kmlink

“The Walker Art Center has a million visitors per year. The Walker Web site has 2 million visitors per year. We are . . . trying to understand what this means.” – Steve Dietz, Curator of New Media, Walker Art Center

Technology has so permeated the museum field that it almost seems to grow out of the institutions’ walls. Originally museum databases, digitized collections, and online archives were meant only for staff and in-house visitors. Now, through the World Wide Web, museum resources can be accessed by a worldwide audience, many of whom may never walk through our doors.
If museums are to adhere to their mandate to educate and inform, they must take this online audience into account.
Today most museums use the Web to fulfill their traditional roles – to document, educate, and preserve – by transferring existing information and reproducing physical objects in an electronic form. A radically different approach is to use Web sites to present art and exhibitions that exist only in electronic form, thus turning the Web into a medium of original experience. Increasingly, the rest of the world is using digital versions of real-life activities; we inform and promote ourselves, shop, play, study, and produce online. Other industries have realized that they must think digitally if they are going to succeed. Shouldn’t museums?

Over the next few years, more and more museums will place digitized information on the Web. Digital heritage programs – ensuring integrated access to collections and materials held in institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives – are being sponsored by many governments and corporate and private sponsors. Guiding this process are professional organizations such as the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), Australian Museums On-line (AMOL), the Canadian Heritage Information Network, and the Digital Heritage Initiative of the European Commission, among others, as well as early initiatives of the Getty Information Institute. (See page XX for the URLs of all the sites listed in this article.) The goal of these organizations is to link the resources held by various organizations, often using library catalogue and database standards. This is because libraries were among the first to use digital technology to disseminate information about their holdings, which is no surprise – accessibility has always been their main objective. Like libraries, museums collect, preserve, and provide access, but their mission also requires that they interpret and exhibit the unique objects entrusted to them. Thus far, however, this aspect of the museum’s mission has not made its way to the Web. Digitization has, at least temporarily, changed the profile of museums from information interpreters to information providers.

How can museums translate their curatorial expertise into a digital environment and encourage visitors to interpret objects online? What distinct role can museums play in the fusion of the “real” and the “virtual” that marks our modern existence?

A WONDERFUL MOMENT OF DISCOVERY
When it comes to online exhibitions, museums still have many questions. If everything can be downloaded, will museums lose their unique status as physical spaces of wondrous experience? Will our visitors still come to our buildings if we publish everything on the Internet? If museums are about real objects, why should we exhibit them in a virtual mode? Who should pay for this online development?
Many museums are struggling with their virtual extension, says Leonard Steinbach, chief information officer at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA): “We are in the process of exploring and defining what we mean by online tours and exhibitions, general access to collection images and information, how they should be approached, and what makes them effective. There are no simple answers.” Although he says that his museum has a long way to go, Steinbach has a clear vision for CMA’s online presence. “To claim that viewing a painting or a sculpture online is ‘purely information’ unfairly sterilizes what can still be a wonderful moment of discovery, inspiration, and illumination,” he says. “It is just different. It means more access to more art by more people than at any time in human history. This goes well beyond looking at objects. This is sharing culture and perspective.”

THINKING TWO-DIMENSIONALLY
The online exhibit resides in a medium that functions according to its own set of rules. The space and duration of an online exhibition as well as its composition, links, and production require a shift in the traditional curatorial approach.
An online exhibition is a two-dimensional display that lacks the physical experience of space. It neither offers viewers the possibility of moving physically closer to the objects on display nor allows someone to share an exhibition experience with others in the same place. In fact, an online exhibition resembles a book. It offers individual and private contemplation, is defined by its “pages” and organized in a linear or branched chronology, and has a hardback cover (its computer monitor). Readers and users share a similar spatial proximity; on one side sits the book/monitor; on the other, the reader/user. Like the book, the online exhibition is defined by intimacy; readers turn the pages and users tap on the keyboard. Finally, books can be read in a variety of surroundings, and online exhibitions can be accessed from any place with a computer that has an Internet connection.
Digital viewing does encourage viewers to look at things in new ways. Zooming allows for close inspection of details. Reproductions of physically distant objects can be united in one imaginative space. Virtual tours using video-stream images offer insights about real galleries. In addition, no matter how well they are publicized, traditional exhibitions are regional in scope. No matter how limited their subject, online exhibitions are global spaces. Still, like their three-dimensional counterparts, simulated spaces can take on all shapes and forms. Examples include the Virtual Guggenheim’s planned yet changeable architecture; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) interactive digital gallery; Superbad.com, where each work of art is just a click away and presented without any textual guidance; and the moving forest of object descriptions and images in the “Revealing Things” exhibition on the Smithsonian Without Walls site.

