Your Exhibition Will Soon Be Virtual - siefkes.de€¦ · back at least to the Age of Enlightenment, i.e. by principles of curation, storytelling, or presentation of exhibits. Online

Your Exhibition Will Soon Be VirtualMartin Siefkes, University of Technology Chemnitz

Transmediations! Communication across Media BordersLinnæus University, Växjö, Sweden, Oct. 13–15, 2016

Martin Siefkes

University of Technology Chemnitz

www.siefkes.de

Your Exhibition Will Soon Be VirtualTransmediating Museums into the Digital Sphere

http://www.siefkes.de/



Overview

● Putting Exhibitions Online

● What Is Transmediated?

● Types of Online Exhibitions

● Presentation & Storytelling

● Conclusions

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Online Exhibitions as Multimodal Texts

● More and more exhibitions take place online

● A young form of multimodal communication

● Goal: a corpus analysis of online exhibitions

● Problem: Very high complexity

– Variety of semiotic resources, including videos, interactive graphics, & virtual reality elements

– Low degree of conventionalisation, i.e. diverse presentation strategies and design elements

– Should underlying structures (e.g. database functions) be considered?

– Internal and external link structure, 3D-viewers, Java applets, …

– Which intermodal relations (e.g. image-text) should be considered?

● High complexity – what is relevant?

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Semiotic Functions of Exhibitions

● Exhibited artefacts already possess meanings

● Exhibitions select artefacts (often as exemplification for larger contexts, e.g. artistic traditions) and arrange them into a multimodal text

● Additional meanings are added through descriptions, labels etc.

● Hypothesis: the spatial arrangement that directs the viewing and exploring of an exhibition are central for exhibitions as a multimodal genre.

How visitors explore an exhibition, and how they look at the exhibits (e.g. lines of vision), are important. This is true both for online and traditional exhibitions.

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Online vs. Traditional Exhibitions

● Online exhibitions are often simply treated as a mediated form of exhibition, which is brought from the ‘real’ into the virtual space

● However, contemporary physical exhibitions are often also multimedial or multimodal: they contain various media, some of which may simply be mediated differently in online exhibitions

● We can distinguish different degrees of mediation:

– Spatiotemporal artefacts such as sculptures, installations, or performances are mediated when shown in virtual exhibitions

– ‘Born-digital’ works or data may be presented in a more mediated form in an ‘offline’ exhibition: think of a print of a digital image or a touchscreen showing a website

– Some exhibits are mediated to the same degree, e.g. a building shown via photographs and verbal descriptions

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Transmediating … What Exactly?

● Contemporary ‘traditional’ exhibitions in museums are often already multimodal and their exhibits are (partly) mediated

● Hypothesis: Exhibitions have created a specific way of showing, as well as of ‘seeing’ and of interpreting artefacts, which online exhibitions transmediate into the digital sphere

● What is transmediated here is not a specific content (i.e. a narrative or fictional world), but is itself a multlimodal genre

– Curating: Semiotic (textual) functions such as selection and presentation of exhibits, thematic ordering, narration / storytelling, navigation signs etc. exist in both types of exhibitions

– Other multimodal genres (websites for presenting artefacts, i.e. architecture websites, product test sites)

– Different types of online exhibitions relate differently to traditional exhibitions (e.g. ‘Virtual tours’)

– Relations to other multimodal online genres that present artefacts (e.g. architecture websites, product testting websites)

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Towards a Typology?

● “Traditional website”:Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (1919–1933)Institute of Sexology, 1919–1933http://www.magnus-hirschfeld.de/institut/

● “Unique design”:Künste im Exil (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek)Arts in Exile (German National Library)http://kuenste-im-exil.de

● “Database”:Museo del Prado – Collectionhttps://www.museodelprado.es/en

● “Virtual tour”:Rijksmuseum Amsterdam – Virtual Tourhttp://www.amsterdam360.com/panos/rijksmuseum

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http://www.magnus-hirschfeld.de/institut/

http://kuenste-im-exil.de/

https://www.museodelprado.es/en

http://www.amsterdam360.com/panos/rijksmuseum

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A Corpus-Based Approach

● Online exhibitions are a relatively young genre whose changes mirror some of the developments of the World Wide Web

● A number of clearly different subtypes are discernible – but when did these diverge from each other? Do subtypes converge, or vanish altogether?

