Exhibitions onlineExhibiting is one of the prime manifestations of a museum's activities, and it is no surprise that this is one of the commonest, richest, and most innovative areas for museum Web sites. In the "networked museum," exhibitions online largely reflect exhibitions in the galleries, perhaps with the addition of multimedia interpretive materials or immersive-like viewing experiences. What follows is a small selection of examples of such exhibitions online. Later in this essay, I look at online exhibitions that take a different tack than projecting the gallery into cyberspace.Oddly, among the first major online exhibitions, several were produced by the Library of Congress. American Treasures is indicative of the basic exhibition online format--images with descriptive text, divided into a few thematic sections. Increasingly, one of the prime directions for exhibitions online is the immersive interface. The Museo de Monterrey's "Virtual Visit," for instance, allows visitors to look around the grounds of the museum, enter the building, move from room to room, and click on specific paintings for further information about them. The Hamburg Museum has an extensive set of quick-loading, QuicktimeVR panoramas of its galleries, but strangely they do not link to any information about the objects the viewer is seeing besides generic labels like "Reformation," and subtopics like "Martin Luther," with no further explanation on that screen. High Renaissance in the Vatican at the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland also includes QTVR of the exhibition and is supplemented by a comprehensive range of materials, from a curatorial introductory essay, images of the exhibition (strangely, no captions), CAD reconstructions of the original architecture, Real Audio clips of period music, images of the exhibition opening, and more. The National Gallery of Art's Van Gogh's Van Goghs uses the Live Picture plug-in, another brand of immersive interface, and also includes audio commentary by the director. The visual quality of the NGA Web tours--as it prefers to call them--is superior. The Walker Art Center's Diana Thater also uses QTVR to walk through the galleries, but an audio track has been manipulated to give a more visceral sense of the kind of post-processing that Thater uses in her work. For the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, both QTVR and VRML versions are available. From either it is possible to click on dynamically zoomable images of the sculptures as well as launch automatic queries to a comprehensive database for all related information. Haida: Spirits of the Sea, a collaboration with several organizations, does not try and create a physically immersive experience, but it is notable for its broad approach to Haida culture, from art to fishing, which is immersive in its own way, even including a story, "The First Totem Pole," with original illustrations. It is also exemplary by providing English, French, and Portuguese-language versions as well as more and less complex versions, depending on one's computer setup and bandwidth.
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next | previous | index Canadian Heritage Information Network, Haida: Spirits of the Sea, Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, High Renaissance in the Vatican Library of Congress, American Treasures Museo de Monterrey National Gallery of Art, Van Gogh's Van Goghs Walker Art Center, Diana Thater: Orchids in the Land of Technology; Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
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