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Tula Giannini Jonathan P. Bowen
Editors
Museums and Digital Culture
New Perspectives and Research
v
Enquire Within by Jill Lauriston (2017), a mixed media work exhibited at the Weston Library, Bodleian Library,
Oxford, “From King Alfred to Chaucer: First graphic designers of English texts”. (© Jill Lauriston)
vi Contents
Foreword
Understanding digital culture is critical to the success of a museum professional in the 21st century. The
digitization of the world has created a paradigm shift for museums: it is challenging our models of thinking and
working. If museums are to retain their relevance, we will need to adapt museum strategies, planning processes,
workflows, practices and programs to align with the expectations and behaviors of our digitally-enabled
audiences.
For our audiences, a digital experience is not inferior, less authentic or a substitute to a physical experience. It
is simply a different experience. It is the responsibility of museum professionals to study, analyze, and test that
difference, and determine how best to leverage the opportunities it provides to more impactfully fulfill our
institutions’ goals. Whether those goals are to scale the museum’s mission globally or design a more multi-sensory
exhibition experience or develop a networked collections management practice, there is no one size fits all. Our
success in guiding our institutions through the transformative and complex impacts of digitization, requires that
we continue to cultivate what is unique about our institutions: their collections, audiences, remits and identities.
To achieve this, we need to be thinking about digitization on several different levels, and through a depth of
different perspectives: this is what this book does.
By exploring digital culture and museums through nine different lenses, this book provides the reader with a
foundational framework around which to develop our understanding of digital culture. It looks at the topic from
the perspective of educators, curators, artists and audiences, through the lens of history and the future, and from
operational and creative perspectives. In so doing, ideas are introduced, explored, re-explored, and developed
throughout the book, enabling the reader to build a richer understanding of the key issues at hand.
By virtue of living in the 21st century, we are all students of digitization. The next generation of technologies
that are reaching mass-markets - artificial intelligence, augmented realities, virtual realities, machine vision - will
only accelerate the rate of digitization of our world. Now is the time to ensure we have the tools necessary to make
sense of that future.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Loïc Tallon
New York, 2019 Chief Digital Officer
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Preface
This richly illustrated book offers new perspectives and research on how digital culture is transforming museums
in the 21st century, as they strive to keep pace with emerging technologies driving cultural and social change,
played out not only in today’s pervasive networked environment of the Internet and web, but in everyday life,
from home to work and on city streets. In a world where digital culture has redefined human information behavior
as life in code and digits, increasingly it dominates human activity and communication. These developments have
radically changed the expectations of the museum visitor, real and virtual, the work of museum professionals and,
most prominently, the nature of museum exhibitions, while digital art and life in a digitally saturated world, is
changing our ways of seeing, doing, our senses and aesthetics.
Overall, this book creates a new picture of the 21st-century museum field. As museums become shared spaces
with their communities, local, national and global, and move from collection-centered to user/visitor-centered
institutions, they are assuming new roles and responsibilities tied to new goals for engaging their audience,
conveying meaning through collections, creating learning experiences and importantly, connecting to daily digital
life and culture integral to the museum ecosystem. Our studies of recent exhibitions at museums leading change,
are used to exemplify new directions, while they point to a reimagined vision for museums of the future at the
heart of which is the integration of digital culture and visitor experience and participation in real and virtual space.
This volume builds upon the work of the editors, Giannini and Bowen, including co-authored articles published
over the past few years, lectures, and research-based teaching related to museums and digital culture. Considered
holistically, these research forays into museum life and exhibitions shed new light on museums during a period
of digital transformation in the context of emerging technologies and dramatic social change both local and global.
Increasingly, museums are reaching beyond their walls to engage with their communities and audiences, onsite
and online. Through conversations mediated by websites, social media and online collections, museums are
listening to public voices fostering greater diversity and inclusion. Using this as a starting point, the editors have
organized the discussion broadly, while contributors speak from their own experiences and expertise that taken
together creates a new view of the field. Recent exhibitions at museums that are leading change, are used to
exemplify new directions and new vision for museums of the future.
