F E A T U R E S    Issue 2.09 - September 1996

Code for a Grecian Urn

By Lee Marshall

Moving museums into cyberspace means remembering what they were originally meant for, appreciating what they are actually used for, and then creating something completely different.



Beauty is truth, truth beauty," wrote John Keats in 1818, looking in rapt wonder upon a Grecian urn in the British Museum. He was articulating the agenda of the vast edifice around him. There had been public and semi-public museums for centuries, princely collections and cabinets of curiosities, but it was in the 19th century, age of archaeologists, anatomists and empires, that they came into their own.

In the words of Paul Valery, it made of them "the temple and the salon, the cemetery and the school". Learning, stillness, morality, mortality: you can hear them all echoed in Victorian reformer Sir Henry Cole's forthright optimism. "The Museum will certainly lead [the working man] to wisdom and gentleness, and to Heaven."

Above all, these 19th-century museums were stories - morality stories. Uplifting stories of nationhood, of evolution, of technical innovation, or, for Keats, eternal stories of the perfection of the soul. The same is true today. Curators are still "inter alia, storytellers," argues Doron Swade, senior curator of computing at "London's Science Museum". "They often have a strong and highly evolved narrative sense of their subject. And it is from this narrative richness that objects acquire much of their meaning."

Now those storytellers are moving into new media. All around the world curators are turning to the Internet - and chances are that those who don't are working on CD-ROMs. Digital technology has made available new ways to store images and archive knowledge. And for all sorts of reasons - some spiritual enough for Keats, some commercial enough to have made him weep - curators are making use of them. They are creating virtual museums.

Or at least so they say. But although the last thorough census of museum Web sites in early 1995 found nearly a thousand - and there are doubtless far more now - these figures are misleading. David Bearman, a freelance technoheritage consultant whose firm, Archives & Museum Informatics, specialises in brainstorming museums out of their technological torpor, says that most are just "billboard advertising". A few pictures, an electronic gift shop and not much more. There are at most a hundred serious museum sites, where "serious" means three things: a group of people have put time (and money) into the site's design and layout; there is useful, regular feedback and input both from the top echelons of the museum hierarchy and from the various departments; and the pages are regularly updated and periodically overhauled to take new technology (such as VRML, the virtual reality modelling language developed by, among others, Mark Pesce) on board. These three characteristics are proxies for a fourth - somebody involved, somewhere along the line, has given some thought to the question of what a museum Web site is actually for.

That small elite among museum sites is worth visiting and worth studying. The odd thing, though, is that even these thoughtful sites tend to look for ways to translate the 19th-century museum into a 21st-century medium.

The 19th-century storytelling museum was an ideology, a metaphor and a cult. The ideology of the museum was the belief that exposure to the cultural elite's view of beauty and knowledge would "improve" the common people. The museum's uplifting tableaux stood as an antidote to the Gin Palace, or the dog track.

The metaphor of the museum was one which had first surfaced in the Palaces of Memory, mnemonic devices of the Renaissance; it is the idea that knowledge can be represented as a series of rooms. They can be plain or ornate, large or small, Doric or baroque. But they are still rooms, essentially like the ones we have at home except that there are a lot more of them. There may be one way through or there may be many. The Vatican museum's colour-coded sub routes offer a range that stretches from the quickie "see the Sistine Chapel and run" option to the six-hour unexpurgated version. But each route is intended as a way of understanding relations between the artefacts on display in the concatenation of rooms.

The cult of the museum was the cult of the object. It was the idea that the thing itself carried extra value - an idea that led to the strange belief that the more objects a museum owned, the better it was.

All three things - the ideology, the metaphor, the cult - look odd in cyberspace. On the Web, there is no cultural elite, no faith in a morally superior knowledge. There are no enforced routes, and though I've nothing against rooms (I live in one myself), they're revealed to be just one metaphor among many. And there are no objects, only representations. So it is curious, and a bit dispiriting, to see all the parts of the trinity being dragged kicking and screaming into the would-be world of the virtual museum.

A room of one's own

Visit a typical museum Web site, and you'll probably find a floor plan. The Louvre does it, the Metropolitan does it, even the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois does it. There is a good reason for this: some people, and many schools, may want to use the Web site to prepare for a physical visit. But museums may also have a vested interest in subordinating the virtual museum to the real one, in using their Web site as bait; they want to keep control. Alistair McLaurin (who does a decent job of the Science Museum in London's 350 Web pages at www.nmsi.ac.uk, despite a budget which just about covers the tea and biscuits) points out that museums like his own are exploring scripts which would allow Web authors to linearise hypertext, forcing visitors to follow a certain route.

