increasingly of interest to museum professionals as they seek to “join up the museum experience with the online experience, taking the museum beyond the boundaries of the physical building and allowing online visitors into the museum” (Patten). In his essay “Web Lab – bridging the divide between the online and in-museum experience,” Dave Patten, Head of New Media at the Science Museum London, describes the current Web Lab exhibition consisting of five Google Chrome experiments: Lab Tag Explorer, Universal Orchestra, Teleporters, Sketchbots, and Data Tracer. The exhibition utilizes several types of technology to bridge the gap, including streaming video feeds from web cameras inside the physical museum, HTML5 and advanced browser capabilities, and robotics to visually represent data. “For example, [visitors] can see how the Data Tracer experiment uses WebGI to generate the 3D map they fly through when following their image search” (Patten).

The Lab Tag Explorer Experiment is made up of several parts: the Lab Tag dispenser, the Lab Tag writer, and the Lab Tag Explorer. When you “enter” the exhibition (both online and in the physical museum), you are assigned a Lab Tag, a unique identifier which is used to mark your presence within the exhibition; the Lab Tag also allows you to capture and store information that you wish to return to later. In the physical museum,guests receive a Lab Tag by visiting the Lab Tag dispenser; Lab Tags are automatically assigned by the browser for online visitors. According to Patten:

“[The Lab Tag Writer] carries the title of the exhibition and a real-time count of the number of users who are currently online in Web Lab… The effect is to help draw physical visitors down to the exhibition and at the same time make them aware they are joining something… The key aims of the Lab Tag Writer are to help physical visitors understand they are about to enter an exhibition that is already being used by lots of people online, and to help them understand the global nature of Web Lab.”  

The Lab Tag Explorer emphasizes the globally-networked nature of the exhibition by allowing users to save and review their own Web Lab creative projects and share their projects creations through their existing social media networks. Visitors can also view other visitors’ projects.

Each of the other four experiments -Universal Orchestra, Teleporters, Sketchbots, and Data Tracer-  reinforce this same central theme: “[museum visitors] are sharing Web Lab with visitors from around the world” (Patten). The Web Lab exhibition explores ways in which museums can integrate physical and virtual museum spaces.

Google, an integral contributor to the Web Lab project, has taken it’s own approach to joining together the physical and virtual worlds through the Google Cultural Institute, which includes the Google Art Project (GAP). The GAP bridges the gap by creating a virtual museum, partnering with physical museums across the world to bring art objects to a global audience. This essay examines the extension of the museum into the virtual space using the Google Art Project as a case study.

Background: Understanding the Museum Space

In order to understand the significance of the GAP and its implications for contemporary art, museums, and culture, it is important to discuss the history of the museum as an institution and an industry. In the past, the museum has been considered as a type of sacred space where cultural knowledge is produced. Within that space, museums acted as thought leaders, framing the conversations about art objects, art history, and contemporary culture.

Sacred Authority of Museum Space

Critical of the discourse of modernity offered by twentieth century scholars, Michael Foucault  sought to present a more precise description of his own unique historical moment. In 1967, Foucault delivered a lecture (which was later published as Of Other Spaces in 1984) on the importance of spaces and the ways in which space is considered and discussed. In the past, there were clear distinctions between spaces, a “hierarchical ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places… It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval spaces: the space of emplacement” (Foucault, 372). Foucault acknowledges that these separations still exist to some extent, but – recognizing the increasing interconnected, yet often contradictory, nature of contemporary society – suggests two new primary types of spaces: utopias and heterotopias.

“Utopias are sites with no real places. They are sites that have a general relation of direct of inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” (Foucault, 374)

 ”[Heterotopias] are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” (Foucault, 374)

Foucault  concerns himself primarily with heterotopias and goes on to describe five main principles of heterotopias:

  1. Heterotopias exist in all societies (Foucault, 375)
  2. Over time, societies can change the function of existing heterotopias (Foucault, 375)
  3. Heterotopias are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault, 376)
  4. “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time” which can be either accumulating or fleeting (Foucault, 377)
  5. Heterotopias are “not freely accessible like a public space… to get in one must have certain permission and make certain gestures” (Foucault, 378)

These principles can be applied to understanding the museum as a heterotopic space. For this discussion, I am using “museum” to mean an institution that collects works of art and displays them for the edification of audiences. As such, “museums” have existed in all societies although they were sometimes known by different names – churches, universities, or private domestic collections. Over time, these “museums” were transformed into the institutions we recognize today as museums; we are now witnessing the next transformation of these institutions as they transition into the digital world through projects like the GAP. The Google Art Project can be considered as a type of heterotopic space, operating as a virtual museum; this topic is discussed in greater detail in later in this essay.

From Sacred to Secular: The Loss of Aura through Reproduction

In his “Introduction to Museum Without Walls,” Andre Malraux discusses the history of museums and their transition to the type of institution that we recognize as a museum today. The discourse surrounding museums changed as the museum transitioned into a new type of institution; additionally, new discourse was created by these new institutions – the discourse of art history. Malraux argues that museums “are so much a part of our lives today that we forget they have imposed on the spectator a wholly new attitude toward the work of art; they have tended to estrange the works they bring together from their original functions and to transform even portraits into pictures” (Malraux, 386). The separation of the artwork from its origin echoes Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the loss of aura.

Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), was concerned with the impact that mechanical reproductive technologies would have on art, arguing that there was a shift in emphasis from cult value to exhibition value. In contemporary culture it is more important for a work of art to be seen by many and be well-recognized (requiring numerous reproductions in exhibition catalogs, promotional media, etc…) than to be held in high regard by an elite, esteemed few. Aware of the importance of attracting large audiences, curators seek out works of art that are entertaining or shocking; this influences many artists to produce a very specific type of work and limits creativity.

Benjamin also discusses the implications of technology on art and society, tracing the transition of art from a cult(ural) object created for the contemplative few to a political object distributed to the masses. Authenticity and the concept of “an original” are integral to Benjamin’s argument: “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”  Benjamin attributes a sense of authority to authentic artworks, saying, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

Foucault also confronts the impact that the contemporary museum has had on art and literature in his essay “Fantasia of the Library” (1977). He says: “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia [by Manet] were perhaps the first ‘museum’ paintings, the first paintings in European art that were less a response to the achievement of Giorgione, Raphael, and Velasquez than an acknowledgement… of the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself, as a manifestation of the existence of museums and the particular reality and interdependence that paintings acquire in museums” (Crimp, 47). Manet became famous during the modern era for using his artwork to point out the relationship between a painting and its sources; for example, Manet’s Olympia remixes Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Contemporary, post-modern artists continue this trend using reproductive technologies; this is the topic of Douglas Crimp’s essay “On the Museum’s Ruins” (1980). Crimp uses Rauschenberg as an example of a postmodern artist.  In his artwork Crocus (1962), Rauschenberg remixes Manet’s work by simply silkscreening photographs of Olympia onto a canvas, juxtaposed with images of trucks, helicopters, and insects. Artists are aware of the “estrangement” that takes place when a work of art enters the museum and are expressing their reactions to this phenomenon in their artistic creations.

Changing Perceptions of Space: Re-mediating the Museum

As Benjamin points out, mechanical reproductions of artworks alter perceptions of space/place/time and can often reveal things about the original that were not visible or noticed with the naked eye. Reproductions also allow for greater audiences to experience a version of the original that would not be possible otherwise. Malraux is primarily concerned with the use of photography to reproduce art and, by extension, re-mediate real space. Through photography, Malraux argues that “a museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely further that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls; in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press” (Malraux, 371). I think that digital technologies allow this “museum without walls” to expand exponentially by re-mediating the museum.

In Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that “new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media… what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (14-15). Virtual museums projects could be considered a remediation of the traditional museum.

