Fibreculture Journal (Jan 2005)
Beyond the Museum Walls : Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic Overlay and Three Movements)
Abstract
In recognition of digital communication’s profound effects on social relations and institutions, this paper explores the influence of digitisation on our notions of art through the design of its institutions. No longer can the museum, as the primary technology of art, be viewed as just a physical container. With the additional of the hidden infrastructure of electronic and multimedia technologies that are to be found “behind the walls”, as it were, the architectural issues of negotiating spaces and manipulating locative settings for displaying artworks are as much virtual as physical.As a contribution to the negotiation of a distributed aesthetics, this paper entertains the possibility that transplanting art to the virtual site of the Internet disrupts our understanding of art itself. From presence on the gallery wall to the plane of the screen, if this translation offers an alternative way of seeing, then what does the Web offer to a different apperception of art? How to position the digital in the discourse surrounding art and the role it plays within contemporary cultural practice?In an attempt to ground these concerns, I will frame the subsequent discussion by focussing my attention upon one particularly representative instance: The National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Gallery of Australian Art; recognising in this localised, site-specific experience a microexample of a much more ubiquitous phenomenon.
