Sam ili usamljen? Posetilac u (virtuelnom) muzeju

Abstract

Još od Kabineta čcudesa, pretecča modernih muzeja, posetilac je onaj koji kontemplira hodajucći kroz odaje ispunjene nagomilanim predmetima. Za razliku od publike u teatru, koja masovno u određdjenom vremenskom intervalu doživljava delo, u modernim muzejima pojedinac može samostalno da korača kroz postavku, tumačeći različite značenjske odnose između predmeta. Pojavom sajber muzeja pak, samoću posetioca u kontemplativnom činu nadrasta usamljenost posmatrača pred ekranom. Kao i tradicionalni muzej, ovaj tehnološki konstrukt zamišljen je da komunicira ljudske vrednosti i istoriju čoveka, ali uz pomoć kliktanja miša i piksela koji predstavljaju slike artefakata. Interakcija sa drugima, ali i sa samim, fizički prisutnim predmetima okruženim aurom, prilikom posete virtuelnom prostoru izostaju. U radu cćemo pratiti odnose koji se vremenom uspostavljaju između muzeja kao medija i njegovih, sve usamljenijih, posetilaca.

Ever since the Cabinet of Wonder, the forerunner of a modern museum, it is the visitor who contemplates walking through chambers filled with accumulated objects. Unlike theater audiences, who experience the play together and in a particular period, in a museum an individual can walk independently through the setting, interpreting various semantic relations between objects. With the advent of the cyber museum, the solitude of the visitor in the contemplative act outweighs the loneliness of the spectator in front of the screen. Like a traditional museum, this technological construct is designed to communicate human values and human history, but with the click of a mouse and pixels that represent images of artifacts. Interaction with others, as well as with the physically present objects, when visiting the virtual space ‒ is absent. This paper explores the relationships that are established over time between the museum as a medium and its increasingly lonely visitors. At the very beginning of the paper, the key terms such as: virtual museum, cyber museum and new media are defined for the purposes of further discussion. However, in the first chapter of the paper, the historical overlook on the development of museum audiences from the proto museums to modern museum institutions is given, seeing a museum visitor as an individual in the contemplative act while walking through the setting. The second part of the paper is questioning the possibilities for contemplation in today’s existing online virtual museum tours and arguing if the technological development succeeded in creating new spaces for contemplation or it just transmits traditional manners of exposition in the virtual space. This issue also leads to the next chapter which is arguing that the default interactivity when using new media is actually not psychological interactivity which involves mind. The museum on the Internet, therefore, is still not managing to involve its visitors completely and create the experience of a fictional world for mind wondering. Finally, while observing tendencies of the contemporary museum institutions to become forums for discussion on one hand, or to develop new manners of functioning in virtual spaces, we are concluding that the object, once being a center in every museum, has today lost its primary role and that the museum has completely changed the idea of a museum existence. Therefore, the institution itself should concentrate more on the needs of its visitors in this new context. As the writing of the paper was finished at the moment of the outbreak of Coronavirus pandemic, when almost the whole world proclaimed social distancing and isolation and museums closed their physical doors, sharing catalogues online and inviting the audience to video-guided tours and 3D models of exhibitions in virtual spaces, the final conclusion are slightly different from the original one. Actually, number of people being active online and following the rich offer of free contents is constantly increasing. The question is whether the virtual museum will finally succeed in creating a unique exposition offering its visitor a completely new experience and perception. Will the loneliness in the virtual space finally be surpassed now when, due to the proclaimed isolation, this is the only possibility of socio-cultural interaction?