Bolter and Grusin identify the “double logic of remediation;” that is, “our culture’s [desire] both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (5). This double logic rests on two main principles: immediacy and hypermediacy. “Immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car or standing on a mountaintop” (Bolter and Grusin, 6). As the authors point out, this aspect of remediation is not a novel invention brought about by digital media; painting, photography, and computer systems for virtual reality all “seek to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed” (Bolter and Grusin, 11). Hypermediacy works in opposition to immediacy, revealing the mediation by combining multiple forms of media into a single media object; “hypermediated forms ask us to take pleasure in the act of mediation” (Bolter and Grusin, 14).

Immediacy can be understood by considering the ubiquity of the graphical user interface (GUI). “Immediacy is meant to make the computer interface ‘natural’ rather than arbitrary… the desktop metaphor, which has replaced the wholly textual command-line interface, is supposed to assimilate the computer to the physical desktop and to the materials (file folders, sheets of paper, inbox , trash basket, etc.) familiar to office workers. The mouse and pen-based interface allow the user the immediacy of touching, dragging, and manipulating visually attractive ideograms” (Bolter and Grusin, 23). The authors speculate about the emergence of three-dimensional versions of this interface; the Google Art Project fulfills this speculation.  The GAP offers a “museum view” allowing audiences to virtually navigate through the three-dimensional space of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). View “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh in museum view here. Simply click on the area of the floor where you would like to move to and watch as your view changes to reflect your new location within the virtual space. The point of view presented in this virtual environment is meant to reproduce the view that museum visitors experience when standing in the physical gallery. The interface in this virtual environment strives to be as natural as possible, simply pointing and clicking in the direction you desire to move and selecting icons to view information about the artworks displayed.

The authors contrast immediacy with hypermediacy, saying: “In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as mutliplicity.  If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as “windowed” itself — with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience…. Hypermedia makes us aware of the medium or media and… reminds us of our desire for immediacy.” (Bolter and Grusin, 34)

 The Google Art Project: A Virtual Museum

Virtual Museum as Heterotopic Space

When considered as a digital museum, the Google Art Project reveals many of Foucault’s characteristics for a “heterotopia.” The GAP is able to juxtapose in a single virtual space many works of art from across the world which could not otherwise be viewed in one collection, confounding our understanding of space. Museums, both the brick-and-mortar and the virtual versions, accumulate works of art from across the decades (and often centuries), altering our understanding of time. Finally, museums – especially virtual ones – are not accessible to everyone, despite their open appearance and mission to serve the public. Audiences of virtual museums must have access to the technology required to view the artwork, including a computer and high-speed internet access, just as audiences of more traditional museums must have the leisure time to visit the museum. Furthermore, in order to fully participate in the museum, both types of audiences must have some amount of training in how to view the works of art and discuss them.

User-Controlled Exploration of Space

The Google Art Project provides a platform for viewing high-resolution reproductions of famous works of art from around the globe. Viewers are often presented with flattened images of multi-dimensional artworks, for example this mural of Anthony and Cleopatra by Rene Antoine Houasse. Painted in 1860 in the ceiling of the Venus Salon at the Palace of Versailles in France, the GAP image erases the context of the painting and alters the viewers perceptions of space and place. The image as it appears on your computer screen can vary somewhat in size, but it cannot accurately match the nearly 10-foot wide and 7-foot high original painting.

Additionally, viewers can zoom in on sections of interest, In his article, Benjamin uses the medicinal metaphor of a magician and a surgeon to describe change in relationship between the artwork and the audience. “The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself….he greatly increases [this distance] by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body.” Traditional artwork such as ceiling murals at Versailles are the work of the magician, maintaining the distance and authority of the original artwork.  The virtual reproduction of Anthony and Cleopatra allows the viewer to use the zoom tool as a scalpel, mimicking the surgeon and cutting into the artwork.

Finally, the Google Art Project expands the reach of the original artwork by providing a digital reproduction that is accessible to viewers around the world through the internet. In the past, technical reproductions relied on creating large quantities of copies to reach such a large audience, so much that Benjamin suggested that “quantity has been transmuted into quality.” The GAP seems to offer a digital reproduction with the goal of preserving a sense of authenticity rather than destroying it.  As museums agree to grant Google with unique access to reproduce and distribute its artworks as high-res images, it is likely that these images will come to complement – and, in some cases where great geographic distances prohibit an immediate physical experience, stand in for – the original artwork. The GAP offers universal access (substituting quantity) to quality reproductions of revered works of art.

Remediating the Museum

The Google Art Project’s museum view provides an excellent example of the immediacy of new media. The GAP’s museum view also exhibits qualities of hypermediacy. Look again at the museum view of MoMA. Notice that in the new tab that opens, the window is split into several sections. Across the top is a menu with hyperlinks to important pages and information, beneath which is the page header with the title of the artwork, the author’s name, and the date of creation. The main portion of the window is split into three sections: a map of the museum floor plan on the left, an icon toolbar in the center, and a three-dimensional virtual interface on the right. The footer includes yet another menu with hyperlinked information.  This one window displays several types of media: text, hypertext, digital graphics, and 3-D virtual reality. Each medium is represented in a way that reflects our cultural desire for immediacy, encouraging us to interact with the digital environment in a natural way. The hypermediacy of the environment is revealed when we consider the entire window, the sum of these media into a single media object (the window interface). No effort is made to conceal the media, but rather to organize it in a way that is functional and visually appealing; audiences are aware of the media represented within the window.

Under Remediation: Maintaining Continuity of the Museum Mission 

In her CCT thesis project “Mediating the Museum: Investigating Institutional Goals in Physical and Digital Space” (2012), Alicia M. Dillon examines how three major museums have approached the internet as a tool for expanding their missions: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and Malraux’s and Crimp’s commentaries on contemporary museums, Dillon asserts that – compared with physical spaces – “the museum website is an equally potent space for communicating a museum’s message” (9). Citing Bolter and Grusin’s theory on remediation, Dillon’s research takes “a close look at both the walls of the museum, the online space, as well as their shared object (the work of art) to highlight the complications of the art museum’s dual architecture in the 21st century” (10). Ultimately, Dillon argues that “understanding the [physical and virtual] spaces as equal but distinct is imperative for art museum’s ability to maximize their public image” (10).

Dillon’s case study of the Hirshhorn Museum lends itself to this analysis of the GAP because the museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Although the Hirshhorn has not yet elected to participate in the Google Art Project, several other museums within the Smithsonian have contributed to the project (The American Art Museum, and The Freer and Sackler Galleries). As Dillon points out in her thesis:

“The Hirshhorn is assigned symbolic power through both the Smithsonian Institution as well as its location on the National Mall. This is extended to its online URL through the <.si> extension. Its <.edu> extension signifies the institution’s primarily educational narrative.” (115)

The messages communicated by the architecture of the museum’s virtual space complement the architecture of the museum’s physical space to create seamless brand-continuity. A similar statement could be made about The American Art Museum and The Freer and Sackler Galleries. In future research, it will be important to explore the impact participation in the Google Art Project might have on each museum’s brand. Art objects shared with audiences through the project no longer reside in an <.si.edu> extension, but rather at a <.com> – owned by one of the world’s largest corporations, no less. Many questions on this topic must be examined, including: What are the implications of this structural shift on the message being communicated? Does the Google Art Project have a mission of its own? If so, how does the project’s mission confirm or complicate the mission of each partnering institution? Does partnering with Google impact the museum’s brand? What does the museum sacrifice by using the Google Art Project rather than creating its own platform to share its art objects with global audiences? What benefits do partnering museums receive? Answering these questions could provide both museums and audiences with more critical perspectives on participation in the GAP.

Making Art Available to All through the Museum Commons 

Dillon understands the virtual space as an extension of the physical museum space, another avenue for accomplishing the mission of the museum. In its simple mission statement, the Smithsonian Institute aims to accomplish “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”  An important step in carrying out this mission is to increase public access to art objects; one strategy for accomplishing this is through a museum commons, a type of virtual museum.

