Project description
Museums immersed in a new reality
Works of art or historical items are kept, studied and displayed to the public inside museums. New technologies like augmented and extended reality are opening up many new possibilities in this regard. Museums, for instance, are becoming virtual, with entire collections of digitally recorded images, sound files, text documents and other data of historical, scientific or cultural interest accessed online. The EU-funded UViMCA project will investigate the utility and usership of virtual museums of contemporary art. It will analyse and develop a conceptual framework for such museums and determine their social efficacy through an interdisciplinary methodology. Different curatorial approaches, theories of contemporary art reception and socially engaged artistic practices will be applied. The results will formulate a roadmap for future digital applications designed to support and enhance the role of contemporary art institutions.
Objective
This research proposal aims to address Utility (i.e. social function) and Usership in Virtual Museums of Contemporary Art [ViMCA]. Its objectives are to establish a ground-breaking analysis and conceptual framework for ViMCA, and to determine correlated modes of implementation designed to sustain social justice through cultural innovation. In its initial out-going phase at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for research-creation, this action will determine ViMCA’s social efficacy through an interdisciplinary methodology investigating different curatorial approaches, theories of contemporary art reception (emerging from neuroaesthetics, philosophy and art theory), as well as socially-engaged artistic practices, and cross-referencing them with the novel affordances provided by XR–Extended Reality technologies. In the subsequent in-coming phase of this action at ICS-FORTH’s Human Computer Lab, research will focus on usership and design in order to establish consistent modes of implementation. This next research phase will initially devise a bespoke mode of user-generated content creation for ViMCA, derived and adapted from co-productive models of public participation found in socially engaged art, new media and museums 3.0. Second, it will establish a dynamic, personalized user interface model adapted to contemporary art contexts that will critically engage users while challenging innate confirmation bias. The results of this overall research will constitute a roadmap for future digital applications designed to support and enhance the role of contemporary art institutions in fostering democracy and social justice in today’s post-truth era. In order to demonstrate the practical viability of these research results, work on this action will ultimately yield the design specifications for an innovative ViMCA prototype application, developed during the fellowship’s final secondment phase at the academia-to-industry spinoff startup ORamaVR.
Fields of science
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
70013 Irakleio
Greece