#5: Portals - Museum Innovation deep dive
The first of a two-part special edition looking at the state of play in immersive, web 3, and social media digitisation of global museums
Portals // Museum Digital Innovation Deep Dive
Over the next two weeks I’m going take a deeper look at what’s happening in territory that means a lot to me: museums.
For those that know me, this was where I spent 8 years of my life, at the British Museum and then the National Gallery. Finding ways to change in face of digital opportunity was the gig, and in both places, we came a long way, quickly.
But a year after leaving the Gallery to work across the creative industries, research and technology sectors, what’s happening in museum digital creativity now?
There are five key trends, all at different stages of maturity - and all at interesting moments:
Non-identical digital twins
Distributed institutions
Blockchain breakthroughs
Immersive acceleration
The social dilemma
This week we’re going to look at the first three, then next week we’ll look at immersive and social media.
We’ll begin with the virtual institution.
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Trend #1 // Non-identical digital twins
In issue 3 of Creative R&D I talked about how:
“We must also note new kinds of virtual institution emerging as digital twins of the real world.”
There it was the example of sport, as baseball and American football all virtualise in new ways.
It’s happening in museums too, as museum digital twins emerge. Like real twins, they are emerging in a not-quite-identical way.
The museum digital twin has many variants from websites, to virtual reality to the Metaverse and more. As 3D virtual spaces, typically built in Unreal Engine, start to proliferate, they are leading to the creation of fictional environments which echo rather than directly represent the real world.
The recently launched Queensland Holocaust Museum is a good example of this, taking place in a space that looks and feels like a small town square, somewhere in the 30s, but nowhere specific. It operates both inside and outside of history.
The same logic applies to the digital twin of last year’s super-successful exhibition DYOR (Do Your Own Research at the Kunsthalle in Zurich - existing in a semi-simulacrum of the real space.
The Webby we won at the National Gallery for the Director’s Choice digital exhibition with Moyosa Media was on exactly this model - a space that took details from the Gallery’s design, its flooring, wall tiles, wall colour, and used them to build an entirely fictional space.
To me this approach becomes really interesting when architects act to shape this virtual domain, creating new impossible forms that reflect on and extend the design language of the real world.
UNESCO just announced a virtual museum of stolen art, to be designed by afro-futurist Francis Kéré, who won the Pritzker in 2022.
There is an interesting and - I think - unwritten history of these architect-led re-imaginings of the museum in virtual space. The earliest digital-age example I can find took place as far back as 1997, when the Guggenheim’s Virtual Museum project commissioned Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, principals of Asymptote Architecture, to create a parallel space to the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building in New York and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao.
25 years later I think it’s still a great work of imagination which you can explore here - a virtual building unmoored from the earth, Lloyd Wright’s 20th century ziggurat become a kind of anti-gravitational ouroboros - a serpent eating its own tail, drifting in digital space.
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Trend #2 // Distributed Institutions
The distinguishing element of the examples above are primarily how they translate museums into new visual virtual environments.
But a complete virtualising of the museum will need to be more than visual.
It will need to rewrite the institutional rules and behaviours of museums for a digital world.
Of the different ways to do this, the blockchain and the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (the DAO) offers the most potential. Whilst still flawed it presents a system for digital governance on which new organisations can grow.
Ruth Catlow, founder of Furtherfield, brilliantly explored this in her book Radical Friends, which explored the different directions of travel DAO’s could lead to. But the most significant current attempt at this has emerged from a different place than the search for inclusivity, equity and eco-social change which marks Ruth’s work.
To me, the key decentralised museum project is Arkive, which has emerged out of the mainstream West Coast crypto community. Arkive describes itself as “a museum curated by the people” with a mission to build “the most expansive and representative collection of culturally significant art & artifacts”.
The plain language on the front of the website doesn’t quite tell the story.
What Arkive represents is a serious, well-funded attempt to build a museum around the principals of the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, and to build it right into the middle of the contemporary art world.
Founded by crypto industry-veteran Adam MacLeod Arkive has very rapidly built a community of real action - and real system-changing potential.
Core to what they do is collective acquisition of art and artefacts - building a collection that, whilst still in its early stages, represents a:
search for objects that reflect, embody, and witness turning points in art or culture driven by technological advances
From Nam June Paik to Lyn Hershman Leeson, to key video from the BLM movement, the community-curated acquisitions are building a collection of real significance and with a real point of view. And they are brilliant at building community - real world events, museum tours, great socials. The surface works - museums have a lot to learn from them.
All of what this does is build leverage. As Arkive grows it will lend its collection - I assume on a smart contract basis of the type ventures like Arcual, lead by old friend and Creative R&D reader Bernadine Bröcker Wieder, are also bringing to the art and cultural world. A virtual institution with a collection of real value holds the power to bring change.
I think Arkive are the most serious, significant example of a new kind of digital-age competitor to the enlightenment-originated ideal of the museum, making new rules that others may need to bend to.
Keep watching.
Trend #3 // Blockchain Breakthroughs
Arkive represents a significant entry point of blockchain technologies into the museum landscape.
It was NFTs, not DAO’s which were supposed to make this leap.
But, after going through the craziest of hype-cycles, and most miserable of plummets into the abyss, NFTs and blockchain projects have been on a wild ride.
In the space of just the last few weeks though, two of the world’s most important museums have both launched NFT projects. And really interesting ones.
Something is shifting.
At MOMA in New York, MOMA Postcard is,
A global community project. An experiment in collective creativity on blockchain … Akin to a digital chain letter, each postcard is designed collaboratively— stamp by stamp, person by person—as it moves from one destination to the next. With 15 blank stamps ready to be designed and signed by you and your co-creators, each postcard is an interactive NFT adventure waiting to be unlocked
On its own this would be an interesting outlier, but in the same few days the Musee D’Orsay in Paris also launched its own blockchain project.
As part of its new Van Gogh show, two digital souvenirs have been released, available on the TEZOS blockchain.
Two of the top 20 museums in the world doing something new simultaneously means something.
But where has this breakthrough come from?
A big part of the credit needs to go to the brilliant Diane Drubay, the importance of whose role as a persistent voice advocating for the potential of the blockchain to make museums better, fairer and more open can’t be understated.
I first met Diane in 2016 when I spoke at her excellent We Are Museums conference in Berlin. Her move to embrace NFTS and the blockchain, and the work she’s done with TEZOS, have done so much to build a cultural understanding of tech that’s often hard to explain.
Her WAC-Lab programmes are the background out of which the Musee D’Orsay project emerged, and an engine room for the future of the sector.
Check them out if you’re at all interested in what next generation digital can mean.
Next week in #6: Portals, pt 2.
This is just the first half of our dive into museum digital innovation.
Next week we look at the explosion of VR, AR and XR in museum exhibitions, and ask whether museums have hit a a threshold of social media creativity.
Enjoy your weeks.
This is a great issue, Chris. Lots to consider. Critical to keep the broadly defined curatorial
engagement and dialogue (i.e., public, community, institutional, secondary market) ongoing and fluid as this tips into esoteric discussions around art, material culture, aesthetics etc and how technology can be leveraged to propel expansion and advance access. These elements will help to move the sector beyond goals driven mostly by economics which we have witnessed in the past.