Having surveyed recent books on museums, this book is distinguished by its focus on how museums are
interacting with their external environment and the people they serve, set in a digital moment of rapid social and
cultural change. We look at how museums are transforming from their 19th-century past to reinvent their identity,
and the look and feel of museum galleries, seeking new ways of conveying meaningful narratives and messages.
So, while other books are considering museums from the inside - administration, management, process, and
collections - our book considers museums from the vantage point of inside/outside interaction, participation, and
collaboration. This porous, flexible model enables new ideas and change - breaking out of the established silos of
past practice.
We feature case studies through the lens of digital artists, exhibitions, gallery design and architecture, both
physical and virtual. The book aims to create a body of new evidence that inspires the reader to consider the new
evolving museum landscape and its diverse communities. We show how the digital ecosystem to which we are all
connected, and is spawning the Internet of Things, has laid the foundations of the post-digital world we are now
entering, in which physical and digital are integrated seamlessly.
In Part I of the book, we introduce the digital culture background of the book beginning in the 1940’s, with the
work of Alan Turing, inventor of computer science and Claude Shannon, inventor of Information Theory and
digital communication, a moment in time which marked the dawn of the digital revolution, one that l inks to the
popular cultural revolution of the 1960s to 80s. These breakthroughs set the stage for the introduction and
development of the Internet, and the defining moment in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee brought us the World Wide
Web. Acting as a catalyst for growing participation online, the web turned the digital tide toward visual interface,
smartphones and personal digital devices that sparked the rapid rise of digital culture. Through observations over
time, we document how these developments have touched every aspect of human life. As the space between digital
and physical, real and virtual blurs, recasting art, cultural, social life and human behavior into new digital forms,
places and spaces, digital life and culture are merging and redefining the way we live, while more and more we
think and see digitally. From a foundational view, we look at how museums living in a digital culture are changing
and adopting to the digital behavior of visitors who enter the museum with smartphones in hand, looking at a
small screen, as the focus of life and their lens on the world. From observations in museums and online, we discuss
how museum/audience interaction is altering the expectations of visitors and their sense of what the museum
experience should be. At the same time, we explore how digital art shifts our ways of seeing, our senses and
aesthetics to the digital realm, while the ubiquitous presence of digital is blurring te lines between pop art and
high art, real and virtual, as we enter a postdigital world merging physical and digital reality.
viii Contents
Part II considers philosophical and theoretical aspects of how technology is affecting the artist’s sense of being
and experience, questioning what in art changes and what is lasting, whether we see through our sense of poetry
and nature, or through the lens of a camera that can distance the artist from the thinking and feeling about art.
From the vantage point of the 19th and 20th centuries, we look at the question of how technology might change the
artist’s sensibilities, juxtaposing the theories of art from Hegel, Goethe, Barfield, and McLuhan, and moving from
past to present, to observe the nature of digital change.
Part III covers digital aspects of art and museum-related temporary exhibitions. We present evidence drawn
from experience and data gathered, as well as the literature – books and articles – over the past few years.
Exhibitions, considered the centerpiece of the life of the museum, are increasingly tied to the museum’s digital
life where most of museum work and activities are carried-out and where art and information come together to
convey content, meaning and narrative. We present a survey of exhibitions over the past few years by leading
museums in New York and London to show new trends, innovative use of digital media technology, and an
increasing presence of digital, installation and mixed media art. We juxtapose digital works exhibited inside and
outside the museum and explore how the use digital displays across most sectors of society is influencing how the
public views art which in turn questions its very nature and meaning.
In Part IV, we consider some digital aspects of museum collections, which may themselves now be digital in
nature. An important current issue is how permanent exhibitions in museums are being updated to meet audience
expectations. To accomplish these goals, museums are developing a digital strategy applied across the entire
museum. Generally, museums in 19th and early 20th-century buildings are being challenged to find innovative
ways to re-conceptualize their galleries and public space for the 21st century.
Part V presents issues with museum audiences and visitors in a digital and virtual context. Real and digital
interaction and participation are all important aspects to be considered by museums. Visitors/users empowered by
digital technology, especially smartphones, have new expectations for engagement. There is a need for museums
to convey meaning, engage visitors, and reflect social consciousness and awareness. Museums of any size must
have programs for outreach, diversity, inclusion and community interaction. Just as digital states of being and
identity are changing visitor behavior and recasting museum identity and states of being to open themselves to
new ways of thinking about the world and its dynamic states of evolving social and cultural consciousness. As
museums build relationships through social media they can find themselves more vulnerable to audience opinion
and its relationship to art on display.
