Abstract
Digitalising the Museum is an online repository created as a substitute for physical visits to London's museums and galleries and art centres that were meant to be undertaken by undergraduates from the London College of Communication (LCC) in 2020. In an attempt to provide a version of the exhibition experience whilst arts venues were in lockdown due to pandemic, the author began exploring their online provision, featuring it in a virtual learning resource and theorising ‘digital museum'. This became the groundwork for a project conducted with the alumni who started evaluating digital exhibitions, tours, and artefacts at London art venues with an interest to support them whilst their doors were closed, their staff furloughed, and decolonisation agenda become reinvigorated with the Black Lives Matter movement. The author reflected on the alumni's findings to map the museums engagement with digital technology throughout the pandemic caused by COVID-19.
TopIntroduction
Digitalising The Museum (https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org) has found the lockdown a fertile time for research and they lamented over the future of the museum beyond pandemic. Their work provided an important frame for these projects as the group considered adjustments to the role of a nation’s storyteller which the museums traditionally played in societies and they wondered how digital technology influences that change. The group concluded that many museums have discovered the potential of digital only due to their physical closure. This research aimed to find out why it was so difficult for them to embrace it before they were forced to and how can that change benefit them?
During the pandemic, rapid response to audience feedback by many publicly funded museums encouraged quick inauguration or extension of their online programmes. Digitalising the Museum became an addition to the Corona Defiance Arts Gallery blog, so it could map and keep up with newly sprung virtual exhibitions and tours in the midst of lockdown. The project engaged four Alumni students (Veronica Amon, Jennifer Nibbs, Katerina Demetriou-Jones and Emma Sproat) to support this supplementary, ad-hoc initiative generously funded by the LCC Research Office and led by the author of this chapter.
The team accepted that our present is digital and concluded that museums must engage with it if they want to serve and survive in the future. As Cameron (2015: 345) claims in The Liquid Museums:
“The modern museum model that is based on hierarchies; nature/culture dualisms; modern precepts of certainty, objectivity, truth, and expertise; linear forms of communication; and the production of social and scientific facts results in an institution that is largely seen as separate and operating above society…”
This bleak picture of the old museum demands immediate update if this and other cultural institutions are to reflect on the contemporary moment. So, in our project we wanted to celebrate those who surfaced as relevant, those best at managing to involve and respond to their audiences in this unprecedented time.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Virtual Exhibition: An exhibition that uses web technology to be seen.
Pandemic: Ongoing global pandemic caused by the COVID-19 corona virus.
Digitalisation: The process of creating a world around the objects, not the mere digitising of them.