Multivocality, hyperlinearity + conversation

"The virtual museum therefore is a renewal of the support systems provided by what we used to call a museum. Consequently, one could say that the virtual museum on the Internet is in fact closer to the original idea of a museum, or the classical definition of a museum. The museum, as perceived by the Greeks, was a forum for discourse on collected information, an archive, a research place, a place of knowledge, and ended up also being a place for the production of knowledge."
Peter Weibel

Shock of the View: Artists, Audiences, and Museums in the Digital Age was a collaboration between 5 institutions (one virtual), 15 curators, 18 artists, 27 respondents, and approximately 200 discussants over a 6 month period. This organized multiplicity of voices was intended to emphasize that there was no single, "correct" view about the 9 exhibitions. But in a way, we need not have worried. By offering a forum for discussion that was relatively neutral ground, the subscribers to the listserv took for granted that what they had to say was as significant--or not--as anyone else. I have no doubt that I learned a great deal from this conversation, and I suspect that many others feel similarly.

Get the Picture is an interactive multimedia guide for kids to the Berkeley Art Museum. But it does much more than inform. It invites users to submit their own responses to various works of art, usually after trying out some kind of activity related to the work. Not only is it very powerful to see one's own comments--one's own labels--online, but seeing many others reinforces the idea that there can be many different points of view. Not to mention that while they may all be valid, in some base sense of the word, some are definitely more interesting than others.

MOMA's Art Safari also encourages participants to tell their own stories in response to a particular object, guiding them through the process with a series of questions. At the end, however, the participant can only view her own story, not anyone elses. Different impact.

If part of what the digital museum can help teach is that there are many stories, no single truth, another tool to do this is the hyperlinear. Like a conversation. This is a tactic that many artists use, perhaps none so elegantly as Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito's Agree to Disagree Online. It is also one that museums can use, as in Julie Luckenbach's and Louis Mazza's hyperessay Beuys/Logos.