A New York Times article “Online, It’s the Mouse That Runs the Museum” (2010), Alex Wright discusses how museums are using new technologies to explore new strategies for building collections, inspiring creativity, and facilitating learning. Wright describes how the National September 11 Museum and Memorial crowdsourced the task of building its collection. In a similar way, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews utilized social media sites such as Youtube, Flickr, and Facebook to obtain content for it’s Virtual Shtetl project.

Wright also points to the idea of a museum commons, citing the Smithsonian Institution as a case study: “That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum’s vast collection of public domain assets. Using the new tools, Web users should be able to annotate images, create personalized views of the collection and export fully licensed images for use on their own Web sites or elsewhere.” Unfortunately, I was unable to find a functioning commons site for the Smithsonian; it seems this project is still in development. Wright quotes Michael Edson, the Smithsonian’s New Media Directors, “described the initiative as a step in the institution’s larger mission to shift ‘from an authority-centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation’.”

In future research, I am interested to compare how the proposed Smithsonian Commons might function similarly to the Google Art Project (which the several of the Smithsonian Museums participate in) – both would allow increased public access to art objects and encourage participatory learning through a user-guided experience. What are the unique qualities of each project and how do they complement or compete with one another? For example, the Smithsonian Commons would make art objects available for use with attribution, encouraging creativity and remix – a feature that is lacking in the current Google Art Project. Google’s advanced platform and global presence encourages the participation of many institutions, increasing the database of art objects available to audiences. Is it important for the Smithsonian to host it’s own platform as part of its brand continuity?  How do these qualities weigh against each other?

Facilitating Learning through the Virtual Museum

The virtual museum can provide more than just increased public access to artworks, it can facilitate learning. In “Exploring Gigapixel Image Environments for Science Communication and Learning in Museums,” (2013) Ahmed Ansari, Illah Nourbakhsh, Marti Louw, and Chris Bartley describe the Stories in the Rock exhibit – a collaborative project between the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Stories in the Rock uses zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) to “offer a spatial way to display and organize large amounts of information in a single interface using scroll, pan, and zoom controls; text, images, graphics, audio, and video can be embedded at spatial locations and zoom levels within an image, creating localized sites for commenting and conversation” (Ansari et al.). The authors identify the challenge addressed by this project: “how to develop intuitive interaction spaces that cater to disparate types of users, giving them deeper agency and choice in how to move through content in ways that are personally relevant and support coherent meaning making.”

The article identifies five “promising affordances” of gigapixel image-based platforms:

1.“Deep looking and noticing in a shared observational space.” The authors cite Nancy Proctor, Digital Editor and Head of Mobile Strategy & Initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution, as she describes in her discussion of the Google Art Project, “the gigapixel scans by which artworks are rendered into digital data streams are enabling intimate encounters with images at visual depths not possible even in the galleries.”

2.“Democratizing a tool of science.” According to Ansari et al “Websites like GigaPan.org and Photosynth.net invite gigapixel image makers from all over the world to upload their content to be viewed, annotated, geolocated, commented on, and shared globally. This affordance is not utilized by the Google Art Project, preserving the role of museum curators as gatekeepers. Museum professionals maintain the most traditional “curating” role by continuing to select which pieces will be available for public view rather than allowing users to add their own gigapixel images of artworks which they find interesting. While many of the “old masters” are owned by museum and therefore must be included through the museum, many new forms of contemporary art could be considered “open source” – such as graffiti art and street art – and could easily be captured and uploaded by users.

3.”Encouraging participatory learning.” While some could argue that the Google Art Project does encourage audience participation in the creation of knowledge by allowing users to guide their own experience, there is great room for improvement in this category. Ansari et al use the North Carolina State University Insect Museum  as a case study to demonstrate how “museum scientists and users could interact and have conversational exchanges about insect biology.” Currently, the Google Art Project does not allow for users to annotate artworks; adding this feature would facilitate conversations and the collaborative creation of new knowledge.

4.”Offering new visuospatial ways to curate collections and environments.” The authors citeThe Nature Valley Trail View as a case study, “enabling users to virtually explore and walk along trails at the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone National Parks… along the way contextual “call outs” provide additional, interactive media overlays for a more dynamic experience.” Google Art Project offers a similar experience through its “museum view” available for many of the participating institutions. The screen capture below shows two “call outs” with information about the sculptures on display and their artists.

 

Musee d'Orsay in Google Art Project's "Museum View"

First floor of the Musee d’Orsay in Google Art Project’s “Museum View”

 

5.”Enabling context-dependent annotations and mediation.” Ansari et al cite the website for Canadian design firm Castor as an example of how “embedded information can be revealed depending on user interactions and locations within a three-dimensional space, dynamically tying information to user exploration.” Currently, Google Art Project is not making use of this technology. In order to do so, Google would need to encourage curators to include “call outs” on individual aspects of each work of art which appear as the user zooms in on a particular section of the artwork; this approach would still allow users to guide their own experience and select only information that is of interest to them, while providing some structure to aid the learning environment. Such an approach would “help museum visitors notice details, pick out salient features, and make personal connections to topics of interest” (Ansari et al).

Evaluating the Virtual Museum as a Hypermedia Learning Environment

In Multimedia for Learning: Methods and Development (2001), Stephen Alessi and Stanley Trollip identify several types of hypermedia learning environments (including “the museum”) sharing three essential features:

  1. “A database of information
  2. Multiple methods of navigation, including hyperlinks
  3. Multiple media (e.g., text, audio, video) for presentation of the information” (142)

Focusing on the database of information as the foundation for the hypermedia learning environment, Alessi and Trollip examine several key factors: “media types, size and organization of the database, resolution, modifiability, visible and internal structure, platform independence, and language independence” (150). These factors provide useful tools for examining the Google Art Project’s database of information.

The Google Art Project uses several media types including text, still pictoral images, and zoomable gigapixel images. The project features images of a vast range of art objects; the hypermedia learning environment offers a way for learners to make sense of this large database. The authors argue that “the size of the database is important in that it should impact the design of navigation methods and features to support learning… the more content, the more important it is to provide a variety of flexible navigation features and to provide features to facilitate motivation, memory, comprehension, and other aspects of learning” (152). The Google Art Project database uses several methods of organization, including “collections,” “artists,” “artworks,” and “user galleries.” Using multiple organizational methods “can facilitate a learner’s efficiency and use of the database” (Alessi and Trollip, 152).High-resolution images are a point of pride for the Google Art Project, boasting gigapixel images for many of it’s shared art objects. Currently, the project does not offer users many options for modifiability. The GAP does not allow for users to annotate artworks; adding this feature would facilitate conversations and the collaborative creation of new knowledge. While users can save objects in their own “galleries” (essentially bookmarking artworks that are of particular personal interest) users are unable to add their own text (as the authors note: “the equivalent of marking marginal notes, underlining, and highlighting). It is impossible to evaluate the interaction of visible and internal structures because the internal structures of the project are not made available to the public. Because it is web-based, platform independence is not really an issue for the Google Art Project, though there are several similar issues to be considered: how well does the project perform when viewed in different browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox) and how does it operation change when viewed through a touch-screen device as opposed to a traditional point-and-click navigation. As far as I can tell, the project does not allow for language independence; it seems that the site is only available in English. In future research, a more extensive evaluation of the virtual museum as a learning environment using Alessi and Trollop’s theories on instructional design could provide additional recommendations for improving the Google Art Project.

Conclusion

The Google Art Project can be considered as a digital museum, extending the physical space of the museum into the virtual space. The museums which participate in this project are taking advantage of Google’s platform to further their individual missions. In the case of the Smithsonian Institute, the GAP allows for the diffusion of artworks across the globe and the increase in knowledge about these art objects through the user-controlled learning environment. In the future, research should be conducted to examine how the remediation of the museum in the virtual space has challenged traditional museum practices within the physical museum space as well as the cultural implications of these challenges.

