The CD-Rom or the First Steps Towards New Definitions for Museums.
A brief introspection of museum history to understand today’s debate on the new definition of museums
This article was published in the 5th Anniversary Special Issue of “Museums and New Tech Magazine” titled “Review and Innovation of Museum Technology Application” by the Shanghai University Museum (August 2019).
Have you ever visited the royal castle of Chambord?
If so, immerse yourself in one of your memories in one of the 426 rooms and rediscover the sensations you experienced there. If you have not yet had the chance, a simple Internet search will set the context: a majestic and monumental castle, with 365 windows and crowned with dungeons and turrets, in the heart of Europe’s largest forest park where wildlife flourishes. As a child, I regularly accompanied my family to visit the castles of the Loire Valley, being a native of the region, but the Château de Chambord was my first real transformative experience. At the time, the Château de Chambord was empty of furniture and its walls decorated with graffiti left by other visitors for centuries created an atmosphere perfect for stories and imagination. The quality of the guide’s narrative was then key to the visitor experience, as it could radically transform the void into the fertile ground leaving room for the greatest characters in French history.
Each step and word created the lines of a new reality that told the story of the place and became the scene of limitless imagination and new emotions.
Towards a space of transformation and incarnation
Today, new technologies are promoting cognitive narrative through sensory and body immersion to create a new experience for everyone. Facilitating the transition of museums from an archive of memory to a space of transformation and incarnation, they are the natural response to a growing need in our society to live rather than to observe, to understand through action and to transmit through emotion.
The role of museums is currently fundamentally disrupted by this new behaviour, which began in the 1990s. At the time, the movement of “relational aesthetics” with artists such as Pierre Huyghe (major artist on the French and international scene who has been involved since the 1990s in redefining the status of the work and the exhibition format. “I’m interested in building situations that take place in reality”) or Philippe Parreno (in the early 1990s, Philippe Parreno established himself in France through a work that explored the possibilities of the exhibition as a medium. More interested in situations than their resolutions, he conceives his art as a process rather than as the production of objects), already placed the principle of the exhibition as an artistic practice to create living exhibitions in which the visitor’s perception is the key.
The experiment became the object of the exhibition.
We currently live in a world where the profusion of data and their unlimited and immediate access turns content into a common good and experience into a rare and sought-after product.
Start by dematerializing
Like so many other people from my generation ‘the millennials’, my first experience of a museum like the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles was on the family computer before even visiting their physical counterpart. Looking back, I feel I have learned more about the history of our country by playing “Versailles 1685: Conspiracy at the Court of the Sun King” (launched in 1996) rather than in class.
When Pierre Raiman, Director of Montparnasse Multimédia, visited the Réunion des musées nationaux in 1994 to suggest to put the Louvre’s collection on CD-ROM, the museum opened up to a new era: the dematerialization of material collections (source).
Art and culture then became consumer products and the visitor their consumer.
This content, which had been collected and documented for so many decades, became accessible and searchable on all personal computers. The provision in June 1992 of the “Mona Lisa Database”, a database of national museum collections generated by the Ministry of Culture and Communication, on the Minitel was the first step towards opening up national collections to the general public, but the CD-ROM goes further by offering a virtual tour of the history of the building and the museum through an “interactive multimedia experience”. The museum thus became a content broadcaster in the same way as a media and, subsequently, was used the same communication media when it switched from the website to the YouTube channel.
A major advance in the history of the digital revolution in museums, this first CD-ROM outlines the beginnings of a virtual museum and the creation of an audience of spectators or visitors outside the walls that will later be called “virtual visitor” or “online visitor”.
The emancipation of the online visitor
Combining pedagogy, contemplation and entertainment, access to immersive virtual experiences leaves room for the visitor, giving voice to experience and creation rather than to content now broadcast on and through the Internet. The visitor is no longer just a spectator, a viewer, an activator or a collector of knowledge or content, but becomes an actor in a world in which he or she evolves. We were in the heart of the era of the participatory web. The visitor reacts, disseminates, shares, transforms and creates from the museum’s collections. He wants to go further and feel close to the works, to have the opportunity to follow the daily life, to discover the backstage and the professions of the institution but also to give his opinion, question, exchange and share his approach to the museum.
