Virtual Education

 

In contemporary society we are experiencing an ever increasing proliferation of digital media, including games and applications (O’Connell,2012). These media, shared through platforms, blogs and social networking sites, are produced and consumed with increasingly rapidity, particularly by  younger audiences, who are “bombarded and bombarding one another with an avalanche of media-rich information in a largely vernacular digital culture” (Ganley,2012:15).

 

The fascinating world of virtual realities and digital technologies is becoming increasingly prevalent in museum settings, particularly in the UK, where museums are attempting to both reach new audiences and strengthen their relationship with regular visitors, providing more in-depth gallery experiences (Anderson,1999).

It seems clear that digital media is responding to the changing needs of modern society, reacting  to varied and informal learning styles that occur within museums (Walker,2008), now more than ever facilitated by digital technologies (Tallon,2008). These occupy a unique position in museums, midway between gaming tools and educational instruments. Indeed, there is a very thin line that divides a tool leading to effective assimilation of educational content from one which is purely an instrument for gaming and entertainment. The debate about the effectiveness of digital media from an educational point of view is far from subsiding (Meecham,2013), and for museums attempting to maintain balance between the two faces of the same coin there is always a possibility of trivialization to contend with. But the issue extends far beyond the simple trivialization of museum's collections: digital technologies have engendered a profound change in the way that we perceive and form relationships with museum objects and works of art (Meecham,2013). Indeed, as we will see in this essay, there are many cultural and social factors behind the design of a digital tool that must be considered alongside the advantages and limitations that interpretative tools bring to museum collections.

 

What effect digital animations can have on an audience's perception of a work of art?

 

Museum visitors today, especially young people, are increasingly accustomed to digitally created and manipulated images, representations detached from reality. Because of this the relationship between museum visitors and physical objects has changed; people's emotions, expectations and even their suggestibility has been transformed since the technical reproduction of images in the twentieth century introduced the masses to the elitist art world (Benjamin,1939)[i].

 

This process of transformation, which has its roots in the mutability of the human sense perception (Benjamin,1939) has never been arrested, and so increasingly in the modern world “access to new media and visual technologies has altered our perceptual skills” (Whitehead,2012 quoted in Meecham,2013). “Now, more than ever before, new technologies allow the museum to imagine creating new experiences and enhancing familiar ones in unprecedented ways” (Bradburne quoted in Tallon:IX).

From an educational point of view, the most significant result of booming digital technology is the greater, yet intangible, accessibility of authentic artwork through “art surrogates”, disclosing forgotten histories of museum objects that have otherwise found no way to emerge into audience consciousness (Meecham,2013). Unlike in the past, today works of art are viewed and accepted through new virtual media forms and languages: “the proliferation of digital images has (…) affected our experience of art works” in a way that demonstrates “our relationship with surrogate images has also changed” (Meecham,2013:41).

Indeed, it seems that our emotional response to artwork is changing, as the conventional separation between an authentic artwork and its surrogate is dismantled. Technology has allowed us to experience in-depth and emotional experiences even through and with surrogates. For example, it is now possible to launch an exhibition about Van Gogh without actually exhibiting a single authentic artwork, as happened at “Van Gogh Alive”, an immersive exhibition in which visitors experienced the “penetration of the exhibition space” through giant reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings (Meecham,2013:39). This was possible because of the strong human desire to make things humanly and physically close, and even to intimately and greedily possess them (Benjamin,1939), perhaps due to a perception that the real thing can be disappointing (Meecham, 2013).

A few years ago, during a Museology lecture at the University of Florence, I was astonished by a provocative announcement from the Professor comparing the potential of Italian and American collections, more or less as follows:

"Some American museums are built upon nothing! Often collections do not exist or don’t have any historical value, especially the scientific ones, but still their galleries are overcrowded and lively! Their uniqueness lies in the fact that people attend those places to experience life, to socialise, to get excited and involved”.

Indeed, without the ability to relate art collections to people's everyday life and through them encourage exciting and engaging experiences, even a country like Italy with countless historic artworks would produce meaningless displays. In post-modern museums, the “aura” no longer seems to be enough, and we can witness a “fading effect” over physical art objects, whilst their hidden stories are made visible through new technologies (Meecham,2013), an issue to which I will return later. We must ask the question, can digital imagery “exist cheerfully side by side with the original with no damage done?” (Meecham,2013:46).

We do not yet know the answer to this question, but surely we are witnessing the birth of a new kind of museum experience alongside traditional ones. We cannot predict whether and how those relationships will undergo further development; but we can try to find new ways of facilitating a peaceful coexistence between these two parallel universes.

 

[i] Digital transformations in museums are deeply related to and conditioned by “historical circumstances” (Benjamin,1939:224),  intimately interconnected with the social fabric in which they are inserted.

 

 

Bettina Di Salvo, 2014