Bibliography

Alessi, Stephen M., and Stanley R. Trollop. Multimedia for Learning: Methods and Development. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2001.

Ansari, Ahmed, Illah Nourbakhsh, Marti Louw, and Chris Bartley. “Exploring Gigapixel Image Environments for Science Communication and Learning in Museums.”  Paper presented at the annual conference of Museums and the Web, Portland, Oregon, April 17-20, 2013.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken Books, 1969.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

Crimp, Douglas. “On the Museum’s Ruins.” October 13 (1980): 41-57.

Dillon,Alicia M. “Mediating the Museum: Investigating Institutional Goals in Physical and Digital Space.” MA Thesis; Communication, Culture, and Technology at Georgetown University; 2012.

Foucault, Michel. “Texts/Contexts: Of Other Spaces.” In Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago. 371-379. Burlington  VT: Ashgate Pub., 2004. Originally published in Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

Malraux, Andre. “Introduction to Museum without Walls.”  In Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago. 368-371. Burlington  VT: Ashgate Pub., 2004. Originally published in Museum Without Walls. translated by Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price. 9-12. New Jersey: Doubleday, 1967.

Patten, Dave. “Web Lab- bridging the divide between the online and in-museum experience.” Paper presented at the annual conference of Museums and the Web, Portland, Oregon, April 17-20, 2013.

Wright, Alex. “Online, It’s the Mouse That Runs the Museum.” New York Times, January 19, 2010. 

 

AO-Week 5: Making Art Available to All through the Museum Commons

A New York Times article “Online, It’s the Mouse That Runs the Museum” (2010), Alex Wright discusses how museums are using new technologies to explore new strategies for building collections, inspiring creativity, and facilitating learning. Wright describes how the National September 11 Museum and Memorial crowdsourced the task of building its collection. In a similar way, The Museum of the History of Polish Jews utilized social media sites such as Youtube, Flickr, and Facebook to obtain content for it’s Virtual Shtetl project.

Wright also points to the idea of a museum commons, citing the Smithsonian Institution as a case study: “That institution recently began an ambitious initiative called the Smithsonian Commons to develop technologies and licensing agreements that would let visitors download, share and remix the museum’s vast collection of public domain assets. Using the new tools, Web users should be able to annotate images, create personalized views of the collection and export fully licensed images for use on their own Web sites or elsewhere.” Unfortunately, I was unable to find a functioning commons site for the Smithsonian; it seems this project is still in development. Wright quotes Michael Edson, the Smithsonian’s New Media Directors, “described the initiative as a step in the institution’s larger mission to shift ‘from an authority-centric broadcast platform to one that recognizes the importance of distributive knowledge creation’.” I am interested to compare how the proposed Smithsonian Commons might function similarly to the Google Art Project (which the several of the Smithsonian Museums participate in) – both would allow increased public access to art objects and encourage participatory learning through a user-guided experience. What are the unique qualities of each project and how do they complement or compete with one another? For example, the Smithsonian Commons would make art objects available for use with attribution, encouraging creativity and remix – a feature that is lacking in the current Google Art Project. Google’s advanced platform and global presence encourages the participation of many institutions, increasing the database of art objects available to audiences. Is it important for the Smithsonian to host it’s own platform as part of its brand continuity?  How do these qualities weigh against each other?

AO- Week 6: Evaluating Hypermedia Learning Environments

In Multimedia for Learning: Methods and Development (2001), Stephen Alessi and Stanley Trollip identify several types of hypermedia learning environments (including “the museum”) sharing three essential features:

  1. “A database of information
  2. Multiple methods of navigation, including hyperlinks
  3. Multiple media (e.g., text, audio, video) for presentation of the information” (142)

Focusing on the database of information as the foundation for the hypermedia learning environment, Alessi and Trollip examine several key factors: “media types, size and organization of the database, resolution, modifiability, visible and internal structure, platform independence, and language independence” (150). These factors provide useful tools for examining the Google Art Project’s database of information.

The Google Art Project uses several media types including text, still pictoral images, and zoomable gigapixel images. The project features images of a vast range of art objects; the hypermedia learning environment offers a way for learners to make sense of this large database. The authors argue that “the size of the database is important in that it should impact the design of navigation methods and features to support learning… the more content, the more important it is to provide a variety of flexible navigation features and to provide features to facilitate motivation, memory, comprehension, and other aspects of learning” (152). The Google Art Project database uses several methods of organization, including “collections,” “artists,” “artworks,” and “user galleries.” Using multiple organizational methods “can facilitate a learner’s efficiency and use of the database” (Alessi and Trollip, 152).High-resolution images are a point of pride for the Google Art Project, boasting gigapixel images for many of it’s shared art objects. Currently, the project does not offer users many options for modifiability. As noted in an earlier post: the Google Art Project does not allow for users to annotate artworks; adding this feature would facilitate conversations and the collaborative creation of new knowledge. While users can save objects in their own “galleries” (essentially bookmarking artworks that are of particular personal interest) users are unable to add their own text (as the authors note: “the equivalent of marking marginal notes, underlining, and highlighting). It is impossible to evaluate the interaction of visible and internal structures because the internal structures of the project are not made available to the public. Because it is web-based, platform independence is not really an issue for the Google Art Project, though there are several similar issues to be considered: how well does the project perform when viewed in different browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox) and how does it operation change when viewed through a touch-screen device as opposed to a traditional point-and-click navigation. As far as I can tell, the project does not allow for language independence; it seems that the site is only available in English.

Further analysis of the Google Art Project as a learning environment will likely be included in my final project.

AO- Week 3: Maintaining A Consistent Brand

In her CCT thesis project “Mediating the Museum: Investigating Institutional Goals in Physical and Digital Space” (2012), Alicia M. Dillon examines how three major museums have approached the internet as a tool for expanding their missions: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and Malraux’s and Crimp’s commentaries on contemporary museums, Dillon asserts that – compared with physical spaces – “the museum website is an equally potent space for communicating a museum’s message” (9). Citing Bolter and Grusin’s theory on remediation, Dillon’s research takes “a close look at both the walls of the museum, the online space, as well as their shared object (the work of art) to highlight the complications of the art museum’s dual architecture in the 21st century” (10). Ultimately, Dillon argues that “understanding the [physical and virtual] spaces as equal but distinct is imperative for art museum’s ability to maximize their public image” (10).

The case study of the Hirshhorn Museum was most interesting to my research because the museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Although the Hirshhorn has not yet elected to participate in the Google Art Project, several other museums within the Smithsonian have contributed to the project (The American Art Museum, and The Freer and Sackler Galleries). As Dillon points out in her thesis:

“The Hirshhorn is assigned symbolic power through both the Smithsonian Institution as well as its location on the National Mall. This is extended to its online URL through the <.si> extension. Its <.edu> extension signifies the institution’s primarily educational narrative.” (115)

The messages communicated by the architecture of the museum’s virtual space complement the architecture of the museum’s physical space to create seamless brand-continuity. A similar statement could be made about The American Art Museum and The Freer and Sackler Galleries. I am intrigued by the impact participation in the Google Art Project might have on each museum’s brand. Art objects shared with audiences through the project no longer reside in an <.si.edu> extension, but rather at a <.com> – owned by one of the world’s largest corporations, no less. What are the implications of this structural shift on the message being communicated? Does the Google Art Project have a mission of its own? If so, how does the project’s mission confirm or complicate the mission of each partnering institution? Does partnering with Google impact the museum’s brand? What does the museum sacrifice by using the Google Art Project rather than creating its own platform to share its art objects with global audiences? What benefits to partnering museums receive? These are all questions to be revisited in my final project.

