letter from Salzburg by robbin murphy

Virtual Museums on the Internet Symposium
ARCH Foundation
Salzburg, Austria
May 8-10, 1998
http://www.arch.at
http://www.arch.at/museumvms/topics/index.html













The Virtual Museums on the Internet symposium in Salzburg, Austria, brought together individuals involved in art, technology, communication and law with the goal of defining and interpreting new technologies as they may apply to museums in the future. Sponsored by the ARCH Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and restoration of cultural heritage, the conference was held at Schloss Leopoldskron, the home of the Salzburg Seminars.

The intimate group of presenters and attendees (about twenty of each) combined with the beautiful, fairytale-like location and the unusually warm weather gave the symposium a feeling of the unreal often associated with the word "virtual," especially when compared to assembly-line conferences held in sterile convention centers or the isolation we might experience while working on our own computers. Schloss Leopoldskron is probably best known to most Americans as the setting for the movie "The Sound of Music" -- much to the annoyance of the locals, who would rather promote their native son, Mozart -- and it wouldn't have surprised me at all if Julie Andrews and her children had stepped up to the podium to burst into song before traipsing off for a hike and a picnic in the mountains.

Andrews and crew never materialized but the melodies of Mozart did seem to follow us around, giving the whole weekend a movie-like feeling. And that was, I assume, part of the reason the organizers chose the site -- to catch us off-guard in an alternative reality in order to make us reconsider what we might mean by a virtual reality. The Schloss is, in fact, not a "true" historical restoration of an 18th century building but a theatrical recreation by director Max Reinhardt, who bought the castle in a near-ruined state in the 1920s and "restored" the building and grounds to reflect his own reality.

The ARCH Foundation was started in 1991 by Francesca von Habsburg in response to the destruction of cultural artifacts around the world and particularly in central and eastern Europe. While the group continues to sponsor conservation projects, they've expanded their mission with their "State of the Art" millennium project, which encourages contemporary artists to explore connections between the past and present in their work. This approach requires new ways of thinking about the exhibition of art in museums as well as the idea of the museum and the possibility of creating an institutional structure that will, in the words of ARCH, "define the four-dimensional framework of a new museum space that has no real world manifestation."

To help achieve this goal the Foundation was joined in the planning of the symposium by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; ZKM -- the Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany; Illuminations, London; University of Applied Arts, Vienna; and Techno-Z, Salzburg.

The presenters, including myself, were, with few exceptions, white males of European descent with "institutional reputations" -- hardly representative of "global cultural heritage," which was one of the topics we had gathered to discuss. On the other hand, we did represent what I've started to sense is a kind of "mid-life crisis" taking place in what was only yesterday called "new media" and what is now a conflagration of techno/video/electronic and/or computer art coming to terms with the Internet and all that it entails. Missing, though, were some of the most interesting artists and theorists from around the world working on and with the Net today from around the world, who could have added their various perspectives.

As it was, we seemed to be engaged in what could be called the "shiny red sports car" theory of art history. We look out our sports car window one day, adjust our bifocals and see gangs of young Tadzios and Lolitas frolicking in an open field. Though these youngsters are immature and probably dangerous, we see that they are gaining ground and want to join them. Where individuals in the same position might buy themselves a shiny red sports car, "new media" now has the Internet to hop aboard. Being older, of course, we wear our seat belts and obey the traffic rules but feel we're headed toward a living present and away from what seems like the increasingly cemetery-like environment of the traditional museum.

Off on our roadtrip there were no clearly demarcated roadsigns but most of the symposium presentations seemed to have three general themes as their destinations:
1. Defining the virtual museum
2. Social aspects
3. Artworks

The organizers of the symposium are to be commended for their willingness to experiment, to do a broad field survey that generated more questions than answers. Most of the presenters approached all three themes in one way or another from the vantage point of their own area of expertise. I will give an overview of what was presented and try to create not a superhighway but more of a pleasantly winding alpine roadway through the various ideas.