These routes can allow a bit of imagination, a bit of choice. The Library of Congress-backed EXPO site , designed by Frans von Hoesel with help and suggestions from Netscape's Marc Andreessen, offers a shuttle bus (for which read "menu page") which takes you to one of six pavilions (for which read "exhibitions"); you can also tour the site using a map. The museum building is recast as a park, but it's still a park with an electronic fence around it, as the following warning spells out: "The shuttle bus operates only on the EXPO terrain. No outside buses are allowed to enter the bus station directly, although they may stop at the EXPO Ticket Office to drop off visitors."

The museum tour metaphor recreates in cyberspace the physical constraints with which most curators claim to wish they could do away. Art galleries are a particularly good example of the paradox. Paintings are now generally arranged for intellectual rather than moral enlightenment, in an age where the two have long since been divorced. The idea is to give the visitor an idea of stylistic developments and/or thematic parallels, so Caravaggio might lead into the Utrecht school and the whole tradition of tenebrism in 17th-century art. Any curator will admit that some at least of the rooms in his gallery are a mixed bag, either because there simply were not enough good examples of that school or genre to fill the space, or for other reasons, such as size, or the security rating of the painting. Yet in many museum Web sites and CD-ROMs, such obstacles are painstakingly reconstructed.

A typical example of the floor-plan genre of museum CD-ROM is Uffizi, produced by Olivetti offshoot Opera Multimedia. After the opening plinky-plonk, you are shown a bird's-eye view of the building, with the roof off. You can pick a room, enter it, stand in the middle of the floor and scan the walls, turning through 360 degrees in 16 movements. You can zoom in on the wall-plaque at the entrance to the room, which gives you a general round-up of the paintings on display (and attempts to justify the company they keep), or zoom in on any one of the paintings, listen to a commentary, go to a biography of the painter, and so on. You can even watch a grainy film of people looking at paintings.

All this movement, apart from making you queasy, is also drinking up bytes by the gallon - which may explain the cursory treatment given to the paintings themselves. Take Botticelli's Primavera. You will be told that the painting was inspired by the stanzas of humanist poet Angelo Poliziano, who in turn drew on classical sources. Multimedia should be the perfect way to explore this cultural palimpsest, yet clicking on Poliziano gives us merely a three-line biography, no more. Flower symbolism, the Ovidian story of Zephyr and Chloris, the significance of dance in early Renaissance Europe - the painting leads naturally into these topics, but you are blocked by design. The bowler-hatted tour guide, with his hoary old anecdote about the guinea-pig in the bottom-left-hand corner, was at least open to questions.

The danger here is that Net presence will only exacerbate the passivity of the museum experience. That is why Pierre Coural, head of audio-visual projects at the Louvre, is keen to get curators online with the collection, even if only for a few hours each week. So far no museum has done this, even though most have had the resources for years.

The cathedral of knowledge

While webmasters reproduce floor plans, though, curators are down in the vaults. This, for them, is where virtuality could really make a difference. Museums have always been hoarders - you never know when 22,000 prehistoric flints might come in handy. Museums are committed as much to conservation and research as to display; like icebergs, most of their bulk is unseen. But storage has always been expensive, and even some high profile museums simply do not have the resources to do it properly.

"I've stopped going into the Uffizi storerooms," one Italian restorer told me recently, "because it always makes me cry." Online access to records and images opens up the possibility of pooling resources. It means that various museums could create, and could then share, vast underground bunkers for storing art and artefacts which would only need to be viewed directly as a last resort - by a student of brush-strokes, for example, or a bio-archaeologist anxious to sample that femur.

A number of projects have already been launched that would allow museums to exchange and collate their collections electronically. The sine qua non for such convergence, of course, is agreement on standards. Laura Corti of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (part of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC) believes it is "an ethical obligation not to waste an institution's resources by using idiosyncratic methods." The Getty Art History Information Programme (AHIP), set up in 1983 to promote access to cultural heritage information via computer technology, has been especially active in this field. AHIP's Imaging Initiative, launched in 1994, is an attempt to get museums, archives, software and hardware manufacturers to agree on digitisation standards, while the Intellectual Integration Initiative aims to create nothing less than a unified visual database for the arts, using structured vocabularies and information protocols.