TIME AND SOCIABILITY
Online exhibitions are never restricted by time. They do not open or close but are available 24 hours a day. Each user defines her own visiting hours and comes and goes without ever seeing staff, asking for immediate assistance, or paying an entrance fee. Visitors experience the exhibition alone; the online show cannot be considered a social experience. Even e-mail discussions, online guest books, chat rooms, and surveys do not do much to alter the visitor’s physical isolation. Though theoretically online exhibitions incorporate the mass medium that is most accessible to a worldwide audience, in practice they remain sources of individual and intimate contemplation. (It is true, though, that online communities have developed new forms of social life and communication. The next generation of museum visitors might find the difference between real and virtual communities a minor one.) Some museums are working to develop a more sociable virtual space, experimenting with two-way dialogues by encouraging e-mail communication between visitors and curators, creating online discussion forums (as MOCA did for a show featuring artist Douglas Gordon), and offering newsletters and downloadable screensavers featuring work by exhibited artists.

EVERYTHING LINKS TO EVERYTHING ELSE
“Showing now at a computer near you!” From an advertisement by the Cornell Heritage Access Information Network (CHAIN), United Kingdom
Like other new media, online exhibitions do not yet have established rules and practices. But because they are not substitutes for traditional displays, they should not be developed using only traditional curatorial criteria. Similar to everything else on the Net, online exhibitions are a succession of windows (or frames) and links. Just as each scene is part of a film, each window is part of the exhibition. The narrative basis of the online show centers on its montage – images, sound, text, and design united in a single composition. No element is neutral, but each conveys the tone and message of the entire exhibition.
While I was curating “Do You Remember, When”, an online exhibition for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the process of reconstructing the story behind the object added new layers to the show’s main artifact, a small, handmade booklet. It was originally an intimate gift between two Jewish friends in Berlin, c. 1941-42, but its meaning changed during the Holocaust and in subsequent decades. The booklet became a time capsule between the “then” and the “now”, and it was essential that the exhibition reflect this temporal dualism both in content and design. The hypertext structure of the online format enabled the museum to present such multi-layered narratives, including reflections on the making of the exhibition. Curatorial transparency was a natural and welcome effect of the medium.
However, excessive hypertext also can take the user’s attention away from the subject of the exhibition. Online activities are defined by the nervous energy of the World Wide Web, which lacks a center and is composed of a seemingly endless progression of links. Surfing the Web is more like watching T.V. than like visiting a museum – you’re always only a click away from another site/channel. Museums must learn to navigate this new environment, bearing in mind, however, that traditional notions of welcoming visitors and offering opportunities to rest still apply. If online exhibitions offer – through their composition, narrative, and design – a defined and meaningful environment, visitors will have the sense of “being somewhere” and will be less inclined to leave before they explore it.

INTERACTIVITY
“In general . . . what many institutions are afraid of is the open communication aspect of the Net. They want to reduce this new medium to ‘information’. . . . The Net could be a link between the ‘dead’ material and the living people outside of the museum walls.” – Geert Lovink, Net critic, Australia
Online accessibility, the main reason for digital heritage programs, is often seen as a democratization of museum culture. Access to information is no longer restricted to those who can afford travel and museum visits, but is available to anyone who has access to a computer with an Internet connection. Collections that museums often lacked the physical space to exhibit now can benefit from a virtually infinite space of display. Thus audiences can enjoy unprecedented access to cultural objects and information.
Ideally, such accessibility could lead to a density of information that might change people’s ways of seeing, interpreting, and researching. But on many sites the conversation resembles the traditional one-way dialogue in which museums – often, it is true, to the satisfaction of our audiences – offer interpretations for visitors to contemplate and digest. Conversely, open communication has been a part of the development of the Internet from its earliest days, with users relying on horizontal rather than vertical communication and participating in interactive networking. How can curators transfer their expertise to a new medium where visitors behave differently, where users interact, talk back, and develop and offer other interpretations?
A few online installations might serve as models: Stephen Vitiello’s sound installation, Tetrasomia, brings together non-musical sounds the artist collected. Vitiello organizes these audio samples in four color fields, which represent Earth, air, wind, and fire. By clicking on the sound files, visitors can listen to a fruit-fly courtship, an underwater volcano, poisonous frogs, and the fiery sounds of the Saturn 5 lift-off. No longer passive listeners, visitors can combine these sounds to create a variety of other compositions. The British Museum invites online visitors to learn about daily life in ancient Egypt by clicking on sections of tomb wall paintings and other objects. And the World of Escher site challenges visitors with a contest. In general, Net art seems to strive for interactivity as evidenced by many works submitted to the Whitney Biennial; MOCA’s Digital Galleries; the Walker Art Center’s Gallery 9, and the annual Art on the Net contests organized by the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo.