DEFINING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM

The term "virtual museum" has become a popular cliche on the Web -- an AltaVista search turns up thousands of sites using these words as part of their title -- yet what does it mean? A cursory review of sites shows most of them to be engaged in some sort of simulation of existing institutional structures and collections using the Internet as a means of distribution. These "Web brochures" can be extremely useful and convenient but add little more than guide books or catalogues to the museum itself and do not hold the Internet's promise of a new dimension.

The basic premise of the traditional museum is that of a place of permanence, where authentic objects are collected and displayed. In contrast, the current trend is moving towards the virtuality, process and participation demanded of communication media and network systems.

The following talks addressed some of the questions raised by this opposition.

The Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe has been one of the foremost centers for the creation and collection of media-based art in the world and is now in the position of creating a context for the development of the virtual museum. Many fear that this is at the risk of dragging the past into that future while ignoring the present social environment.

Hans Peter Schwarz, director of the Media Museum at ZKM started by asking if the museum, even in its current state of inertia, has a value as an institution that can "stop the caroussel of visual communication in its mad rotation for at least a moment -- in order to let a picture of reality penetrate into our consciousness." The museum's relationship with other social mass media, he said, has always been competitive and the relationship between new electronic image media and the traditional museum hasn't changed.

According to Schwarz, we only have to look at many museums' resistance to photography as art to remind ourselves of the basic conservatism that hinders the acceptance of anything new -- a kind of fear of contact with "the other side," meaning, of course, the world outside the museum walls. The very differences between interactive media art and traditional art objects, and its interrelationship with mass media blinds museums to the possibilities they could offer in the development of that art.

What is needed now, Schwarz believes, is the development of useful criteria for new media's integration into museum collections and that means expanding the museum's scope. This shift entails acknowledging the many museum-like environments that are emerging on the Internet and are created by people outside the professional museum walls and does not constitute an out-and-out surrender. The traditional museum has one advantage over all other mass media in that it confronts us with the foreign, the unknown and even the embarrassing when other mass media, dependent on public acceptance, cannot. Ironically, it is because of the museum's distance, its seeming inertia, that the virtual museum can be of value.

Schwarz went on to say that the museum is one of the last places where one can assess reality in an age of simulations. The issue now is to accept that there are many realities, virtual and physical and that it might be art's task at the end of this century to define, interpret and shape the interfaces between these worlds. It is the responsibility of the museum to organize these interfaces between mixed realities. He ended by advising museums to be anticipatory -- not imposing perspectives on the history of art, but opening up a pool of possibilities from which art might emerge; not as a machine but as a structure with its own memory, reacting as much to us as we interact with it -- essentially an electronic central nervous system that will generate a productive situation between the public, the artist and the museologists.

The virtual museum as defined by Schwarz is relatively conservative and an expanded version of the museum's traditional structure from the 19th century -- a physical site to house art objects.

Taking this view to an extreme, media artist and curator Peter Weibel defined the virtual museum as closer to the classical "museion" or "home of the muses": relying on an archive and acting as forum of discourse rather than a place to store objects. The goal should be to treat the mass audience not as a mass, says Weibel, but to find methods for accommodating the individual through increased multifunctional variety that would include multidisciplinarity, multimedia and multiculturality. A "museum of multiple choice" that is situated "in the net" of culture and available to any person at any time in any place.

In contrast to the traditional concept of a museum, no matter how decentered, Alonzo Addison of the University of California, Berkeley, questioned the commitment shown to new media in recent high-profile museum projects. He would shift the definition of a virtual museum into the wider realm of architecture, urban planning and 3D visualization that is the concern of the Center for Environmental Design Research (where he is a project director for the Design Technology Group).

Unlike the Guggenheim Bilbao or the Getty Center in L.A., neither of which have included new media into the design, he points to several museums now under construction in Japan that have integrated the virtual museum into their planning stages. One of them, a cultural museum on an island in Japan's inland sea, is part of a larger plan for the entire island that uses the Net as a tool to preserve its culture without the impact of cultural tourism.