 

AO- Week 6: Mediating the Visitor Experience through Gigapixels

In a previous post, I discussed how museums are using technology to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual museum spaces using the Web Lab at the Science Museum London as a case study. I wanted to further explore specific digital technologies museums are using to enhance knowledge production among audiences and their applications for integrating physical and virtual museum visitor experiences. In “Exploring Gigapixel Image Environments for Science Communication and Learning in Museums,” (2013) Ahmed Ansari, Illah Nourbakhsh, Marti Louw, and Chris Bartley describe the Stories in the Rock exhibit – a collaborative project between the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Stories in the Rock uses zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) to “offer a spatial way to display and organize large amounts of information in a single interface using scroll, pan, and zoom controls; text, images, graphics, audio, and video can be embedded at spatial locations and zoom levels within an image, creating localized sites for commenting and conversation” (Ansari et al.). The authors identify the challenge addressed by this project: “how to develop intuitive interaction spaces that cater to disparate types of users, giving them deeper agency and choice in how to move through content in ways that are personally relevant and support coherent meaning making.”

The article identifies five “promising affordances” of gigapixel image-based platforms: 

1.“Deep looking and noticing in a shared observational space.” The authors cite Nancy Proctor, Digital Editor and Head of Mobile Strategy & Initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution, as she describes in her discussion of the Google Art Project, “the gigapixel scans by which artworks are rendered into digital data streams are enabling intimate encounters with images at visual depths not possible even in the galleries.”

2.“Democratizing a tool of science.” According to Ansari et al “Websites like GigaPan.org and Photosynth.net invite gigapixel image makers from all over the world to upload their content to be viewed, annotated, geolocated, commented on, and shared globally. This affordance is not utilized by the Google Art Project, preserving the role of museum curators as gatekeepers. Museum professionals maintain the most traditional “curating” role by continuing to select which pieces will be available for public view rather than allowing users to add their own gigapixel images of artworks which they find interesting. While many of the “old masters” are owned by museum and therefore must be included through the museum, many new forms of contemporary art could be considered “open source” – such as graffiti art and street art – and could easily be captured and uploaded by users.

3.”Encouraging participatory learning.” While some could argue that the Google Art Project does encourage audience participation in the creation of knowledge by allowing users to guide their own experience, there is great room for improvement in this category. Ansari et al use the North Carolina State University Insect Museum  as a case study to demonstrate how “museum scientists and users could interact and have conversational exchanges about insect biology.” Currently, the Google Art Project does not allow for users to annotate artworks; adding this feature would facilitate conversations and the collaborative creation of new knowledge.

4.”Offering new visuospatial ways to curate collections and environments.” The authors cite The Nature Valley Trail View as a case study, “enabling users to virtually explore and walk along trails at the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone National Parks… along the way contextual “call outs” provide additional, interactive media overlays for a more dynamic experience.” Google Art Project offers a similar experience through its “museum view” available for many of the participating institutions. The screen capture below shows two “call outs” with information about the sculptures on display and their artists.

Musee d'Orsay in Google Art Project's "Museum View"

First floor of the Musee d’Orsay in Google Art Project’s “Museum View”

5.”Enabling context-dependent annotations and mediation.” Ansari et al cite the website for Canadian design firm Castor as an example of how “embedded information can be revealed depending on user interactions and locations within a three-dimensional space, dynamically tying information to user exploration.” Currently, Google Art Project is not making use of this technology. In order to do so, Google would need to encourage curators to include “call outs” on individual aspects of each work of art which appear as the user zooms in on a particular section of the artwork; this approach would still allow users to guide their own experience and select only information that is of interest to them, while providing some structure to aid the learning environment. Such an approach would “help museum visitors notice details, pick out salient features, and make personal connections to topics of interest” (Ansari et al).

In my next post, I plan to examine how the design of Stories in the Rock provides an excellent example of how multimedia can be used for learning. I will also do an assessment of the Google Art Project as a hypermedia learning environment.

AO-Week 5: Using Technology to Bridge the Gap

Engineers and developers are constantly trying to innovate ways to bridge the gap between physical space (reality) and virtual space (virtual reality).  Overcoming this divide is also becoming increasingly of interest to museum professionals as they seek to “join up the museum experience with the online experience, taking the museum beyond the boundaries of the physical building and allowing online visitors into the museum” (Patten). In his essay “Web Lab – bridging the divide between the online and in-museum experience.” Dave Patten, Head of New Media at the Science Museum London, describes the current Web Lab exhibition consisting of five Google Chrome experiments: Lab Tag Explorer, Universal Orchestra, Teleporters, Sketchbots, and Data Tracer. The exhibition utilizes several types of technology to bridge the gap, including streaming video feeds from web cameras inside the physical museum, HTML5 and advanced browser capabilities, and robotics to visually represent data. “For example, [visitors] can see how the Data Tracer experiment uses WebGI to generate the 3D map they fly through when following their image search” (Patten). 

The Lab Tag Explorer Experiment is made up of several parts: the Lab Tag dispenser, the Lab Tag writer, and the Lab Tag Explorer. When you “enter” the exhibition (both online and in the physical museum), you are assigned a Lab Tag, a unique identifier which is used to mark your presence within the exhibition; the Lab Tag also allows you to capture and store information that you wish to return to later. In the physical museum,guests receive a Lab Tag by visiting the Lab Tag dispenser; Lab Tags are automatically assigned by the browser for online visitors. According to Patten:

“[The Lab Tag Writer] carries the title of the exhibition and a real-time count of the number of users who are currently online in Web Lab… The effect is to help draw physical visitors down to the exhibition and at the same time make them aware they are joining something… The key aims of the Lab Tag Writer are to help physical visitors understand they are about to enter an exhibition that is already being used by lots of people online, and to help them understand the global nature of Web Lab.”  

The Lab Tag Explorer emphasizes the globally-networked nature of the exhibition by allowing users to save and review their own Web Lab creative projects and share their projects creations through their existing social media networks. Visitors can also view other visitors’ projects.

Each of the other four experiments -Universal Orchestra, Teleporters, Sketchbots, and Data Tracer-  reinforce this same central theme: “[museum visitors] are sharing Web Lab with visitors from around the world” (Patten). The Web Lab exhibition explores ways in which museums can integrate physical and virtual museum spaces. Patten describes the variety of lessons his development team learned through this process as ranging “from the way teams can use collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Hangouts during the exhibition development process, to opening exhibitions in beta to allow final testing and development to take place before the big opening event. Web Lab has also given the Museum the confidence that moving its interactive development onto HTML5 is both achievable and desirable.”

While this case study takes place in a science museum, I think a similar approach could be taken to the contemporary art museum.  It would be interesting to see Google introduce a similar user experience for visitors to the physical spaces of it’s partner museums. The GoogleArt Project allows visitors to take on a curatorial role  by allowing audience members to guide their own experiences –  selecting artworks of particular interest and saving them in a “gallery,” then creating knowledge by analyzing, comparing, and contrasting the collected artworks.  Visitors to the physical museum could also be invited to use technology (perhaps through an identifying tag) to collect, compare, and share artworks that are meaningful to them. This approach would also allow visitors to the physical museum to virtually re-visit a work of art and explore it in greater detail using the zoom feature or compare it with artworks from around the world – both experiences which could not occur in the physical museum.

Additionally, art museum professionals should take the lessons learned from Patten’s development team and evaluate their exhibition design process to identify areas where technology could offer great opportunity for collaboration and creativity.

AO-Week 4: Tools for Curating the Digital World

Susan Cairns and Danny Birchall examine the process of curating in the age of information overload in their paper “Curating the Digital World: Past Preconceptions, Present Problems, Possible Futures” (2013). Citing film producer and author Steven Rosenbaum, “curation ‘addresses two parallel trends: the explosive growth in data, and our need to be able to find information in coherent, reasonably contextual groupings’.” Cairns and Birchall examine the historic role of museum curators as information organizers, “relying on heirarchical methods for prioritizing and categorizing information” to create meaning and instill value in a work of art or group of artworks.  The development of the internet changed this information landscape, providing expanded public access to information and presenting all information as equally-valued data. Meaning-making in the information age must take a new approach.

