Reactions: Augmenting the Reality of Art and (Art) Museums in the Age of Tangible Computing

 

My concern is to understand augmentation as an emergent modality - among many others in ‘the expanding digital field' (Søndergaard M. , Transformative Creativity in the Expanded Digital Field, 2009)' - attributed to the production of contemporary art and the ‘archive of knowledge' in the (art) museum. Augmentation, in this expanding digital field, is part of a production of new public spaces, as well as a new reality that affects and traverses art and institutions immanently and througout.

The expanding digital field is transforming art and the art museum in a number of fundamental ways, a few of which I will look into in this paper. It has been suggested that

... we are in the midst of an explosion of emerging human-computer interaction techniques that redefine our understanding of both computers and interaction. We propose the notion of Reality-Based Interaction (RBI) as a unifying concept that ties together ... (Robert J.K. Jacob, 2008)

I suggest that a negotiation between reality-based interaction and a digital dialectic (Lunenfeld, 1999)(Søndergaard M. o., 2008) is becoming still more evident, on two levels: 1) As an investigation into (the visuality of) a digital reality under construction; and 2) As a construction of a new reactive modality of the (art) museum as ‘archive of reality' - showing the outline of a cultural institution that oscillates between the instituting and institutionalizing competences of the (art) museum - between knowledge-based and experience-based exhibiting; It is in this negotiation, I would claim, that the foundation of a possible critique of the role of the (art) museum in the age of post-bourgeois public space and experience-based culture should be located.