The Virtual Museum as a work of art


If we examine the recent proliferation of virtual museums, we see that they are usually informatic restructurings of traditional museum architectures that limit themselves to digital representations of existing collections. Instead of conforming to this routine model, a truly virtual museum, as I see it, employs an entirely different topography.

In fact, the virtual museum should be more broadly understood as any shared device or environment, real and/or virtual, that enables digitally structured audiovisual data to be locally and/or remotely engaged by a large public. In constructing an analysis of the possible morphologies of the virtual museum, I have found it useful to identify the following categories as descriptive frameworks: the navigational model, the spatial model, the augmented reality model, the distributed telematic model, and the architectonic model…




Jeffrey Shaw