Addison believes it is important for the virtual museum to realize the potential for placing and viewing art in the context in which it was originally created and to consider the virtual museum, like the physical museum or the city, as a social place where people go to interact and build relationships.

To demonstrate this he worked with a group of international students in the small town of Massa Marittima in Italy to create an Internet site documenting the decline of this town with interviews, models, pictures, maps, guides, VRML and QuickTime movies etc. While the end result was a typical "Web brochure," the process by which it was achieved was a community event that allowed citizens to re-experience their city and their heritage. A previous project in another city had led to an application for funds from the European Union. With the money a media studio was built where the citizens now maintain their website. The technology served as a spark that empowered the citizens, particularly the young, to re-inhabit their city.

The virtual museum, then, expands into the urban social network and becomes an important part of the overall structure, fulfilling a function that should be taken into consideration at the earliest planning stages.

Another possible "site" of the virtual museum is the crossover between old broadcasting and new network systems. John Wyver, an independent producer with Illuminations in the UK, has attempted to bridge the gap between television and the Internet through a project called "The Mirror," a 3D social space developed in conjunction with British Telecom, Sony, and the BBC. When that networked space proved successful, they took the next step and tried to integrate the online system with a television program, broadcasting live from inside an online world. Technically is was a success but the end result was incoherent to television viewers.

Still, Wyver said he is undeterred and sees the possibility of these experiments evolving into a form of public service media with profound forms of democratic participation.


SOCIAL ASPECTS

No matter what its manifestation, the virtual museum is as much a social medium as a digital one. Wyver joked about how "the 'Field of Dreams' principle doesn't apply. If you build it, they won't necessarily come." He and his partners had to create ways to draw people into the space and arranged a combination of scheduled special events like weddings and art openings. They also discovered that, as in the physical world, it was important to have people in the space, especially hosts who were there on a regular basis to introduce people and guide them.

These new social spaces are being explored by sociologist and media researcher Volker Grassmuck, who questioned the possibility of "cultural heritage" on a global level and proposed that if there is such a thing as "world culture," it would have to be media.

How, he asked, can seven billion people consider a unique singular object as their culture? Only technical reproducibility allows a trace of the artifact to reach a "world culture." As an example he suggested the caves of Lascaux, which have been closed off in order to protect the fragile drawings, while a replica has been built next to it for visitors. The replica could also be reproduced for a traveling exhibition using panoramic projection systems. Thus we have "a powerful metaphor of an object being closed off in order to save the abstract idea of the original." At the same time, those who experience Lascaux as part of their heritage still have access, at least a trace of it.

This would seem to be a direct contradiction to the belief voiced by Schwarz and others that the virtual museum is an antidote to simulation or the re-enactment of cultural heritage that has become popular in museums today. But Grassmuck points out that museums themselves derive from such re-enactments, practices to commemorate the dead using objects made to manifest something other than themselves, acting as links between the visible present and the invisible past. This is a distinct part of cultural memory that bonds groups together and it's when this memory turns to storage that the collections take on the character of a mausoleum and objects lose their traditional use value. Societies become "self-museofying" and collect not for present use but for some perfect future.

Grassmuck sees the virtual museum (as well as the Internet) not so much as the answer but as a test tube for on-going empirical research into these questions. If we are to accept the notion of world culture and that cultural heritage is something worth preserving, then what follows is a demand for accessibility that can only be realized via media.

A separate panel on legal aspects placed many of these theoretical considerations into more pragmatic terms, not just the question of ownership and payment but also accountability -- who is responsible?

Graham Defries, a solicitor with the London-based law firm Bird & Bird who specializes in telecommunications law, gave a general outline of intellectual property issues and explored how current laws are being challenged by digital technology. I followed with examples of artists who are taking up the challenge and working with the resulting ambiguity, and used Henry David Thoreau as a model of point-to-point interaction. Günther Wilms then outlined recent proposals for copyright reform made by the European Commission and for implementing the World Intellectual Properties Organization (WIPO) treaties.