The G7 countries have also taken a stand on heritage convergence by including "multimedia access to the world's cultural heritage" as one of eleven pilot projects agreed on at the Gore-fuelled Conference on the Information Society held in Rome in April 1995. The International Council of Museums' Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) project was working towards such a goal well before politicians got interested. And there is a small galaxy of more localised initiatives, like the European RAMA (Remote Access to Museum Archives) consortium, a recently completed four-year project which connected seven museums, complete with archives, via a tele-research service aimed at museum staff and scholars; or the Canadian Heritage Information Network, a more public-oriented network which enables the user to find and compare holdings in different Canadian museums.

The logical goal of all this convergence was set out by David Bearman in a talk given at the Science Museum last year. He defined the end result as RICH, or the "Repository of International Cultural Heritage". This "universal cathedral of human knowledge and memory" would allow us to locate a song - any song - and listen to it, or search for a building - any building - and walk through it. RICH would also serve as a "visual thesaurus, the latter being a totally new kind of intellectual resource enabling the location of concepts through visual identification in their proper hierarchical structure, and the discovery of the textual explanation and documentation of unknown concepts without any textual input." (Purely visual search engines are already the subject of research at Eastman Kodak and elsewhere.)

It's an awesome idea - but, again, one firmly routed in the past. Michel Foucault gave it voice 20 years ago - not as a vision of the future, but as the founding assumption of the modern age, an age born almost two centuries ago and already moribund. "The idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organising in this a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place - this whole idea belongs to our modernity."

A triumph of form over content

However much content you amass, it's only half the story. There has to be more to a virtual museum than content. And in some places there already is. Jonathan Bowen's excellent Virtual Library of Museums will take you to some of them. The site, designed by a computer engineer whose wife is a curator, is one of those satisfyingly complete works born of personal enthusiasm that make Web surfing so rewarding. As well as museums, there are the major museum associations and those acronym-rich international heritage initiatives. It's an essential stopping-off point for anyone who wants to get some idea of how single museums are beginning to reach out through the Net. It's a doorway into many, many rooms.

And into at least one cave. The display of prehistoric cave paintings from Vallon Pont D'Arc in France, which the Net-wise French Ministry of Culture posted at less than a month after their discovery on Christmas Day in 1994, is perhaps the most widely-quoted positive role model of virtual heritage management that the Web can offer.

There's not all that much to see, but this is still one of the most exciting virtual heritage sites on the Web. The reason is not just that these startlingly beautiful red- and black-ochre paintings of horses, panthers, wild oxen and hyenas are several metres underground somewhere in rural France, nor even that in seeing them this way you are actually aiding conservation (virtual visitors do not exhale carbon dioxide). What makes the experiment unique is that the research process is taking place on the Net. In June of last year, the radiocarbon analysis that showed the paintings to date from around 32,000 BC, making them the oldest examples of cave art yet discovered, was on the Web site as soon as it was done. Shortly afterwards, an advertisement was posted asking for applications to join a research team that would carry out further analysis of the drawings, analysis which, thanks to the dating, was overturning previous theories of the birth of the artistic instinct in man. Traditionally, museum research goes on behind closed doors. The closest the docile public gets to it is when it's put on a label.

The cave site lets you go in the virtual world where people can't go in the real world. Other sites let you touch in VR what you can't touch in real life. An example of what can already be done in the field of three-dimensional image manipulation is the virtual fossils exhibition offered by London's Natural History Museum. Anyone with Netscape 2 and a plug-in VRML browser can flip over a trilobite to see what's underneath. Other museums are now jumping onto this bandwidth-wagon; the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago offers a nicely designed multimedia site that will appeal especially to children.

And as well as letting you do what you can't in the real world, these sites also encourage you to do what, in the real world, people simply don't. A museum that gets few visitors in the real world can be a hit in the virtual one, if it tries. Italy's best museum Web site is not that of the Vatican or the Uffizi, but that of the Uffizi's little-known next-door neighbour, the History of Science Museum in Florence. The museum gets only 50,000 non-virtual visitors a year. But its Web site (galileo.imss.firenze.it) boasted around half a million hits in 1995, and 25,000 of them involved research in the Museum's online archives. Director Paolo Galluzzi has ambitions beyond merely getting more visitors, though. He wants to do something new. "Our aim is to recontextualise objects, to bring out their cultural value. And the Net, which is pure context, offers a unique opportunity to build in historical, biographical and social links which in the physical museum tend to get pushed aside by the primacy of the object."

