Periodic Reporting for period 2 - UViMCA (Utility and Usership in Virtual Museums of Contemporary Art)
Période du rapport: 2022-01-18 au 2023-01-17
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, arts organizations have accelerated their lagging digital transition in an effort to provide broader public access to their collections and projects, and increase their stake in the attention economy. Yet, for the most part, their digital infrastructure and digital strategies are still emergent, often limited to broadcasting documentation and visitor information on their website and through social media. While arts organizations are investing considerable resources into digitizing their collections to make them widely available for public reference and use, these massive, online collections remain dramatically underutilized, garnering very little audience engagement beyond a small pool of already committed researchers and amateurs. Almost three decades after the advent of the first online collections, their presentation has barely changed and arts organizations are still puzzled at how to best exploit these rich content troves. The UViMCA research project addresses this issue by examining both the existing and the potential impacts (i.e. utility) and modes of engagement (i.e. usership) of virtual museums of contemporary art. This issue is crucial for society as the general public is increasingly coming into contact and engaging with artworks by means of digital technology, given that visiting physical museums and galleries often proves difficult, costly and even daunting for some audiences. In consequence, digital mediation is rapidly transforming the public’s perception of and relationship to culture, which is what effectively upholds collective meaning and value for society. In today’s post-truth era, cultural organizations are among the only public institutions that retain a good measure of public trust (in comparison to democratic and scientific institutions), which makes them invaluable to the task of fighting disinformation, fostering healthy civic debate, promoting social cohesion and nurturing a more active citizenry. Accordingly, the overall objectives of the UViMCA project are to identify the most effective ways of increasing arts organizations’ social impact by means of new digital technologies, and examine how digital cultural applications can mobilize collective intelligence to sustain greater diversity, equality and social justice.
Overall, the work performed throughout the project has involved surveying and critically assessing the main digital strategies used by art museums and galleries to mediate modern and contemporary art, and speculate on the potential socio-cultural benefits of virtual museums, to create a roadmap for the future development of new cultural applications with more social traction. The project’s basic research question was: “what can virtual museums of contemporary art do that physical museums can’t?” Its goal was not to determine ways to enhance and further disseminate in-gallery practices, but instead leverage the affordances provided by digital technology to create new models of remote (online) cultural participation able to sustain power sharing on a mass scale by recruiting users’ unique perspective and judgment. The project’s main results add up to a ground-breaking analysis and conceptual framework for virtual museums of contemporary art developed across 4 major papers. Each paper identifies and proposes a solution to an issue or question of vital importance to the advancement of virtual museums of contemporary art. The first paper, published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies’ special issue on “Online Collections” (2022), addresses the lack of adequate, online curatorial strategies for digitized works of modern and contemporary visual art. The second paper, published in the Digital Art History Journal (June 2023), explores the potentially-transformative effects of online participation on physical institutions. The third paper, co-authored with Chris Salter for the Routledge volume “Museums and Technologies of Presence” (September 2023), tackles the impacts of immersive technologies (e.g. Virtual Reality) on cultural experience users. Finally, the fourth paper, co-authored for the Springer Nature volume “Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage” (Fall 2023), focuses on the benefits and drawbacks of personalized artistic recommendations on user engagement and judgment. In addition to these papers, the project results were communicated to diverse expert and non-expert audiences through presentations at 3 academic conferences (RISE¬–IMET 2021, Museums Without Walls 2022 and MCG’s Museums+Tech 2022) and 1 industry conference ( Connect 2021); public talks organized by The Hexagram Network in Canada and the art centre Azkuna Zentroa in Spain; participation in European Researchers’ Night 2022; 6 postgraduate guest lectures in universities in Greece, Canada, Finland and the UK; 3 press articles in Canada and Greece as well as 1 feature interview in a book published in Korea; a series of Youtube Vlog entries for general audiences; a project website (providing access to all results and recorded events) and social media promotion on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin.
This project progresses beyond the state-of-the-art on virtual museums by proposing alternative perspectives and innovative solutions to important problems (e.g. skeuomorphism) that have hindered the progress of museum computing. The project’ main results amount to a roadmap for how art museums and galleries can leverage their digitized collections (whether through screen-based applications online or immersive experiences in the metaverse) to support new models of remote cultural participation capable of fostering more inclusion, diversity, equality and empowerment within art museums. While UViMCA is mainly a theoretical and speculative project, its potential impacts in the long-run are far reaching. The project directly tackles the thirty-year old issue of how best to exploit growing online collections of art digitizations (art museums’ main digital assets) so as to benefit society. It theoretically demonstrates that by changing the way in which users navigate and interact with these digitized collections, it is possible, firstly, to recruit collective intelligence on a mass scale to offset the art world’s unjust reputational economy and value system so as to make it more distributed, equal and diverse. Secondly, by transforming online engagement, it is also possible to make users more aware of their own perceptual patterns, biases and meaning-making tendencies, shape their aesthetic judgments, similarly to the way in which recommendation engines used by companies like Amazon and Netflix incite users to reflect on their decision-making processes and personal preferences. This emerges as a way for arts organizations to utilize their existing resources to increase their stake in the attention economy all the while fostering a form of critical literacy adapted to the post-truth era.