At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, media theorists like Peter Weibel were quick to bury the body-based “society of proximity” in discourse. To him, it seemed that gigantic stadiums, concert halls, museums, and the like will be “the pharaonic tombs of the future.” That people would not simply relocate to a purely digital world was already foreshadowed by the first easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, when an almost excessive return to the analog took place. Original artworks were more in demand than ever, and there was a hunger for encounters with other people and objects in the museum. Is the binary rhetoric of analog/ digital, conservative/progressive, and either/or, still appropriate in the post-pandemic age, or should we rather address questions of media specificity and hybridity?
One could argue that art museums were always dependent on hybridity. Still, something has changed. The forms of hybridity (mixed methods and materials, complexes of professional practice, stacks of technology and data) are being recast. Intellectually and philosophically, art curation today reflects upon its meta-modernity — confronting intersectionality, following the consequences of quantum thinking. Socially and operationally, the art museum responds to the new patterns of work and creativity generated by the pandemic, pursuing the potential of teleworking in its internal operation, re-planning the channels of communication and encounter in its external offer.
“The Art Museum in the New Hybridity” explores the convergence of analog and digital media, focusing on the art museum in the new hybridity.
Possible topics include:
New assumptions of hybridity (in provision, visitation, and operation) on which curatorship can now predicate its practice
Use of new hybridities to remix, restage, and reframe the art museum’s function and form
Shifts in operation and delivery, and the consequence for art production, display, and scholarship, including the logic of selection and interpretation of art in the modern media ecosystem
“Platformization” and the erosion of the traditional rituals for engaging with art
Forms of participation in hybrid spaces and the relationship between analog/digital and virtual/physical
Art historian, museum professional, and digital humanist Christian Huemer is the guest writer of this call. After several years at the Getty Research Institute, he is currently Director of the Belvedere Research Center in Vienna where he oversees the development of analog and digital research infrastructure — including library, archive, online collection, and research journal. A central concern of his is to enable free, open and linked access to digitized cultural heritage. Since 2019, he has been organizing an annual international conference on “The Art Museum in the Digital Age.”
The call is now open and first articles are to be published in the second half of 2021. To submit articles, please register first and review the information for authors. We will be publishing articles on a rolling basis.