The "digital tide" of museums: pursuit and controversy parallel

A large number of international art galleries and museums are catching up with the "digital" trend. The latest news from the Smithsonian Museum is that art enthusiasts around the world will soon be able to watch more than 40,000 items in their cosy homes at the two Asian museums of the Smithsonbord. They digitized the 40,000 items, most of them never exhibited before. These include Chinese jade and bronze, Islamic art, Chinese ink, ancient Persian and Egyptian handicrafts. If these objects were to be more than 1000 feet in size, they would take up less than 10T of space after digitization.

And just last month, Google Cultural Institute announced that they would develop a new mobile app that would allow users to use their mobile phones to stay indoors and be able to navigate through wonderful museums around the world. At present, 11 museums and cultural institutions have reached an agreement with Google, including the Paris Craft Museum, the Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, GAM, the Lady of Rome, Madame Curie Museum, Le Havre Museum, Paris Coin Museum, Maga, the Dutch National Heritage Museum and Nigeria. The new app will use Google's Street View technology to provide 360-degree, no dead-angle navigation, so you can watch these exhibitions from anywhere in the world. This application will also provide a large number of exhibition background, text interpretation, voice navigation.

As Diet Sadic, a former architectural critic and curator of the Design Museum in the UK, said: "Museum visits bring a powerful shared physical experience, which is the power to attract the digital world audience." Numbers and entities are fused. The key is how to tell a story and activate the collection, not a silent collection. "The History of the museum's digitalization is only more than 20 years old, but its pace of development follows the advances of Internet technology." Not only are more and more museums digitizing their collections, setting up their own websites, but also, like Google and other internet giants, the museum is attracted by projects such as the Art project.

In addition to facilitating research, the digitization of collections also helps to hold a series of important exhibitions between museums. Like last year's famous Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&a Museum), the introduction of large Chinese ancient famous paintings--Chinese painting masterpieces: 700-1900. The exhibition showcases more than 70 paintings collected from museums in China, the United States, Japan and Europe, some of which are on display for the first time in Europe. Among them, the Taipei National Palace Digitization Project, two ancient Chinese calligraphy and painting quality--the South Song Dynasty Chen Jong's "Kowloon Map" and the Ming Dynasty Ying Ying "The Xunyang Farewell map" makes the animated short film, the screen can be changed with the footsteps of the audience, coloring, the original distant classical paintings in vivid form is displayed, especially to attract the participation of children's audience.

The Taipei National Palace Museum plans to conduct a digital tour of some of the mainland's museums this year, allowing viewers to incarnate Qianlong, embark on a magical journey, and pass the "time hole" made up of Emperor Ching Gong and Qianlong portrait, a corridor leading to the fantasy world of Qianlong's heritage. The exhibition will be "history" on the Qianlong towards and the audience in the "contemporary", with the virtual parallel space-time bridge, through the street art, role play, cartoon, anime, audio, avantgarde fashion and video games, such as the display of the theme of the artistic taste of Qianlong to carry out a new interpretation and creation.

The core of Internet technology is sharing. For museums, when digitized, the collection data is made public to the Internet. When people find and browse the artwork through search engines, the additional information behind it, such as "which museum it belongs to" and "where to display it", is actually less important. This information, which is open and shared, will no longer be a "secret asset" for a particular gallery.

While the digital museum facilitates the browsing of art enthusiasts around the world and increases the amount of online access to art galleries, 72% of American adults tend to pay for "experience" rather than specific things, according to the American Express (American Express). At the same time, there are many experts on the digital tide caused by the social problems, especially the current technology in the digital exhibits process, or there is a certain loss of pixel, not very good display of the key details.

But what worries more museums is that in the digital process of the collection of art pictures "embezzlement", so many museums often do not provide high-definition images, or in high-definition images on the watermark, but in the middle of August last year, the United States Paul Getty Museum free of charge about 4,600 pieces of artwork high-resolution images, For users to download, processing and publishing, the only requirements are: The download has to fill out the reason for downloading the artwork and, when used, the pictures are from the Getty Museum, including the works of several famous painters, such as the "Iris" of Van Gogh (1889), Rembrandt's "Abduction of Europa" (1632) and Danone. Many of Finch's paintings. According to the museum's president, the move is only a start, and the museum will open more special collections for the Getty and Getty institutions in the future.

The digital tide has changed the way museums operate, "the audience wants to talk to us instead of listening to our monologue and we have to become a more flexible and adaptable institution because today's greatest technology is likely to be eliminated tomorrow," said G. Winkrauf, secretary-general of Smithsonbord. If we don't change, we'll fall behind. ”

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)