Del museo sin muros, al museo como simulación fotográfica: Experiencias contemporáneas en los museos en línea

Abstract

Nowadays many human activities are carried out online in a natural way. However, the case of visits to art museums in the cyberspace has an added experiential complexity: being physically in front of the "aura" of original pieces, and go across emblematic spaces continues to be a relevant symbolic fact which are difficult to substitute with non-immersive digital simulations for inhabitants and tourists. In spite of this, most leading museum institutions, along with their buildings, have online alternative sites with specific complementary objectives: advertising, ideological, commercial or educational. This work studies the digital online spaces of the main art museums around the world synthesizing their identity, intentions and state of the art of the experiences they offer as a product of the visual interaction between art and container space. To that end, the work is divided in two sections. In the first section, the theoretical principles of the exhibition space as digital simulation in which art, architecture and physical experience participate as commodities for the construction of digital image, are developed. This section continues with an ideological journey from Malraux's Musée Imaginaire to the growing online "world museum": Google's Arts and Culture. In the second section of this work, an analytical model of digital referents of the most internationally visited art museums both, in official websites and in the spaces assigned in the Arts & Culture site, is designed. From the analysis, four different types of typologies are established based on their different degrees of reality and interaction.