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE REAL AND THE VIRTUAL
“All of the evidence we have is that spending time with the virtual version of works of art increases people’s desires to see the real thing.” – Sandy Nairne, Director of National Programmes, The Tate, London
Debates about the authenticity and physicality of objects are relevant to site-bound museums. But do they enhance our understanding of the virtual? Digital reproductions do not provide the same experience that one has in front of the original, but they can convey concepts, ideas, and emotions. Not as tied to the immediacy of the object, virtuality forces us to imagine narratives and spaces through which we can understand objects and their stories. Exhibitions have always taken objects out of their authentic context and displayed them in a new interpretive frame. In that sense, museums have been creating virtual environments all along.
Skepticism, questions, and ambitious expectations are inherent to the development of online exhibitions. However, a pro/contra argument does not do justice to the complex nature of the process. Site-bound museums must recognize that they now operate in an increasingly network-dominated world. As Sandy Nairne puts it, “We are now very aware that we do have a large number of virtual visitors who cannot, or will not, be able to get to any of the four Tate galleries. . . . But this is fine, because it matches with our mission, which is to extend knowledge and understanding of British, modern, and contemporary art.” In addition to commissioning artists, Tate Online experiments with digital extensions of contemporary artworks from the museum’s collections. The first in this series, says Nairne, is “a special feature with Damien Hirst, built with him, out of the work called Pharmacy.” The Tate site offers a 360-degree panorama view of Pharmacy with zoom capacity, visual documentation on how the three-dimensional version was displayed at other museums, an online discussion forum, and textual explanations from Hirst and the show’s curator.

CHEAPER AND FASTER?
“Bhutan: Fortress of the Gods” cost “approximately a seventh of the cost of a traditional exhibition.” – Christian Schicklgruber, Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna, Austria
“The fate of its $20-million Web site, guggenheim.com, is still unclear.” – New York Times, Nov. 20, 2001
From a production perspective, the benefits of online exhibitions are many. Objects can be seen from all sides – inside and out; viewers can even “turn” the pages of a book. Online exhibitions are excellent outlets for fragile objects that cannot be displayed due to conservation issues (and any other conservation issues will be limited to the exhibition’s development period). The established exhibition does not need more than technical maintenance. There are no costs associated with insurance or the shipping or installation of objects. Exhibition plans can be redesigned more easily; last minute factual corrections pose few problems; and staff can be limited to a small core team. It is true that the research and exhibition development process of an online show is similar to that of a traditional exhibition, but digitized information is cheaper, faster, and more flexible.
Potentially lower production costs would seem to make online exhibitions an ideal medium for smaller museums, allowing them to diversify outreach efforts, experiment with innovative displays, and develop a variety of advertising campaigns. However, online products can be expensive, and most museums will not have the $20 million the Guggenheim directed toward its Web site. But it is possible to develop a small-scale display that uses existing resources. Remember that while digitization is costly, online exhibitions don’t have to be. Institutions with small budgets can ask sponsors and pro-bono Web designers and programmers to help them with their projects.