Part VI presents the ideas and work of several digital artists, mostly in the form of interviews with selected
digital artists. Digital aesthetics and senses, installation, mixed media, interactive and participatory art, virtual
reality, augmented reality, robots and robotics, and the presence of digital artists on the web, in their own voices,
all impact on museums, and especially on art galleries. Increasingly, people are seeing digital as the world they
inhabit is saturated with digital media. This immersion in digital media is affecting the human sense of color,
light, space, and time.
In Part VII, educational aspects are considered. For example, Tula Giannini designed and introduced to Pratt
School of Information three museum related programs, the first of their kind: fall 2015, a new museum master’s
program, Master of Science in Museums & Digital Culture, that newly defines the knowledge and skill sets for
21st-century museum professionals through its cutting-edge curriculum, fall 2016, a new Advanced Certificate in
Digital Curation and Preservation; fall 2016, a dual-master’s degree, MS Library & Information Science & MFA
Digital Arts, and an Advanced Certificate in Museum Libraries. We address the need to diversify the museum
profession, but not only in terms of staff, but equally the knowledge and skills that students acquire, moving from
a laser focus on curatorial skills and art history, to an amalgamation of content, curation, and communication in
the context of the digital ecosystem of 21st century culture moving to an education that is relevant and speaks to
contemporary narratives and values.
Part VIII presents some issues for museum libraries and archives. Among the world’s finest libraries are those
housed in museums and universities. Examples include the Frick Art Reference Library, part of the Frick Museum,
and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, as covered in this Part. Such libraries, including special and
archival collections, rare books and ephemera constitute a treasure trove of materials on art, design and
architecture, and importantly, their collections in general have been developed around subject areas of the
museum’s object collections. Further, such libraries have conservation laboratories, provide public access and
services, and support scholarly research on topics relevant to the collections.
The final Part IX of the book covers aspects of the future of museums with respect to developments in digital
culture. We consider the growing forces competing with museums for audience including entertainment and the
many hours people spend each day with digital media. Museums have long identified with their physical space as
a specific place in time and space, have now expanded to cyberspace, having a digital identity on the web.
Developments such as smart cities will further affect how museums fit into the digital culture overall.
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In summary, we have entered the next wave of the digital revolution as all media has gone digital, a state of
being that closely aligns with human creativity and innovation – mainly, art, culture and the humanities, the
lifeblood of the museum. The convergence of media as digital, which makes all media equally usable, is fueling
the rise of human expression through visual and sound media, as we shift to a post-text-dominated era to life on
the Internet, while new technology is introduced regularly such as visual recognition using AI. This trend reveals
the power of visual and sound media as digital media language that enables museums to reach larger more diverse
audiences. We hope that readers will enjoy this selection of viewpoints on the relationship of museums and the
rapidly evolving digital culture in which they find themselves.
New York, 2019 Tula Giannini
London & Oxford, 2019 Jonathan P. Bowen
x Contents
Acknowledgements
The annual EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts has been influential on the contents
and selection of authors in this volume. Some of the material in chapters by the editors has been adapted and
updated from recent papers in this conference. Thank you to all individual photographers who have allowed their
work to appear in this book, especially Jill Lauriston for the frontispiece and George Mallen. All such
photographers are acknowledged individually in figure captions in the book. Organizations that have allowed
photographs to be included are also acknowledged in individual figure captions within the book and we thank
these institutions for their generosity, especially the Bodleian Libraries (University of Oxford), InvisibleStudio,
and Tate, London. Some photographs and images are from Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org)
and we thank the contributors to this wonderful altruistic facility. Again, such images are individually
acknowledged in figure captions. We thank Pratt Institute for their research support of Pratt Professor, Tula
Giannini, coeditor of this book, during her sabbatical for the academic year 2017–2018. Jonathan Bowen thanks
Museophile Limited for financial support.
