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 house operates at the intersection of fashion and technology and creates solely digital, and thus, immaterial garments. Which is a challenging thing to do as the garments traditionally only had to protect, cover up or decorate the physical body and therefore the tactility of these garments was of great importance. Of course, as we shift between the digital and physical world more fluidly, a metaverse of identity and being has come into life and naturally requires fashion that adheres to the need of novel ways of identity expression in the digital world. This notion of immateriality is examplary for the post-museum, in which a great interest is embedded in intangible heritage. As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill describes in The rebirth of the museum “the post-museum holds and cares for objects, but will concentrate more on their use rather than on further accumulation.” The Wholeland installation is exemplary for this. In Wholeland a sort of digital fitting room was created, including display screens that function as mirrors and digital garments that are to be tried on. However, in this fitting room it is not the visitor (and in the case of a store / fitting room setting: the consumer) that would select what garment they would like to try on, but it is the mirror that predetermines what the visor will wear by placing a filter like garment on them as they pass the screen mirrors.

 

The Fabricants’ aim is to stimulate a fashion renaiXance, in which fashion became more inclusive, democratic and decentralised ways of thinking about identity and expression. This thinking connected to the concepts of new materialism and agency. One could therefore wonder how much agency a visitor truly holds or is provided with space to take their agency, when garments are posed on them without their consent, interaction or notice. The visitor moves through the space, being unaware that their body will soon be centralised within the fashion presentation of the Fabricant. Facial filters and augmented realities allow us to alter ourselves without limit, but apparently we can not only alter ourselves but also be altered by others. The next logical question then is, until what extent and where lies the limit? The post-museum opts for the incorporation of many voices and many perspectives. Even though this was undoubtedly the aim of both the NXT museum and The Fabricant, it nevertheless fell partly into fashion's longstanding tradition of objectifying and using bodies for its own proliferation. 

The UFO exhibition presents various interesting ways of exploring post-human and fluid identities. However, the visitors’ interaction and self-determination within this digital realm remains a field that needs to be further explored to truly offer immersive experiences that offer freedom of choice to reject or to participate in virtual worlds.

 Post by Karmen Samson