ACCESS FOR ALL
Accessibility of online exhibitions is a complicated issue, says Jonathan Bowen, professor of computing at South Bank University, London: “Imagine a museum where the disabled are excluded because no thought has been given to facilities to enable them to access at least a portion of the museum’s resources. This is no longer acceptable in modern society, and may even be illegal in some countries as well. However, this is exactly what is happening online with many new museum Web sites around the world.” The guidelines for Web-site designers developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), part of the World Wide Web consortium, recommend various measures, including providing textual explanations for all visual images and transcripts of audio content, and thinking about how frames, tables, and other design templates will affect disabled visitors.
There’s another issue: “Blind Web users need some form of audio browser that automatically translates text in Web pages into an audible representation,” says Bowen. He believes that many problems can be solved with a little more consideration: “Some designers may claim that designing a Web site for wide access will mean that it will lose its impact for users with no disability. Do not believe them, and go elsewhere.” Remember, too, that working to make Web content more accessible to people with disabilities can only help us to reach other users, who represent a range of computer skills and equipment.

JOURNEYS THROUGH A VIRTUAL WORLD
Advancements in technology will enable unforeseen methods to create ever more meaningful and accessible experiences.” – Jan Schall, Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.
“Museums today have to bridge and communicate between the real and virtual.” – Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany
In 1998, a global survey of museums – conducted by the Japanese Internet Museum and Jonathan Bowen, who also is affiliated with the Virtual Library – indicated how slowly museums had ventured into online development: 53.7 percent of all museums had launched their Web sites after 1994; 70 percent were spending less than $1,000 per year (excluding personnel costs) on their sites; and 57 percent were running their Web departments with one staff person. However, a report on The Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries, issued in May by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), indicates a rapid change, at least in American museums. According to the IMLS survey, today all large museums, 93 percent of mid-size museums, and 41 percent of small museums in the United States have a Web site. Fifteen percent of those institutions without a Web site plan to launch one in the next 12 months. Seventy-nine percent of all U.S. museums indicate that a lack of funding is the key obstacle to technological expansion, followed by a lack of expertise (a high 63 percent).

There are examples of Web-based exhibitions that can serve as models for the field. “Bhutan: Fortress of the Gods”, developed by the Museum für Völkerkunde, an ethnological museum in Vienna, Austria, offers diverse strata for experiencing the objects and topics. The visitor moves through its narrative layers as if on an expedition to a new land. Awarded Best Online Exhibition in the Best of the Web 2001 competition, “Bhutan” was developed by the museum, the Austrian Ministry of Science, and the Institute for Informatics in Vienna. Funded by the ministry, it was intended to be a blueprint for online exhibitions, accessible to all Austrian museums. It was the first online exhibition for curator Christian Schicklgruber, whose “first decision was to forget the real exhibition and develop an online concept.” Each organization handled a different aspect of the project. “In the beginning we tried to explain decisions to each other,” says Schicklgruber, “but after a while we simply accepted the work and language divide between curators and programmers.” Because much of the technological know-how was outsourced, however, the museum was unable to fully benefit from the collaborative experience.

At present, “Bhutan” is a precious entity that has not been broadly advertised to the public or influenced the design of the museum’s main Web site. Still, according to Schicklgruber, on average each visitor spends an astonishing 47 minutes at the site. Twenty-five percent of the approximately 25,000 visitors who visited the exhibition between November 2000 and May 2001 returned to see the show again. Many hits came from educational institutions in the United States.
The Web is particularly suited to the diverse aspects of museum work. Curators often present their favorite pieces online, and some museum Web sites allow visitors to build their own virtual collections. But much more could be accomplished. For example, the Nelson-Atkins Museum created “lab-like” sounds for the conservation section of its online exhibition, “Tempus Fugit.” The show presents the concept of time in different cultures, explored through selected artworks dating from 900 B.C. to the present. “Tempus Fugit” offers an elegant combination of objects projected on a world map as well as conservation information and research resources. “Developing the online form of ‘Tempus Fugit’ required that I learn a new language,” says curator Jan Schall. “Music and sound in general have an uncanny ability to evoke place and mood.” In this case, sound helped transport the visitor to the museum’s conservation lab, something that could not be accomplished by a traditional exhibition.

