As museum collections increasingly become digitized on registrar databases with access to users on their websites, human interaction with material culture shifts to reflect our evolving digital capabilities. The aim of this project is to analyze how technological development can potentially redefine the mission of museums as producers, mediators, and interpreters of digital images incorporated in cultural collections.
One of the most troubling endeavors of such a project deals with simply defining what constitutes a digital art object. What is archived: the object’s hardware components? The digital software? What about considerations of user experience? Determining what is archived and why are considerations curators and stakeholders must contemplate as contemporary material culture becomes more and more digital. The interdependency between the digital interface and its supplementary hardware makes conservation and archival processes particularly complex and unique to traditional analog museum collections. As agents of collective memory and cultural materials, museums have traditionally presided over their holdings and administered user experience and access to them. The challenge going forward is how they will manage digital objects as they become incorporated into institutions and force museums to reevaluate their relationship with active users creating experiences through active contact with interactive digital spaces.
Sources thus far:
Moma 14 videogame collection
Vigamus, IT
Neoludica, Biennale, IT
Source: Pioneering a model