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Showing posts from February, 2023
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 New media narration When we think about museums, our first thought is always about a painting hanging on the wall or imposing sculptures in the middle of a room, but is it only that, or have museums started to change their focus and identity?  Having already been at the UFO exhibition in the NXT museum, we can easily distinguish the differences from a "traditional" museum. The use of new media installations like videos, movies, and even video games creates a hypermediated space where the audience becomes a medium himself. The institution has found a new transmedial way to narrate its story. UFO exhibition in the NXT museum. Photo by Ioanna Paschali, 2023.  In recent years more and more institutions have used transmedia storytelling techniques in order to engage more and more people and be more entertaining, one can say a big queue makes a successful museum. However, that does not really mean that succession is only about big queues but also about the message. While new m...

The positioning of the visitor as post-human in the post-museum

In their exhibition UFO - Unidentified Fluid Other, the NXT Museum poses the following questions to its visitors: “What is possible beyond the fixed boundaries of the physical world and how do we shape-shift between virtual and physical worlds?” The exhibition consists of six rooms with large-scale new media artworks and five, so-called transition rooms, where the androgynous avatar Viatrix meets the visitors and takes them on a journey through a metaverse of various identities and fluid states of being. Viatrix appears between every big room and narrates the UFO story of the museum to the visitor through poems written by Julia-Beth Harris. Viatrix offers a moment of reflection on the presented works and the artists’ statements. These moments in-between the works function as a neutralising component amid the Visual overload that is released on them.   One of these exhibition rooms is named “Wholeland’ and presents the works of The Fabricant. This Amsterdam-based digital fashion hou...

Thinking about museums (and beyond)

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     Artifacts on display… that is the most common thought when people are confronted with the word “museum”. And yes, once upon a time it was so, but as new media approaches the museum new ideas and possibilities open up (Henning). NFT  Exhibition in the Moco Museum. Video by Erick Vázquez 2022      The first possibility is, of course the idea of how information can be spread around more easily. The digitalization of catalogues and the easy access to them is definitively a process of democratization of knowledge. Taking into account that there is no such thing as “one size fits all”, the possibility of accessing information relevant to each case is important and fundamental. (Hooper-Greenhill)      Interactivity is one upgrade that can be created by new mediums entering exhibitions. There are two ways that interactivity can be achieved in exhibitions and museums. Hands on vs Mind on, the former can be a mechanical gesture from the visit...