Cairns and Birchall identify algorithms to be the meaning-making tools of the digital world: “The algorithmic approaches use the processing capabilities of computers to sort and manipulate the data according to human-created rules, but frequently do so in ways invisible to the eye.” Algorithms already guide our every-day lives in ways that we no longer even recognize. For example, search engines use proprietary algorithms – like Google’s PageRank – to sort through the vast amount of available information and provide results that are prioritized by relevance. Drawing on the work of Eli Pariser, Cairns and Birchall suggest that “our increased faith in algorithms has moved the act of gatekeeping from humans to algorithms.” The authors point out several risks associated with algorithms acting as conremporary gatekeepers within the consciousness industry:

1) Algorithms are written by humans. Humans have political interests. Thus, the algorithms will likely reflect the political interests of their creators.

2) The ability to control information provides a huge political advantage. Very few people understand how algorithms work and only a handful are able to create and execute their own algorithms; this concentration of power affords a small minority to wield significant power over the mass majority.

3) Algorithms are conservative by nature, which limits the range of results to often exclude alternative viewpoints and minority voices. Quoting Pariser writing about the Netflix algorithm: “The problem with [the algorithm] is that while it’s very good at predicting what movies you’ll like – generally it’s under one star off – it’s conservative. It would rather be right and show you a movie that you’ll rate a four, than show you a movie that has a 50% chance of being a five and a 50% chance of being a one. Human curators are more likely to take these kinds of risks.”

 

The Google Art Project uses algorithms to allow you to search through the available artworks. From  my observation, it seems that this algorithm is conservative in yielding results relative to the search term. The results are ranked by the collection (museum) with the most artworks matching the search term.  For example: The term “horse” yielded 1,257 items. The options to refine the search indicate that 582 of these items are held by the Yale Center for British Art, 110 items are held by The J. Paul Getty Museum, and 81 items are held by the Korean Art Museum Association. Of the 1,257 displayed results, eight of the first ten images shown are held by the Yale Center or the Getty. Although it offers the third largest selection of artworks matching the term “horse,” the first artwork from the Korean Art Museum Association ranked at number 42.  Based on this data, it seems that there are other variables besides frequency which factor into the Google Art Project’s search algorithm. I am curious as to what those variables might include and the implications of them.

1) Reflecting the interests of its human creators: Could it be that Google privileges institutions which partnered with the project first? As an American company, does Google privilege American/Western institutions over others?

2) Expanding influence of its owners: Are Google stakeholders also involved in the leadership of the higher ranking institutions? Does Google sponsor additional programs or exhibitions with these institutions?

3) Limiting minority voices and alternative viewpoints: Are fewer non-Western institutions invited to participate in the project? How could the non-Western world be marginalized by lower rankings?

AO-Week 4: Curating Art in the Digital World

Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook provide a brief history of the role of the curator in their book Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (2010):

“Curating is another contested word. As traditionally used, it referred to the act of caring for a collection, and the Latin root curare (to care) is reflected in the usage of the noun curate  in the United Kingdom for someone who assists a priest in caring for the needs of a congregation. So the basic definition is “caring for objects,” but a curator of contemporary art is just as likely to be selecting artworks; directing how they are displayed in an exhibition; and writing labels, interpreting material, catalogs, and press releases. The curator is basically in this case acting as a kind of interface between artist, institution, and audience in ‘the development of critical meaning in partnership and discussion with artists and publics’ as Barnaby Drabble states.” (10)

As I consider the implications of the Google Art Project on contemporary art and museum practices, I am intrigued by how the role of the curator is assigned. Graham and Cook describe the curator as an interface; the Google Art project takes that metaphor literally by providing a platform for interaction between artists, institutions, and audiences from around the world. Within this digital space, Google encourages audiences to direct their own experiences: users can search by collections (the institutions which house the physical piece), artists, or artworks and gather their favorites together in their own “gallery” which can be shared with other users.  The professionals at each institution have not completely abandoned their role by participating in the Google Art Project; they maintain control over which artworks are captured and displayed digitally. By selecting which artworks are available for audiences to view, museum professionals place limits on the discourse and body of knowledge created – to echo Haacke and his concept of the “consciousness industry” – in both the physical museum space and the digital space.

In the Google Art Project, the role of “curator” seems to be shared among three groups: museum professionals, Google, and audience members. Museum professionals maintain the most traditional “curating” role by continuing to care for the physical artworks and selecting which pieces will be available for public view. Google acts as the interface-curator by creating the digital space where artists, institutions, and audiences can interact. Audience members guide their own experiences, selecting artworks of particular interest and saving them in a “gallery,” then creating knowledge by analyzing, comparing, and contrasting the collected artworks.

AO-Week 3: Understanding the Contemporary Museum as an Industry

 

Hans Haacke considers the contemporary art museum as belonging to the “consciousness industry,” emphasizing the shift in museum practices to more closely resemble the industrial model of production, distribution, and consumption. In his article “Museums: Managers of Consciousness”, Haacke describes how museums are increasingly shifting their model of operation to more closely mirror the corporate model. Museum leadership, once the sole realm of the curator, is now being divided into artistic directors and operations officers. Marketing and development departments are emerging and expanding, indicating the extent to which contemporary museums feel pressured to bring in larger audiences and greater financial support from individuals, foundations, and corporate sponsors in order to balance their operating budget. The artistic staff is not exempt from the strain of the bottom-line; as curators decide which works of art to include in an exhibition, they must keep in mind what artists and artworks will attract the largest crowds and which ones might offend or deter board members, donors, and corporate sponsors. “Museums are now on the slippery road to becoming public relations agents for the interests of big business and its ideological allies… rather than sponsoring intelligent, critical awareness, museums thus tend to foster appeasement” (Preziosi and Farago, 411).

Haacke views the corporate-driven museum as a potentially dangerous political instrument. The author draws on Marx’s theory that “consciousness is a social product.” This product “reflects particular value systems, aspirations, and goals,”within a society, however it is not necessarily inclusive of or universally accepted by everyone within that society (Preziosi and Farago, 404). Haacke sees art as a communication tool, sharing the artist’s point of view with audiences. As the reach of an artwork grows, through methods of reproduction and remediation, “it inevitable participates in public discourse, advances a particular system of beliefs, and has reverberations in the social arena” (Preziosi and Farago, 405). As the museum becomes increasingly subject to corporate influence, it is likely that the consciousness created by museums through programs and exhibitions will confirm rather than challenge the dominant ideology within our culture; this could mean the continued exclusion of racial minorities, the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes and gender roles, and the objectification of women as sexualized commodities.

Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia)

Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia)

In my own undergraduate research, I studied the implications of corporate sponsorship on the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (now the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art) in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I interviewed both the curator of the museum and the director of development to discover their experiences working with corporate sponsors. Additionally, I analyzed the museum’s promotional media as well as the physical spaces (galleries, lobby, gift shop) to better understand the messages being communicated to museum audiences. Finally, I surveyed museum visitors to inquire about their awareness of and opinions toward corporate sponsorship. Using these methods, I found that the language that museums use to attract corporate sponsors mirrors that of advertising sales managers. For example, the value of sponsorship is measured in the number of impressions yielded by the inclusion of the corporate logo on museum promotional materials. The presence of the names and logos of corporate sponsors invaded the physical space of the museum as well, appearing on the wall plaques at the entrance to the gallery. Through my analysis of the artworks on display, I found very little to challenge the dominant ideologies surrounding race, gender roles, and the objectification of women; there were hardly any racial minority figures displayed, men were portrayed as wise and knowledgeable in business, and women were shown as sexual objects (nude, red lipstick, mouths open). The audience survey responses revealed that most museum visitors were not aware that the exhibitions on display were supported by corporate sponsors. My conclusions echoed Haacke, finding that the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia, while maintaining it’s mission to provide the public with educational opportunities in the Arts, had adopted a secondary mission of promoting the branded images of its corporate sponsors. The lack of alternative voices communicated through the exhibitions as well as the lack of awareness among audiences about corporate sponsorship provides evidence that the consciousness being produced by museums can be easily influenced by its sponsors and distributed to a consumer audience.