ARTWORKS

"Displaced Emperors" / Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

A number of the presented projects point to possible directions for the virtual museum to investigate. Michael Naimark's continuing investigations into the recreation of actual places and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's large-scale projections based on his concept of "Relational Architecture" show how virtuality cannot be separated from the politics of place.

Jeffrey Shaw, director of the Institute for Visual Media at ZKM, presented a number of original artworks that embody paradigms to consider when thinking about virtual museums -- even though most of the projects he showed depend on high-end computing environments that make them inaccessible over the Internet. He suggested, however, that they can be studied as models for future installations that may be able to take advantage of higher bandwidth and improved computer capabilities. He also brought up the point that the virtual museum should be understood as incorporating any digital data that can be locally or remotely accessed by a large public and that the Internet should be understood as just one of many possible carriers for this data. We should not discount working with technologies that do not have broad accessibility at the moment.

Most of Shaw's examples have been widely exhibited, including his own "The Legible City" where the visitor navigates through a virtual space by riding a stationary bicycle. But he is right in that even though they may not be geared toward Internet access, the ideas behind the projects are worth reconsidering in light of the new network capabilities. My favorite was "The Golden Calf" with its LCD monitor attached to an empty pedestal, which visitors manipulate to view a computer-generated image on the pedestal. What was once a kind of miniature VR helmet takes on new meaning when considered as a "hand-held Internet appliance" or "personal browser.Ó This goes to prove the importance of experimenting without being overly concerned with practical application and the necessity of collecting such work for future study.

There is, according to Shaw, tremendous diversity of potentialities of the new media; and new virtual museums should be created as extensions of the artworks themselves.

"Conceiving Ada," 1993-1998, 35mm film
Lynn Hershman Leeson, media artist and a professor of Electronic Art at the University of California, Davis, sees virtual museums as places where we will find lost memories buried beneath cultural foundations; there we will both retrieve and build a history we've barely begun to imagine. The Net, she believes, is alive and expanding like the universe and communal imagination is an important element.

Much of Hershman's work has been done in existing sites like motel rooms and elsewhere outside museum walls. As a result her work has not had broad institutional exposure as it doesn't conform to institutional demands. She has recently moved into the realm of mass media and completed a film about Ada Lovelace, the inventor of the first computer language, titled "Conceiving Ada." It combines live action with PhotoShop images as background so that Ada moves around in a digital environment, which couldn't exist without her original inventions. Her next project, continuing her commitment to excavating our communal memories, is a film about the "Bride of Frankenstein."


THE ROAD AHEAD

The Guggenheim Museum recently announced plans for a $1 million program to create a virtual museum later this year that will include both an expanded website as well as studio space for an artist-in-residence program. As a prelude, the museum has commissioned a project for the Web by Shu Lea Cheang, titled "BRANDON: A One-Year Narrative Project in Installments" that was previewed by its curator Matthew Drutt during the symposium and officially launched on June 30th.

The story of "BRANDON" -- a woman living as a man who is eventually murdered after her real gender is discovered -- is true and, to say the least, a controversial choice for a major museum. It's this very controversy that is the real theme of the project and the reason for doing it. The sense of uneasiness produced by the subject is like that produced by an overtly sexual Calvin Klein advertising campaign or a voyeuristic TV talk show meant to draw the attention of the masses as they pretend to be offended.


These ruptures of good taste draw our attention because they provoke, if only briefly, small states of emergency in life, like a ride on a roller coaster, where reality shifts and causes us to rethink our position. Whether "BRANDON" will go beyond its initial provocation remains to be seen as it unfolds over the year but the basic premise for doing it, this shifted reality rather than a virtual reality, is something to examine when we try to imagine a virtual museum.


Robbin Murphy is an artist and co-founder of artnetweb. His e-mail address is murph@artnetweb.com