In 2008, the Mattress Factory Art Museum in Pittsburgh offered visitors the opportunity to leave their impressions of their visit by video on Youtube and the brooklynmuseum in New York to do the same on Twitter in 2009. Evenings dedicated to Facebook fans were organized like those at the Musée des arts décoratifs de Paris in 2010 in order to gather, listen and individualize this virtual community. Through social networks, the museum has expressed itself to its fans but also and above all to individuals by entering into discussions with Internet users and listening to them. Very quickly, museums understood the participatory and creative potential of social networks. From 2007 to 2011, Internet users had the opportunity to participate in numerous photographic competitions organized on Flickr by the Tate, the Toulouse Museum, the Château de Versailles, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. In 2010, the Château de Versailles organised a style competition in 2011 on Tumblr for its exhibition “Le XVIIIème au goût du jour”, which offered Internet users the opportunity to draw inspiration from the fashion of the time to create contemporary pieces. Between 2010 and 2011, the British Museum and the Château de Versailles received Wikimedians in residence to enrich the institutions’ presence on Wikipedia and to train teams in the culture of free and collective expression.
These initiatives have allowed museums to identify much more than just fans, they have allowed them to create communities around photography, fashion, an era, a style or a philosophy of life.
Curating immersion
In a few decades, we have gone from the database to virtual reality with strong steps such as visiting online collections or the virtual counterpart of exhibitions mixing scientific or emotional narrative.
The dedicated site of the Claude Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais produced by the Réunion des musées nationaux offered a most poetic and intimate experience, unlike the crowds gathered in the physical spaces. The online experience reacted to the Internet user’s actions breaking the boundaries of reality and the virtual. A sensory journey, the Internet user walked through a landscape, watching it transform itself before his eyes into an impressionistic landscape. A simple breath into the microphone and the flowers flew away, the movement of the mouse moved the water under the boat within Monet’s painting, etc.
The immersive experiences offered by museums has changed the behaviour of audiences towards works, giving a place to body movements in the visitor journey, to emotion and sensations (source: “But Doesn’t the Body Matter? — Talk by Olafur Eliasson, More than Real Art in the Digital Age, 2018 Verbier Art Summit).
By taking a step back from the objects and giving way to sensory, intellectual, artistic, creative or entrepreneurial experimentations, the visitor has become an actor or producer of a common heritage. The museum’s relationship with its visitors is no longer linear but multi-modal and multi-dimensional. The museum has thus evolved from a history collector to a disseminator of information and content to a platform of opinions, ideas and experiences.
The museum in an immersive reality
Today, the impact of immersive realities can be measured both in the relationship with visitors and in the very role of the museum and the evolution of museum’ skills and teams. Curators, researchers, scenographers, exhibition managers and even architects and artists are changing their perspectives to understand the museum’s walls, the creation of exhibitions and the visitor experience. The world in which we live allows us to explore some museums only with a virtual reality headset that offers a multi-sensory spatial and immersive experience.
The Kremer Museum, for example, designed by the architect Johan van Lierop, exhibits 70 masterpieces by 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters gathered for the first time hanging in the museum space. The Universal Museum of Art, in collaboration with French museums, produces exhibitions that exist only in virtual reality and go beyond the limits of what is possible. For the first time, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the United States were able to bring their respective paintings “The Sunflowers” together in a virtual space open to visitors and researchers.
Or, historians and curators at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam had to push their research to the furnishing details of Amsterdam’s wartime apartments to complete historical reconstruction of Anne Frank’s ‘Secret Annex’ in virtual reality.
As for the scientists and curators of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle de Paris, they wanted to tell the story of evolution by replacing the human being within biodiversity without putting it at its centre. To this end, the team produced a temporary virtual reality exhibition full of emotions and wonder presented in a brand new exhibition room: ‘The Cabinet of Virtual Reality’.