“Crossfade,” a curated space that explores sound as an artistic medium, utilizing network technology as an integral part of its production, illustrates another feature of online exhibitions: virtual cooperation. “The most important initializing phase was totally non-virtual; we met in person,” says Johannes Goebel, director of the ZKM Institute for Music and Acoustics. Organized by the Goethe-Institute in San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany, the exhibition combines media essays with new artworks. “The artists are commissioned,” says Dieta Sixt, former director of the Goethe-Institute, San Francisco. “It is a process by which all of the original institutions can suggest names and we decide together – online, of course.” Thus far “Crossfade” has included 10 hours of Japanese music and works by Stephen Vitiello, Yoko Ono, Chris Chafe, and Greg Niemeyer next to essays about the “architecture of listening” and “music and the Net.” It has been established as a work in progress and has no time limitations (as long as funds remain available). “Museums . . . have the potential to juxtapose issues of context and longevity in ways that may prove useful,” says the Walker’s Steve Dietz. “Also, as sites of both offline and online culture visits, museums can be important venues for prototyping rich, hybrid experiences.”

ONLINE DOCUMENTATIONS
Many museums offer digitized versions of their collections, complete with captions and an introduction, under the title “online exhibition.” Digital databases are wonderful tools for highlighting objects from the collection or presenting a rich selection from the archives. But these online documentations will only disappoint those looking for an exhibition. Audiences have learned that exhibitions are carefully curated and designed efforts and expect no less from an online show. Digitized versions of objects with captions do not make an exhibition, but merely publicize visual information. They should be called “online documentations” and positioned within collections and archives areas. The Cleveland Museum of Art, for example, presents its Jonah Marbles, early Christian and Byzantine works, within a carefully designed online Curator’s Tour. “We experimented with placing the faces of our curators on the tour to help personalize it and add a sense of authority, which I think becomes an issue with material a museum places online,” says Steinbach. “Also, the objects and galleries described are well loved by our community and we wanted them to connect to the persons involved.”

CONCLUSION
Returning home from a trip to the Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, I was delighted to find out that I could re-enter the galleries I had just explored through their virtual tours. But is it enough to transfer “galleries” into the virtual world? Or should we avoid simulations of our site-based museums? Why replicate the conditions of a gallery space that is defined and limited by four walls? Furthermore, how do we respond to the challenges raised by interactivity, transparency, and the online presentation of the object? How do we protect unique voices from being watered down?
Online curators are entering a new and unmapped area where many traditional considerations do not apply. In the virtual world, conservation issues are limited to the digitization process; there is no architecture to influence the design; and linear writing does not suit the branched structure of most online exhibitions. And while site-based museums are tied to their local environments, their online activities have a global reach. These factors will shape the visual language of our online exhibitions and force us to question the universal accessibility of our concepts. The exploration of the social, artistic, and mnemonic dimensions of cyberspace has just begun, and curators will need to negotiate between newly familiar user-friendly interfaces and exhibiting cultures using new visual languages.
Still, many museums are realizing that their Web sites can be something more than storage areas for information on collections and activities. The available technology allows (funds permitting) curators to put objects on the Web’s center stage and illuminate them through exhibitions. In the end, exhibiting online is not about special effects or showing technological prowess. Online or off, it is still the object that dictates the format of the presentation.

REFERENCES

WEBSITES
DIGITAL HERITAGE PROGRAMS
Australian Museums & Galleries Online
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
European Commission Digital Heritage Information Society
Canadian Heritage Information Network
Former Getty Information Institute
Stephen Vitiello’s Sound Installations
World of Escher contest pages
Superbad
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art
Art on the Net, Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo
Artmuseum.net
Walker Art Center, New Media Initiatives

ONLINE EXHIBITIONS
British Museum
“Bhutan, Fortress of the Gods,” Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna
“Tempus Fugit,” Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.
Curator’s Tour, Jonah Marbles, Cleveland Museum of Art
“Do You Remember, When,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Best of the Web 2001, Museum and the Web 2001
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS): Status of Technology and
Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries 2002 Report
IThe World Wide Museum Survey on the Web
Crossfade
Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Guggenheim Virtual Museum
Smithsonian Without Walls
Tate

ACCESSIBILITY Guidelines
Guidelines Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

THANKS
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The author expresses his sincere thanks to the many colleagues who contributed to this article, the participants of the Salzburg Seminar’s 2001 session on “Museums in the 21st Century,” the Salzburg Seminar, and Ioan Nemes.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: Going Global: Reaching Out for the Online Visitor. In: Museum News, Sept/Oct 2002. Vol. 81, No. 5, American Association of Museums.

A Romanian translation of this article can be found in Romanian art and culture Journal Vector: SPRE O EXTINDERE GLOBALA: IN INTAMPINAREA VIZITATORULUI ONLINE. In: Vector, arta si cultura in context, 01, 2005.