xi
Contents
Part I Introduction
1 Digital Culture
Tula Giannini and Jonathan P. Bowen
2 Museums and Digitalism
Tula Giannini and Jonathan P. Bowen
Part II Philosophy and Theory
3 Historical Questions on Being and Digital Culture
Gareth Polmeer
4 Museums, Art, and Identity: The Internet and digital ecosystem – a paradigm shift
Tula Giannini and Jonathan P. Bowen
5 Contested Space: Activism and protest
Tula Giannini
Part III Exhibitions
6 Past the Museum Floor: Criteria for curating experience
Deborah Turnbull Tillman
7 Digital Road Trips: The shifting landscape of digital art shows
Nick Lambert
8 Rethinking Museum Exhibitions: Merging physical and digital culture – past to present
Tula Giannini and Jonathan P. Bowen
9 Rethinking Museum Exhibitions: Merging physical and digital culture – present to future
Tula Giannini and Jonathan P. Bowen
Part IV Collections
10 Collecting, Documenting, and Exhibiting the Histories of Digital Art: A V&A perspective
Douglas Dodds
11 Conserving Digital Art
Patricia Falcão and Tom Ensom
12 Spatial Narratives in Museums and Online: The birth of the digital object itinerary
Stuart Dunn, Graeme Earl, Anna Foka, and Will Wootton
xii Contents
Part V Audiences
13 How Museums Made (and Re-made) their Digital User
Ross Parry
14 The Digital Layer in the Museum Experience
Catherine Devine and Matt Tarr
15 Engaging Museum Visitors with AI: The case of chatbots
Giuliano Gaia, Stefania Boiano, and Ann Borda
16 Engagement at the Brooklyn Museum: A case study of use rate and lessons learned
Sara Devine
Part VI Digital Artists
17 Morphogenetic Creations: Exhibiting and collecting digital art
Andy Lomas
18 Evolving Installations: “Shaping Space”
Ernest Edmonds and Francesca Franco
19 Art, Life, and Technology, through Time and Space
Carla Gannis and Tula Giannini
20 A Conceptual Artist Programming for Social Change
Rachel Ara and Tula Giannini
Part VII Education
21 The Education of a Digital Fine Artist
Bruce Wands
22 Breaking Silos: New modes of art, education, and technology training in museums
Rosanna Flouty
23 Transforming Education for Museum Professionals in the Digital Age
Tula Giannini and Jonathan P. Bowen
Part VIII Libraries and Archives
24 Museum Libraries and Archives in the Digital 21st Century
Stephen J. Bury
25 Democratizing Discovery: The impact of digital culture on the research library
Judith Siefring
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Part IX Digital Future
26 Digital Culture Leaders Visioning the Postdigital Museum
Seb Chan, Courtney Johnson, and Tula Giannini
27 Smart Cities and Digital Culture: Models of innovation
Ann Borda and Jonathan P. Bowen
28 The Digital Future for Museums
Jonathan P. Bowen and Tula Giannini
xiv Contents
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Tula Giannini is a Professor in the School of Information at the Pratt Institute, New York, USA. She was
formerly Dean of the School during 2014–2017. At Pratt, she has initiated and managed several successful
collaborative digitization projects with leading New York City museums, libraries, and related cultural
institutions, supported by the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and other funding agencies. She
has also established a Master of Science (MS) in Museums and Digital Culture. Since 2016, she has co-organized
the EVA London Symposium, associated with the annual EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation
and the Arts. She also has an interest in musicology and has contributed entries in The Grove Dictionary of Musical
Instruments, published by Oxford University Press.
Jonathan P. Bowen FBCS FRSA is an Emeritus Professor of Computing at London South Bank University in
London, UK, an Adjunct Professor at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, and Chairman of Museophile
Limited, a consultancy company in the area of museums and IT. In 1993, he founded the Virtual Library museums
pages (VLmp), part of the WWW Virtual Library, in 1994, later adopted by the International Council of Museums
(ICOM). He was invited to be the Honorary Chair of the first Museums and the Web conference in 1997 and was
a regular contributor subsequently. More recently he has been co-chair of the annual EVA London Conference on
Electronic Visualisation and the Arts. In 2013. he was a co-editor of Electronic Visualisation in Arts and Culture,
published in the Springer Series on Cultural Computing. In 2017, he co-authored The Turing Guide, on the life
and work of the computing pioneer Alan Turing, published by Oxford University Press. He is a Life Fellow of the
British Computer Society, a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Liveryman of the Worshipful
Company of Information Technologists.