Recently, the example of the exhibition “Age Old Cities” at the Institut du Monde Arabe de Paris raises the fundamental role of the virtualization of museums and heritage going beyond the amazement and education of the public but making it possible to save places and cultures in danger. The startup Iconem associated with Ubisoft has thus created a fully digital exhibition presented in Paris but also via virtual reality headsets in order to allow visitors to discover places destroyed or missing from Syria, Libya or Iraq.
When new technologies facilitate the emotionality of museums
To make room for more humanity in museums and allow them to focus on individual, emotional and sensory relationships, new technologies such as artificial intelligence combined with the Internet of Things in a context of ultra-connectivity provide powerful solutions. For example, the answers provided by museum chatbots draw the beginnings of a virtual companion capable of providing the necessary information and knowledge to fuel a visit. IBM’s intelligent Watson system integrated into the Museum of Tomorrow visit route in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, speeds up the connection between the visitor and the museum via a conversation interface called Iris+. The intelligent analysis of the data connected throughout the museum visit serves as the basis for Iris+’s exchanges with the visitor. Providing additional information that goes beyond the museum’s collections from the social, cultural or environmental fields, the dialogue between the intelligent digital mediator and the visitor invites reflection and exchange. The objective is thus to give a new perspective to the visitor experience to allow a multi-interpretation of life, society and the future.
But the new intelligent PDAs go far beyond mediation. Museum professionals are already observing the creation of emotional and intimate relationships with these virtual companions where affect and intellect play a major role in making the conversation credible and therefore real.
At the IBM Think 2018 conference held in March in Las Vegas, American theoretical physicist and futurist Dr. Michio Kaku explained that the future of an emotional Internet is characterized by sharing memories and visceral feelings through a brain stimulator. “Finally, we will download the entire experiments. We will send emotions, memories, the feelings of our first kiss…. on the Internet” which is what he calls the “brain net” connecting our brains to the machines. Learning from interactions and time spent with the visitor, compiling his reactions, memories and references, the intelligent system gets to know his interlocutor to better answer him.
It is simple to imagine a conversation falling into a much more emotional and intimate lexical field and thus creating a feeling of attachment, admiration, anger, curiosity, etc. Faster than we think, we will see almost human relationships being built between the museum entity and its visitor.
The museum entity
The technological revolution we are experiencing has profoundly changed the definition of the museum and its professions. By making the collections accessible for immediate and unlimited consultation or reuse, the 80,000 museums surrounding us can change focus, no longer work solely on their objects but also respond to urgent needs and crisis that our societies and micro-communities are currently facing.
Today’s museum is beginning to measure its transformative potential and its impact on local communities and the future of our societies. In a world where anxiety and social disabilities are becoming commonplace, where 29% of people do not feel at home in their homes while 68% of the population will live in cities in 2050, well-being, freedom of being and safety are essential. People are looking for a social environment that is a source of quality rather than quantity where trust and transparency are keywords, a space to be and express themselves, to grow and evolve.
It only took a few decades for museums to move from CD-ROM to Virtual Reality curated by artificial intelligence, from intellectual to sensory content, from the diffusion of works to the creation of universes, from the dematerialization of collections to the safeguarding of the intangible, social, emotional and sensory heritage of humanity.
Today’s society is not only changing the professions of museums and their roles but is also changing its definition.
In addition to being seen as places of trust and security, inspiration and openness, museums, assisted by intelligent and emotional technologies, are perceived as adventures beyond physical, physiological and spiritual realities. The museum then becomes an entity of its own as part of the experience in the same way as the collection, the artist or the visitor. And as every entity, it has its own individuality that creates the fabulous diversity of museum’s today and gives them this strong power. Is it really a question today to define what is a museum? Museums are as diverse as their collections and their communities, definitions are multiple and this is why they are so fundamental in today’ society balance.