Galluzzi thinks that this opportunity has been spectacularly fumbled by most museums because "the sites are generally set up and maintained by engineers - they're all bells and whistles and packing the content in. The curators are too often absent; what is essential, if the virtual museum is ever going to be taken seriously, is not content but meaning. There's a lot at stake: we have the chance to change the museum experience from a celebration of the sacred rite of culture in a dusty temple to a truly interactive experience, which gives new value to our collections." David Bearman agrees that "people do not want the things in themselves; they want the meanings they convey." Better still, they want to create those meanings themselves.

What museums really do

Sheldon Annis, now at the New College of Global Studies in Virginia, wrote an essay called "The Museum as Staging-Ground for Symbolic Action". It is one of the best descriptions of what a museum really does ever written. Annis starts by pointing out that, Victorian values aside, today's visitors' "scripts" never coincide with the curators' stories. Because curators are responsible for objects, they tend to be rather material. Not so the visitors; we construct our own personal "warehouse of symbols" based on three levels of interaction: dream space, pragmatic space and cognitive space.

In the first, we experience the museum as "a flickering of and among symbols". We can slow it down, speed it up, freeze and delete at will - all inside our heads. Pragmatic space is where we cross museums off our personal checklist - "done the Louvre, done the Hermitage, done the Met" - but also the level of museum-going as a social act.

It is here that the "this is doing me good" tripwire is set off; it is here, too, that we rehearse erudite pick-up lines in front of Monet's water-lilies. On this level, writes Annis, "It does not matter whether the coins were Roman or Chinese." We are beyond the objects.

Cognitive space, finally, is the one that corresponds most closely to the museum the curator wants us to visit. Writes Annis, "There is an idea - like the evolution of the horse - that the designer writes in physical form across the museum's floors and walls." But even here we can beg to differ. "Since fully understanding the curatorial message requires patience, some quiet, and no pushing, most museum-goers enter cognitive space selectively." We edit the stories.

Anyone designing a museum Web page should read Annis on spaces before reaching for Pesce on VRML. This sort of understanding of what the physical museum really does is the first step towards releasing its virtual potential. The second step is to ask how a similar experience might be realised in cyberspace - and how it might be changed.

In the virtual museum, dream space is extruded onto the screen, and into the actions we make to change it. "Flickering of and among symbols" sums up the Web surfer's average Saturday night in; rather than mooning over the connections between Goya's Maja Desnuda and the Playmate of the Month, we make them.

You could argue that dream space is no more the concern of the virtual museum than of its physical progenitor; it's none of the curator's business what we do with his artefacts in the privacy of our own heads. But this objection holds only as long as we remain locked into the notion that a museum is a collection of things, rather than a collection of ideas, or links. Perhaps it's easiest to see if you look at the sort of thing which might one day want to sit in a virtual museum. Joseph Squier's "the place" is a one-man Web installation, a journey through fragments of a life via a succession of unsettling, unfocused, treated images and accompanying text. Click on "Manifesto" and Joseph explains the logic: "In the place there are no objects, spaces or bodies.... The place requires new constructions of bodily reality". As Jim Ure pointed out on HotWired, "the place" is one of the few art sites to use the Web as a medium in itself, rather than a showcase for work done in other media.

A museum would never dare go this far, of course; dream space is incompatible with boards of governors. But there is no need to David-Lynchify the museum to make the most of the new medium. An example of what can be done within a fairly traditional concept of what constitutes our "cultural heritage" is provided by the World Art Treasures site, set up by Swiss art critic René Berger, one of the few convinced Net converts in his field. Berger's site is a serious attempt to use Web pages to structure an exhibition. In the case of the Bomarzo Monster Garden tour, for example, you need to solve the metaphysical riddles posed by the grotesque sculptures in this extraordinary Italian Renaissance garden before moving on to the next page. Concrete museums have also shown a remarkable reluctance to incorporate outside links into their sites. Modern art galleries in particular have a responsibility here. They should act as hosts to cutting-edge multimedia artists like Squier, rather than letting the revolution happen outside their virtual walls - in such places as Squiers' own "@ art gallery" , or the "Art on the Net" artists' cooperative at.

Some museums are trying their best. The Whitney Museum's Web site provides links to other Web artists' sites; it also features its own satisfyingly weird "Hollywood Archaeology" project. Whitney Director David Ross is one of the few museum bosses to recognise that "the museum as we know it - the museum as a social instrument, the museum as a site for the contest of ideas and values - will be completely transformed by the technology."

That does not mean, though, that the transformation will be from the inside. Leaving aside contemporary art, museums devoted to the traditional domains of classic art, natural history and archaeology are being undermin- ed by non-institutional sites that do it better - or at least with less of a lemon-sucking face. When the Science Museum in London set up its Web site early in 1995 there were already three unofficial "Science Museum" pages. Some of these museum hackers offer grab-bags of "art 'n' culture" which work on Annis' "trophy level": "done the Mona Lisa, done Picasso's Guernica ...".

