Abstract
Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality.
Highlights
When COVID-19 forced itself into our lives in March 2020, it sent shockwaves across the globe; suddenly we faced “lockdown”
A major trend for museums will be working in partnership with digital artists and designers, including experience design tied to human digital behavior research, as museums embrace the integrative and inclusive museum model
We examine cross-disciplinary practice, where art and technology converge, and how this will continue to transform under the increasing pressure of computational culture and attitudes in a post-COVID-19 world
Summary
When COVID-19 forced itself into our lives in March 2020, it sent shockwaves across the globe; suddenly we faced “lockdown”. Masks, and work from home mandates, the arts and performing arts, from theaters, museums, galleries, and the public square, were shuttered. Their very existence was challenged and spiraling out of control as staff were laid off, exhibitions cancelled, while concurrently creating an urgency to go online to dwell in cyberspace, the new daily destination. The social forces, already at play, of diversity, equity, and inclusion, entered this deserted space and filled it with protest fueled by social movements, most prominently Black Lives Matter This paper explores these issues through the lens of museums and cultural life, especially in New York and London, where art pervades the fabric of life, to be heard and seen on city streets, in galleries and museums. While information and technology services can be outsourced or remote, curators remain at the heart of defining collection content and context but need the collaboration of artists on new narratives and ways of thinking, which in turn enable museums to reimagine collections in ways that encourage museums to engage with more diverse communities, artists, and audiences
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