Contributors
Rachel Ara Independent artist, London, UK
Stefania Boiano InvisibleStudio, London, UK
Ann Borda The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan P. Bowen London South Bank University, London, UK & Southwest University, Chongqing, China
Stephen J. Bury The Frick Collection, New York, USA
Seb Chan Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia
Catherine Devine Microsoft, Seattle, USA
Sara Devine Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA
Douglas Dodds Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK
Stuart Dunn King’s College London, London, UK
Graeme Earl King’s College London, London, UK
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Ernest Edmonds De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Tom Ensom Tate Gallery, London, UK
Patricia Falcão Tate Gallery, London, UK
Rosanna Flouty New York University, New York, USA
Anna Foka King’s College London, London, UK
Francesca Franco University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Carla Gannis Pratt Institute, New York, USA
Tula Giannini Pratt Institute, New York, USA
Giuliano Gaia InvisibleStudio, London, UK
Courtney Johnson Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand
Nick Lambert Ravensbourne University of London, London, UK
Andy Lomas Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
Ross Parry University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Gareth Polmeer Royal College of Art, London, UK
Judith Siefring Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Matt Tarr American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA
Deborah Turnbull Tillman University of New South Wales & New Media Curation, Sydney, Australia
Bruce Wands School of Visual Arts, New York, USA
Will Wootton King’s College London, London, UK
xvi Contents
Abbreviations
3D Three-dimensional
ACM Association of Computing Machinery
ACMI Australian Centre for the Moving Image
AI Artificial Intelligence
AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council
ANSI American National Standards Institute
API Application Program Interface
AR Augmented Reality
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
BCE Before Common Era
BCS British Computer Society
BFA Bachelor of Fine Arts
BLE Bluetooth Low Energy
Bodleian Bodleian Libraries
CAS Computer Arts Society
COBOL COmmon Business Oriented Language
DAH Digital Art History
DCMS Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
EC European Commission
ENoLL European Network of Living Labs
ERASMUS EuRopean Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students
EU European Union
EVA Electronic Visualisation and the Arts
Fab lab Fabrication laboratory
FGM Female Genital Mutilation
Frick The Frick Collection
GDPR General Data Protection Regulation
GIS Geographic Information System
GLAM Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts
ICT Information and Communications Technology
IEC International Electrotechnical Commission
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IIIF International Image Interoperability Framework
ILS Integrated Library System
IMLS Institute of Museum and Library Services
IoL Internet of Life
IoT Internet of Things
ISEA Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts
ISO International Organization for Standardization
IT Information Technology
JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group
LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art
LMS Learning Management System
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LOD Linked Open Data
MARC MAchine-Readable Cataloging
MDC Museums and Digital Culture
Met Metropolitan Museum of Art
MFA Master of Fine Arts
MI Machine Intelligence
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MoMA Museum of Modern Art
MOOC Massive Open Online Course
MPEG Moving Picture Experts Group
MR Mixed Reality
MRes Master of Research
MS Master of Science
Mu.SA Museum Sector Alliance
MVP Minimum Viable Product
MW Museums and the Web
NFC Near-Field Communication
NLA National Library of Australia
NLP Natural Language Programming
NYARC New York Art Resources Consortium
NYC New York City
OCLC Online Computer Library Center
OCR Optical Character Recognition
Pratt Pratt Institute
QA Question Answering
RCA Royal College of Art
RCC Rapid Response Collecting
RFID Radio-Frequency Identification
SAT Society for Arts and Technology
SIGGRAPH Special Interest Group on Computer GRAPHics
SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies
SVA School of Visual Arts
TEI Text Encoding Initiative
TIFF Tag Image File Format
URL Uniform Resource Locator
USB Universal Serial Bus
UX User eXperience
V&A Victoria and Albert Museum
VR Virtual Reality
VSA Visitor Service Associate
WAV WAVeform audio file format
Whitney Whitney Museum of American Art
Wi-Fi Wireless networking technology
WSN Wireless Sensor Network
WWW World Wide Web