In my final essay for this course, I am interested to explore the implications of Google as the corporate sponsor for this Art Project.

 

Comments

This is a really good survey of issues, problems, and questions. The theory sources you cite are from the earlier Marxian school of thought, and those questions yield much more interesting and complex descriptions in Pierre Bourdieu’s and other recent socio-economic-cultural studies. The older models are too reductive–“these art representations and institutions reduce to this…” , and we know culture is more open and complex. More recent 2nd-3rd wave feminist work also avoids the old binary (“this is a sexist representation of a woman, and this is an affirmative hetero-normative representation of a man, etc.”) because representations in art can be very complex symbolically. You want to avoid the kind of theory that sets up thought policing and has reductive or deterministic procedures. You need theory that is heuristic, able to open up new discoveries. The newer models are more network and systems theoric, looking at complexity and distributed agency. The institutional function is a great case to study. Theorists like Bourdieu, Debray, and Latour are good at repositioning the questions in institutional and symbolic value contexts.

It’s great that you can incorporate your experience at the Virginia Museum. You have the start of an inside view of the challenges museum professional face when dealing with these macro cultural and institutional problems. Keep going, good work so far!  –MI

AO- Week 2- Institutional Power of Museums

In his essay “The Exhibitionary Complex,” Tony Bennett discusses Foucault’s perspective on the institutional creation of knowledge/power. Bennett draws a distinction between the “institutions of confinement” such as prisons (which are Foucault’s focus) and “institutions of exhibition” such as museums. Where Foucault identifies a society of surveillance (panopticon penitentiary), distinct from the society of spectacle found in antiquity (public floggings and executions), Bennett suggests that the two exist simultaneously; the self-disciplining nature which surveillance engenders is reinforced through the spectacle of exhibition.  To illustrate this point, the author refers to Graeme Davison’s description of the Crystal Palace: “The Crystal Palace reversed the panoptical principle by fixing the eyes of the multitude upon an assemblage of glamorous commodities. The Panopticon was designed so that everyone could be seen; the Crystal Palace was designed so that everyone could see.” (Preziosi and Farago, 418)

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851

Bennett sees the Crystal Palace, acting as an early museum, as a powerful institution of knowledge creation. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s discussion in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction on the importance of artworks shifting from cult value to exhibition value, Bennett describes the “exhibition complex:”

comprised of “institutions… [that] were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains which they had been previously displayed (but to a restricted public) into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected , they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power (but of a different type) throughout society.” (Preziosi and Farago, 414)

 Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Bennett explores how museums contribute to the negotiation of power within a society in order to maintain the hegemony of the ruling class. The author describes the institutional methods for maintaining the status quo following the industrial revolution, saying:

[The maintenance of social order] consisted not in a display of power which, in seeking to terrorize, positioned the people on the other side of power as its potential recipients but sought rather to place the people – conceived as a nationalized citizenry – on this side of power, both its subject and its beneficiary… this was the rhetoric of power embodied in the exhibitionary complex – a power made manifest not in its ability to inflict pain but by its ability to organize and co-ordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order.” (Preziosi and Farago, 420)

 By making exhibitions and their organizing institutions (contemporary museums) available to the general public, an illusion of public power over these institutions is created. In an eagerness to participate in this new “democratic” society, the working and middle classes voluntarily submitted to a specific code of conduct while navigating the exhibition space – forming what Gramsci terms a “civil society.”

Museums were responsible for instituting not only a specific set of behavioral standards, but also a unique moral set of standards. Bennett describes “the emergence of a historicized framework for the display of human artifacts” which took place in museums during the period of industrialization:

[A teleological perspective developed through] the lifelike reproduction of an authenticated past and its representation as a series of stages leading to the present…[exhibitions] aimed at the representation of a type and its insertion into a developmental sequence for display to a public.” (Preziosi and Farago, 428)

Bennett also notes the important development of two cultural distinctions – national and universal – which came to be reinforced by exhibitions. Special museums were established to promote the unique cultural history of a nation-state (for example the American History Museum); within these exhibitions, “national materials were represented as the outcome and culmination of the universal story of civilization’s development” (Preziosi and Farago, 429). What resulted was the great divide between “the West” and “the rest,” the marginalization or exclusion of entire ethnic groups (orientalism and neo-colonialism).

Bennett articulates the political component of Foucault’s heterotopias saying:

“[Exhibitions] constituted an order of things and of peoples which, reaching back into the depths of prehistoric time as well as encompassing all corners of the globe, rendered the whole world metonymically present, subordinated to the dominating gaze of the white, bourgeois, and male eye of the metropolitan powers.” (Preziosi and Farago, 436)

In my final paper, I plan to explore further how the GoogleArt project might function as a virtual museum to contribute to the creation of knowledge and the alter or reinforce distribution of power within society. I am curious about how GoogleArt maintains or challenges ideas of nationalism and universalism within a digital, supranational space.

 

Comments:

You’re off to a great start in this research project! I wanted to give you two references to recent work by CCT students on digital museums and Goggle Art that you should know and may like to reference:

Alexis Hamann-Nazaroff, “Google Art Project and its role in the Artworld” (from CCTP748):

https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-748-spring2013/2013/04/23/google-art-project-and-its-role-in-the-artworld/

Alicia Dillon, Mediating the Museum: Investigating Institutional Goals in Physical and Digital Space. CCT Thesis, 2012. (Check the Library archives for theses.)

–MI

 

AO-Week 2: Understanding the Contemporary Museum as an Institution

Critical of the discourse of modernity offered by twentieth century scholars, Michael Foucault  sought to present a more precise description of his own unique historical moment. In 1967, Foucault delivered a lecture (which was later published as Of Other Spaces in 1984) on the importance of spaces and the ways in which space is considered and discussed. In the past, there were clear distinctions between spaces, a “hierarchical ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places… It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval spaces: the space of emplacement” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 372). Foucault acknowledges that these separations still exist to some extent, but – recognizing the increasing interconnected, yet often contradictory, nature of contemporary society – suggests two new primary types of spaces: utopias and heterotopias. 

“Utopias are sites with no real places. They are sites that have a general relation of direct of inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 374)
 “[Heterotopias] are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 374)

Foucault  concerns himself primarily with heterotopias and goes on to describe five main principles of heterotopias:

  1. Heterotopias exist in all societies (Prezoisi and Ferago, 375)
  2. Over time, societies can change the function of existing heterotopias (Prezoisi and Ferago, 375)
  3. Heterotopias are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 376)
  4. “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time” which can be either accumulating or fleeting (Prezoisi and Ferago, 377)
  5. Heterotopias are “not freely accessible like a public space… to get in one must have certain permission and make certain gestures” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 378)

These principles can be applied to understanding the museum, and even more specifically the Google Art Project- a type of virtual museum, as a heterotopic space. For this discussion, I am using museum to mean an institution that collects works of art and displays them for the edification of audiences. As such, museums have existed in all societies although they were sometimes known by different names – churches, universities, or private domestic collections. Over time, these “museums” were transformed into the institutions we recognize today as museums; we are now witnessing the next transformation of these institutions as they transition into the digital world through projects like GoogleArt. As a type of digital museum, GoogleArt is able to juxtapose in a single virtual space many works of art from across the world which could not otherwise be viewed in one collection, confounding our understanding of space. Museums, both the brick-and-mortar and the virtual versions, accumulate works of art from across the decades (and often centuries), altering our understanding of time. Finally, museums – especially virtual ones – are not accessible to everyone, despite their open appearance and mission to serve the public. Audiences of virtual museums must have access to the technology required to view the artwork, including a computer and high-speed internet access. Audiences of more traditional museums must have the leisure time to visit the museum. Furthermore, in order to fully participate in the museum, both types of audiences must have some amount of training in how to view the works of art and discuss them.