But at one level this is a perfectly valid need, and one which single sites simply don't satisfy quickly enough. Everyone knows that if you want a selection of the world's greatest paintings, you don't mess about visiting twelve different official online museums in twelve different countries; you go straight to Nicholas Pioch's justly famous WebMuseum at mistral.enst.fr (and at 35 other mirror sites on five continents).

Pioch started the site off as the "WebLouvre" early in 1994; objection from a large and curiously similar-sounding French museum soon forced a change of name, but the boy-wonder stormed on regardless. Today, the WebMuseum is the world's most-visited art site, with around 150,000 hits a day and an impressive range of sponsors, from BMW to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Pioch doesn't even own a scanner; all the artworks on display are contributed by visitors. The site is unashamedly populist in its selection of great artists and their works, but there are a few more récherché corners as well, such as the illuminated miniatures from the Medieval manuscript Les Trois Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, held in the Chateau de Chantilly collection but too fragile to be exhibited. Pioch is scathing of the generally snooty reactions the WebMuseum gets from traditional museum curators. "They're mostly afraid of it, since they tend to be control freaks."

From objects to meaning

The WebMuseum takes care of the museum visit as Great Art Tour, but the museum as a forum for social exchange is more of a problem. You don't have to have an analysis as sophisticated as Annis's to see that museums are about groups and identity just as much as objects. The creation of desultory "museum caffs" for talk is not the way to do this on the Net (though recreating one often ignored but utterly vital function of the museum - that of a high-class dating agency - would be enjoyable, if museums had a sense of humour).

In the cybermuseum, social involvement begins when we enter into a dialogue. It is this which prompts us to hang around, to interrupt our voyeuristic skim. The dialogue can be of the "you speak, I listen and silently criticise" variety - the marginal gloss instinct - but this is hard going in the long run. It is more likely to be stimulated by true interaction of the kind envisaged by Pierre Coural at the Louvre.

There is still precious little of this out there. The Science Museum in London has launched a series of online ethical debates on questions such as genetic screening (check it out and vote on www.scicomm.org.uk/biosis/index) - no more than you might get on alt.sci.ethics, but still a laudable move.

And a distributed observer experiment in which local online residents helped to track the migratory patterns of butterflies in the midwestern United States was a resounding success. It doesn't sound like a museum, and many of the "researchers" had never seen the inside of a natural history museum. But it was an ordering of the world; it taught by example; it was a meaningful story. The idea that the museum is what we see around us, what we have in our homes, has been batted around a few enlightened museum education departments, but has never made it much further. The Net is the ideal place for it to take off.

Another way of approaching the problem of involvement is to make a virtual museum out of whatever people choose to put into it. As far as I know (and it's a big Web out there), this has only been done once, in a fascinating experiment called 1002 situations. Two video artists, Michele Kolnicker and Michael Kieslinger, set up 1002 situations in conjunction with an exhibition on the idea of the Heimat , or homeland, held at Castle Tollet in Austria last year. Anyone curious enough to beach up at the site was faced with the question, "What defines your homeland?" and could mail back a response to one of the castle's subject-area "rooms": childhood, language, food, et cetera.

The online experiment is still in progress; contributions range from the poetry of "a tiny oak leaf from some doomed chaparral, it had been ripped from the mother plant in her death, incarcerated in a fiery sky ..." to the gush of "I got this clown from a shop and it is cute it is red, blue and yellow a cute little face".

1002 situations has some claim to be the first museum of private memories and enthusiasms - unless you take the Net itself to be just such a museum.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

To judge by their behaviour, today's museums are still about fixed values and solid objects, just as they were to Keats. Even if they do go virtual, curators are unlikely to embrace memories and enthusiasms as part of their brief, even though a good museum is as full of them as it is of exhibits.

But that traditional brief must still mutate; the move into the virtual world will be a move from objects to meanings, meanings that can no longer be set in stone simply by juxtapositioning, labelling and partitioning.

The meanings might emerge out of the discovery-and-research process, as they do at the virtual Vallon Pont D'Arc. They might come from active discussion. They might come from new metaphoric strategies, from a poetry in, not about, museums. And they might come from outside. If the curators don't deliver, there will be more than enough people happy to raid the repositories for what they can get, and to set up their own museums.

In cyberspace, everybody owns the Elgin marbles.

Lee Marshall is a freelance writer based in Rome.