by Alec Waxman & Cameron Dayton

This project seeks to create an immersive virtual tour of the Nasher Museum of Art and its galleries. Since closing its doors to visitors in March due to COVID-19, the experience of walking through the museum’s space and viewing the art in its galleries, including the museum’s temporary exhibition featuring the works of Ebony Patterson, has been largely inaccessible to the public. Now, in the age of growing digitization and especially during a pandemic where physical museum visits are largely inaccessible, creating an encompassing, immersive virtual experience is incredibly relevant.

Graphic Pull: Contemporary Prints from the Collection at the Nasher Museum

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Course: Virtual Museum (ArtHIST 305)

The future of museum is on the immateriality, affordances, interactions, processes, artificial organisms, cyber-spaces. After an era of museography, of inorganic taxonomic museums, the short life of virtual museums, the future will be on cyber-museums: borderless, distributed, embodied and able to reproduce new knowledge in different forms, layout and rhizomes. The Internet of Things, augmented reality technologies, new data analyses of artifacts, virtual reality systems, body sensors and simulations associated to new forms of engagement are going to transform missions, roles, goals and communication of museums and collections. The transformation of museums in more dynamic, flexible and open institutions is a challenge of this century and, more importantly, this trend generates new job positions and different professional profiles at the level of cultural resource management, museum communication and technological research.

In the pandemic period all the major museums changed their look, offered a more articulated visualization of on line collections and increased the digital content. Is this a new era of virtual pandemic museums? Does this period create new forms of virtual learning and museum entertainment?

Questions (among others) we will debate along the semester: what is the role of virtual museums in the pandemic era? Is there a difference between digital and virtual museums? What about virtual communication for cultural heritage? How to design a virtual museum for the future? How can we browse and study virtual collections?