This week, we’re discussing digitization and information politics, and how we’re balancing between liberation and exploitation in information politics. For this week, I find this example of digitization particularly intriguing:
In this video, Vox Media (2018) discusses how Instagram is changing art museums. In installation art, people and their interaction with the piece is the main thesis of the art piece. Since Instagram has taken the world by storm, art museums are increasingly shaping their museum experience to fit people’s desires to take photos for Instagram. The video also notes that since they’ve changed in this sense, museum visits have risen but people’s enjoyment of them has gone down.
Here, we can see the perfect example of how people are quantifying an “analog” experience into a digital form. Museum experiences were previously analog in the sense that it was continuous – impossible to quantify or divided into countable units. In the Vox video, we can see that museum art is increasingly digitized by the Instagram generation and museums are creating experiences around that.
In a sense, I think it suggests that the Instagram photos of the art pieces are also a part of the art piece itself – a very digital, quantifiable art piece. It’s certainly the case for most of the art pieces created by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. When you search Kusama’s name on Instagram, the main result that comes up is people’s interaction with her artworks, not just the works themselves.
In his chapter “What is ‘Post-Digital”, Cramer (2015) argues that it’s pointless to discuss anything digital because we’re living in the digital age where everything has an underlying digital layer (p. 23). Instead, he discusses the concept of “post-digital” – an ongoing continuation of digital culture. I find that this example of “Instagramable museums” perfectly captures the struggle of post-digital age, where offline experiences need to be transferred into digital forms to reach a bigger population, but it almost subdues the experience itself.
This example also illustrates the principles of new media in Manovich’s “The Language of New Media” (2001). Although the museum exhibitions themselves are analog (p. 23), I believe they can be counted as “new media” because they encourage people to create their own digital version of the artworks using social media photos. One thing that’s especially interesting about these exhibits is the new media notion of “variability” – they are experienced in countless different ways, and each “session” is a unique experience for a person because no two Instagram photos are the same.
However, it doesn’t mean it’s good that museums are increasingly post-digital. Some say that the very presence of social media in this space affects people’s perceptions and enjoyments of the artworks. Even if that’s the case, digitized museum experiences are here to stay, and museums are shaping their artworks to serve this purpose.
References:
Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘Post-Digital’. In: D. Berry and M. Dieter, ed., Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, and Design. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.13 – 26.
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. London: MIT Press.
YouTube. (2018). How ‘Instagram traps’ are changing art museums. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/Qx_r-dP22Ps [Accessed 16 Oct. 2019].