● Multimodal corpus analysis combines methods of corpus analysis with categories provided by multimodal semiotics

Which patterns define online exhibitions as a multimodal genre?

Which subtypes and changes can be found?

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Question 1: From Artefact to Exhibit

● How are exhibits multimodally presented?

Number and size of images

Use of text (descriptions or just labels?)

Measures describing layout● Arrangement of exhibits on page (e.g. variable or fixed)● Selection of exhibits: are there obvious principles at work?● Which perceptions and experiences of the exhibits are intended? (e.g. 3D vi-

sualisation?)● Which forms of interaction with exhibits are possible?

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Example 1:

Künste im Exil (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek)Arts in Exile (German National Library)

http://kuenste-im-exil.de

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http://kuenste-im-exil.de/

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Example 2:

Museo del Prado, collection, permanent exhibition.


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Question 2: Navigation & Storytelling

● Which forms of navigation offers the site?

● Are there routes indicated for a visit, or do visitors move freely around the site?

● How is the exhibition telling stories about the exhibits?

● What role do the visitors play? Are they narrators themselves, or passive ‘readers’?

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Example 3:

Du bist anders (You are different), an exhibition about the fate of children in the time of National Socialism.

http://www.dubistanders.de/

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http://www.dubistanders.de/

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Example 4:

The Melbourne Story, Melbourne Museum, Virtual Exhibition.

https://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/whatson/current-exhibitions/melbournestory/virtual-exhibition/

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Navigation & Storytelling

● Virtual Exhibition The Melbourne Story (Melbourne Museum). https://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/whatson/current-exhibitions/melbournestory/virtual-exhibition/

Uses “virtual reality” interface based on 360° photographs

Clicking on arrows allows to jump to different locations

Rotation and zoom allow to look at the objects

Video symbols 'floating' next to objects allow to open videos w. explanations or demonstrations

A map can be overlaid, marking the visitor's location and field of view

“Augmented reality” metaphor: (clumsy) movement through a simulation of the actual exhibition space, with additional elements (such as videos) pasted onto it

● Tries to mimic experience in the real exhibition (“Take a sneak peek at The Melbourne Story …”)

● Storytelling isn’t integrated, but provided as a long text on a separate page

● Arguably misses the mode-specific potential of online navigation36 / 38



Precarious Transmedia Balance?

● Online exhibitions are obviously influenced by the museum tradition that goes back at least to the Age of Enlightenment, i.e. by principles of curation, storytelling, or presentation of exhibits.

● Online exhibitions should be seen in the context of digitization of cultural heritage, which has recently taken on new dimensions both in scale and in quality (e.g. due to 3D scanners).

● Online and ‘offline’ (spatiotemporal) exhibitions cannot be clearly distinguished due to the mediated aspects of the latter. Rather, they form a continuum.

● Popular discourses criticize the loss of some aspects of the museum experience, e.g. arguing that the aura of the artworks is lost. Multimodal analysis allows us to highlight the differences as multimodal forms of communication.

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Bibliography

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• Bucher, Hans-Jürgen (2011). Multimodales Verstehen oder Rezeption als Interaktion, in: Hajo Dieckmannshenke, Michael Klemm & Hartmut Stöckl (eds.). Bildlinguistik. Theorien - Methoden - Fallbeispiele. Berlin, Schmidt, 123-156.

• Forceville, Charles & Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo (2009). Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.• Fricke, Ellen (2012), Grammatik multimodal: Wie Wörter und Gesten zusammenwirken. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.• Halliday, Michael A. K. & Matthiessen, Christian M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.• Kress, Gunther & van Leeuwen, Theo (2001). Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold.• McTavish, Lianne (2006). Visiting the Virtual Museum: Art and Experience Online, in: Janet Marstine (ed.). New Museum

Theory and Practice, 226–246.• Natale, Maria T. & Sergi Fernández, Mercè L. (2012). Handbook on virtual exhibitions and virtual performances. Version 1.0.

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10Plus1 1/2015, 113-131.• Stöckl, Hartmut (2004). Die Sprache im Bild – Das Bild in der Sprache. Zur Verknüpfung von Sprache und Bild in

massenmedialen Texten. Konzepte – Theorien Analysemethoden. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. • Wilson, Ross J. (2011). Behind the scenes of the museum website. Museum Management and Curatorship 26, 373–389.

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http://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/handbook-on-virtual-exhibitions-and-virtual-performances