Everything Digital? Art Online: an End of Year Review

2014: Everyone Mobile?

If one trend is detectable over the past 12 months from the perspective of museum life, it is the focus on mobile uses. In German museums, it has long since seemed self-evident that each institution requires its own a Facebook page or YouTube channel. Now, however, increasing commercialization of the networks and ongoing debates about data protection have instead raised the question of whether it might be advisable to log off from the big players of the digital economy. As late as 2014, in any event, the issue of the mobile uses of digital offerings had come to the fore.

Independent of considerations concerning which materials should be made available to users en route to museums (one possibility was introduced by our Frankfurt colleagues at the Städel and Schirn, who launched the first digitorial), there is also the question of how the needs of tomorrow’s museum visitors are likely to transform museum spaces. Is free WLAN sufficient to enhance service quality? What are the prospects for reversing the ban on photography, which remained almost universal in museums until recently? The most popular emblem of this question, which remains to be clarified by the museum community, is perhaps the museum selfie (#museumselfie), which took the social media networks by a storm in 2014, and has meanwhile mutated into a veritable social media classic, given further euphoric encouragement by the museums themselves.

Absolutely: Gamification

Moreover, it is today regarded as absolutely standard for museum websites and apps to be responsive (that is to say, they automatically adapt themselves to the resolutions of smart phones and tablets); to an increasing degree in the German-speaking lands, we are also seeing specialized museum apps and augmented reality apps that are often components of educational projects, or else constitutes specific exhibition projects (an example being Olafur Eliasson: Your exhibition guide in spring here at the K20). These days, the gamification trend – that is to say, the implementation of typical elements of game playing in contexts not originally associated with gaming – can hardly be overlooked.

While German art museums have traditionally been cautious about sharing their data, major international institutions, in particular in the English-speaking world and in the Netherlands, have made their data fully accessible to the app development scene through a variety of projects, organizing competitions and bestowing awards on the best resulting apps. For the first time, the V&A in London announced a Game Design Residency in the museum, from which the app Strawberry Thief has emerged.

Another possibility is the direct integration of digital games into exhibition spaces, an example being the Spieltisch (gaming table) in the newly-installed presentation of the permanent collection of the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster.

On the Back Burner: Digitalizing Collections

Another perspective is that of the long-term digitalization projects pursued further by institutions large and small in 2014. Given their understandable commitment to the originals, art museums in particular started down this path with some hesitancy; they are now catching up to libraries and museums of history and natural history – to some extent supported by elaborate technical procedures such as the 3D scanner of the Fraunhofer Institute.

The Individual Digital Museum versus Google Arts Project

Without much hesitation, Google too has devoted itself to the theme of the digital museum tour. By the end of 2014, a majority of the great art museums worldwide were already represented by the Google Arts Project. Recent developments show that alongside street-view-style gallery tours, illustrations of works are also being compiled (nearly 300 of the altogether 460 collections). Established in 2014 alongside the continuous development of the platform was the so-called Cultural Institute, which bundles together the various cultural activities of the endeavor. Currently online alongside the Arts Project are two additional projects: views of “World Wonders” and user-generated information displays on historic themes ranging from the “Spanish Civil War” all the way to “Favorite Technologies of the 1950s.”

And the Artists?

In 2014, artists like Olafur Eliasson and Ai Weiwei – who have long since absorbed digital technologies into their artistic repertoires – presented new websites or disseminated their activities via social media. Regarding web-based art forms and net art, by contrast, things seem to have grown quieter, at least when it comes to general perceptions online. Interestingly, it is currently the highly analog artistic medium of Street Art that is being celebrated by the digital arts community in Berlin and Hamburg, along the Rhein and Ruhr Rivers, and in countless blogs, photo albums, and tweets.

In Between: ArtOnYourScreen

At the same time, art online still exists: this year, in keeping with its mission, the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe has presented a promising new exhibition platform: http://aoys.zkm.de/ArtOnYourScreen (AOYS for short) that allows media artists to produce projects online. AOYS, regarded by the Center in Karlsruhe simultaneously as a “digital display window and research project at the interface the various artistic media, is inviting 12 artists annually to create works. The project – supervised by curator Matthias Kampmann, who has many years of experience in the field of net art – is currently featuring Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Weibel-/Manning-Bot,” through which virtual visitors get entangled with the museum director via a question-and-answer machine. You simply have to try it out!