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This article by , Lecturer in Writing, was originally published on . Read the .
To many, museums are like dinosaurs: fossilised. They call to mind Renaissance paintings, Roman sculpture, 鈥渄on鈥檛 touch!鈥� admonishments, and Indiana Jones demanding 鈥渋t belongs in a museum!鈥� But these associations won鈥檛 be true for much longer. While there will always be a Louvre and a National Portrait Gallery, today there are many more types of museum exhibits and art, thanks to the constant evolution of technology and computing.
The new age of digital art doesn鈥檛 even restrict itself to museum spaces; interactive and digital works are spreading out into online galleries, public places, and real-time performances. They can even invite you into the artwork itself, asking you to wander through it, to roll your hands over it, to touch, to play, and even to make the art yourself.
Art in the museum
Museums have always been spaces that embrace the fresh and the experimental, the avant garde of art and culture. So it鈥檚 no surprise that digital and multi-media art (in the sense of film, text, image, sound, and texture) have found homes in exhibits and installations all over the world. Notable examples include the exhibit in 2009-2010, which featured digital interactive pieces that were collaborations between designers and users. These works asked 鈥� even required 鈥� the museum visitor to touch, poke, prod, move through, peer into, and play in order to garner a response from the technology.
Other artworks use their museum space to immerse the interactive audience deeply into a , a , or physical experiences (such as the ). These works invite their visitors to play, to physically interact with the digital technologies, and to cooperate in creating the final realisations of the pieces.
Some ventures outside the hallowed museum halls, turning public spaces into interactive art displays. The , for example, reshuffles the bard鈥檚 lines in an algorithmic in New York鈥檚 Public Theater, immersing the audience in Shakespeare鈥檚 poetic language in the lobby while actors do the same next door. of this sort are emerging all over the world in , , and . They play with LEDs, speakers, conductivity, input, output, motherboards, algorithms, robots, and the viewers of the works themselves.
Art online
Even Indiana Jones鈥檚 brand of art is going digital, as curators seek to preserve, catalogue, and archive their collections using new technologies. In the UK, the includes an outline for creating digital versions of its collections. The aim is to take the physical museum to the realm of the virtual. Online communities such as and are also delivering digital art, through virtual exhibits, online archives, and original digital pieces in virtual spaces.
Online platforms also provide opportunities for artists, curators and art lovers to interact and collaborate. The wildly successful uses site visitors 鈥� the public in general 鈥� to catalogue and crowdsource metadata for 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings, an enormous task made easy and educational via digital interfaces. Other projects, such as , , and the National Gallery of Art鈥檚 , seek to engage and educate through multimedia tasks in art, games, and video, whether in museums, classrooms, or on a home computer.
Mobile art
The mobile aspects of digital media are also moving art outside of museums and into public spaces via mobile devices and public displays. Art installations live inside our mobile phones and our daily environment, combining into 鈥済eo-locative鈥� art, stories and histories. There鈥檚 Joel Cahen鈥檚 soundwalk narrative for example, and Rebecca Horrox鈥檚 Snowdonia opera walk, . These works make use of your mobile devices in the actual physical location, enhancing the visitor鈥檚 experience of the geographical space with multimedia.
Mobile apps, , on buildings and in public spaces, embedded , , and that turn ubiquitous surveillance into real-time displays all bring art into the 21st century, into our hands, and into our everyday environments. Banksy鈥檚 , for example, features a QR code that takes the viewer to a video of teargas being used in a raid on the Calais refugee camps. Mobile phones are making art part of our lives, rather than a brief Saturday outing for the express purpose of 鈥渃ulture鈥�.
Creating Digital Art
And phones can take this one step further, transforming the art consumer and participant into artists themselves. The combination of a general frustration with rampant consumerism, poor quality consumer products, and the availability of raw materials on the cheap 鈥� from projectors to robotics to computing components 鈥� has ushered in the current 鈥渕aker鈥� culture.
Using inexpensive, open source tools that allow anyone to build small computer interfaces, such as the and systems, a 鈥減hysical computing artist鈥�. The internet is full of , and .
No one is on their own in trying to play with these new arts tools; museums such as the Tate and the V&A hold regular digital and , often free or low-cost, to patrons. Self-made works can be posted online, featured in online galleries, and linked through virtual spaces. The line between artist and visitor is blurred in the myriad interchanges and interactivities between the work, the sourcing of the work鈥檚 data and algorithms, and the patron鈥檚 input into the work of others as well as their own creations.
What is yet to come in the open creative spaces of museums? Certainly the digital festivals and 鈥渉ack sessions鈥� will continue, and ramp up as experimentation with digital tools and physical computing gains more and more traction. Expect more digital homes, virtual worlds, and public spaces transformed into art installations. Expect the walls separating museums, art, and artists from the everyday world to break open.
Publication date: 28 January 2016