In his “Introduction to Museum Without Walls,” Andre Malraux discusses the history of museums and their transition to the type of institution that we recognize as a museum today. The discourse surrounding museums changed as the museum transitioned into a new type of institution; additionally, new discourse was created by these new institutions – the discourse of art history. Malraux argues that museums “are so much a part of our lives today that we forget they have imposed on the spectator a wholly new attitude toward the work of art; they have tended to estrange the works they bring together from their original functions and to transform even portraits into pictures” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 386). The separation of the artwork from its origin echoes Benjamin’s ideas about the loss of aura.

Malraux is primarily concerned with the use of photography to reproduce art and, by extension, re-mediate real space. Through photography, Malraux argues that “a museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely further that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls; in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press” (Prezoisi and Ferago, 371). I think that digital technologies allow this “museum without walls” to expand exponentially.

Foucault also confronts the impact that the contemporary museum has had on art and literature in his essay “Fantasia of the Library” (1977). He says: “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia [by Manet] were perhaps the first ‘museum’ paintings, the first paintings in European art that were less a response to the achievement of Giorgione, Raphael, and Velasquez than an acknowledgement… of the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself, as a manifestation of the existence of museums and the particular reality and interdependence that paintings acquire in museums” (Crimp, 47). Manet became famous during the modern era for using his artwork to point out the relationship between a painting and its sources; for example, Manet’s Olympia remixes Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Contemporary, post-modern artists continue this trend using reproductive technologies; this is the topic of Douglas Crimp’s essay “On the Museum’s Ruins” (1980). Crimp uses Rauschenberg as an example of a postmodern artist.  In his artwork Crocus (1962), Rauschenberg remixes Manet’s work by simply silkscreening photographs of Olympia onto a canvas, juxtaposed with images of trucks, helicopters, and insects. Artists are aware of the “estrangement” that takes place when a work of art enters the museum and are expressing their reactions to this phenomenon in their artistic creations. 

Benjamin, in The Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, was concerned with the impact that mechanical reproductive technologies would have on art, arguing that there was a shift in emphasis from cult value to exhibition value. In contemporary culture it is more important for a work of art to be seen by many and be well-recognized (requiring numerous reproductions in exhibition catalogs, promotional media, etc…) than to be held in high regard by an elite, esteemed few. Aware of the importance of attracting large audiences, curators seek out works of art that are entertaining or shocking; this influences many artists to produce a very specific type of work and limits creativity.

 

Sources:

Preziosi, Donald, and Claire Farago. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub., 2004.

Crimp, Douglas. “On the Museum’s Ruins.” October 13: 41-57. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1980.

AO-Week 1: Re-mediation through Google Art

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin are concerned with the reproduction of media objects, a phenomenon which they refer to as remediation.  In Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), Bolter and Grusin argue that “new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media… what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (14-15).

Bolter and Grusin identify the “double logic of remediation;” that is, “our culture’s [desire] both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (5). This double logic rests on two main principles: immediacy and hypermediacy. “Immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car or standing on a mountaintop” (6). As the authors point out, this aspect of remediation is not a novel invention brought about by digital media; painting, photography, and computer systems for virtual reality all “seek to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed” (11). Hypermediacy works in opposition to immediacy, revealing the mediation by combining multiple forms of media into a single media object; “hypermediated forms ask us to take pleasure in the act of mediation” (14).

Immediacy can be understood by considering the ubiquity of the graphical user interface (GUI). “Immediacy is meant to make the computer interface ‘natural’ rather than arbitrary… the desktop metaphor, which has replaced the wholly textual command-line interface, is supposed to assimilate the computer to the physical desktop and to the materials (file folders, sheets of paper, inbox , trash basket, etc.) familiar to office workers. The mouse and pen-based interface allow the user the immediacy of touching, dragging, and manipulating visually attractive ideograms” (23). The authors speculate about the emergence of three-dimensional versions of this interface; Google Art fulfills this speculation.  GoogleArt offers a “museum view” allowing audiences to virtually navigate through the three-dimensional space of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). View “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh in museum view here. Simply click on the area of the floor where you would like to move to and watch as your view changes to reflect your new location within the virtual space. The point of view presented in this virtual environment is meant to reproduce the view that museum visitors experience when standing in the physical gallery. The interface in this virtual environment strives to be as natural as possible, simply pointing and clicking in the direction you desire to move and selecting icons to view information about the artworks displayed. GoogleArt’s museum view provides an excellent example of the immediacy of new media.

The authors contrast immediacy with hypermediacy, saying: “In digital technology, as often in the earlier history of Western representation, hypermediacy expresses itself as mutliplicity.  If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible. Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as “windowed” itself — with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience…. Hypermedia makes us aware of the medium or media and… reminds us of our desire for immediacy.” (34)

GoogleArt’s museum view also exhibits qualities of hypermediacy. Look again at the museum view of MoMA. Notice that in the new tab that opens, the window is split into several sections. Across the top is a menu with hyperlinks to important pages and information, beneath which is the page header with the title of the artwork, the author’s name, and the date of creation. The main portion of the window is split into three sections: a map of the museum floor plan on the left, an icon toolbar in the center, and a three-dimensional virtual interface on the right. The footer includes yet another menu with hyperlinked information.  This one window displays several types of media: text, hypertext, digital graphics, and 3-D virtual reality. Each medium is represented in a way that reflects our cultural desire for immediacy, encouraging us to interact with the digital environment in a natural way. The hypermediacy of the environment is revealed when we consider the entire window, the sum of these media into a single media object (the window interface). No effort is made to conceal the media, but rather to organize it in a way that is functional and visually appealing; audiences are aware of the media represented within the window.

AO-Week 1: Reproduction through Google Art

In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin discusses the implications of technology on art and society, tracing the transition of art from a cult(ural) object created for the contemplative few to a political object distributed to the masses. Authenticity and the concept of “an original” are integral to Benjamin’s argument: “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”  Benjamin attributes a sense of authority to authentic artworks, saying, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Reproductions alter perceptions of space/place/time and can often reveal things about the original that were not visible or noticed with the naked eye. Reproductions also allow for greater audiences to experience a version of the original that would not be possible otherwise.  These two statements can be demonstrated through examining the GoogleArt Project. 

The GoogleArt Project provides a platform for viewing high-resolution reproductions of famous works of art from around the globe. Viewers are often presented with flattened images of multi-dimensional artworks, for example this mural of Anthony and Cleopatra by Rene Antoine Houasse. Painted in 1860 in the ceiling of the Venus Salon at the Palace of Versailles in France, the GoogleArt image erases the context of the painting and alters the viewers perceptions of space and place. The image as it appears on your computer screen can vary somewhat in size, but it cannot accurately match the nearly 10-foot wide and 7-foot high original painting.

Additionally, viewers can zoom in on sections of interest, In his article, Benjamin uses the medicinal metaphor of a magician and a surgeon to describe change in relationship between the artwork and the audience. “The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself….he greatly increases [this distance] by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body.” Traditional artwork such as ceiling murals at Versailles are the work of the magician, maintaining the distance and authority of the original artwork.  The virtual reproduction of Anthony and Cleopatra allows the viewer to use the zoom tool as a scalpel, mimicking the surgeon and cutting into the artwork.

Finally, GoogleArt expands the reach of the original artwork by providing a digital reproduction that is accessible to viewers around the world through the internet. In the past, technical reproductions relied on creating large quantities of copies to reach such a large audience, so much that Benjamin suggested that “quantity has been transmuted into quality.” GoogleArt seems to offer a digital reproduction with the goal of preserving a sense of authenticity rather than destroying it.  As museums agree to grant Google with unique access to reproduce and distribute its artworks as high-res images, it is likely that these images will come to complement – and, in some cases where great geographic distances prohibit an immediate physical experience, stand in for – the original artwork. GoogleArt offers universal access (substituting quantity) to quality reproductions of revered works of art.