UViMCA · Utility and Usership in Virtual Museums of Contemporary Art
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-01-18 → 2023-03-12
- EU contribution
- €164,558
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Utility and Usership in Virtual Museums of Contemporary Art
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, arts organizations have accelerated their lagging digital transition in an effort to provide broader public access to their collections and projects, and increase their stake in the attention economy. Yet, for the most part, their digital infrastructure and digital strategies are still emergent, often limited to broadcasting documentation and visitor information on their website and through social media. While arts organizations are investing considerable resources into digitizing their collections to make them widely available for public reference and use, these massive, online collections remain dramatically underutilized, garnering very little audience engagement beyond a small pool of already committed researchers and amateurs. Almost three decades after the advent of the first online collections, their presentation has barely changed and arts organizations are still puzzled at how to best exploit these rich content troves. The UViMCA research project addresses this issue by examining both the existing and the potential impacts (i.e. utility) and modes of engagement (i.e., usership) of virtual museums of contemporary art. This issue is crucial for society as the general public is increasingly coming into contact and engaging with artworks by means of digital technology, given that visiting physical museums and galleries often proves difficult, costly and even daunting for some audiences. In consequence, digital mediation is rapidly transforming the public’s perception of and relationship to culture, which is what effectively upholds collective meaning and value for society. In today’s post-truth era, cultural organizations are among the only public institutions that retain a good measure of public trust (in comparison to democratic and scientific institutions), which makes them invaluable to the task of fighting disinformation, fostering healthy civic debate, promoting social cohesion and nurturing a more active citizenry. Accordingly, the overall objectives of the UViMCA project are to identify the most effective ways of increasing arts organizations’ social impact by means of new digital technologies, and examine how digital cultural applications can mobilize collective intelligence to sustain greater diversity, equality and social justice.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This research proposal aims to address Utility (i.e., social function) and Usership in Virtual Museums of Contemporary Art [ViMCA]. Its objectives are to establish a ground-breaking analysis and conceptual framework for ViMCA, and to determine correlated modes of implementation designed to sustain social justice through cultural innovation. In its initial out-going phase at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for research-creation, this action will determine ViMCA’s social efficacy through an interdisciplinary methodology investigating different curatorial approaches, theories of contemporary art reception (emerging from neuroaesthetics, philosophy and art theory), as well as socially-engaged artistic practices, and cross-referencing them with the novel affordances provided by XR–Extended Reality technologies. In the subsequent in-coming phase of this action at ICS-FORTH’s Human Computer Lab, research will focus on usership and design in order to establish consistent modes of implementation. This next research phase will initially devise a bespoke mode of user-generated content creation for ViMCA, derived and adapted from co-productive models of public participation found in socially engaged art, new media and museums 3.0. Second, it will establish a dynamic, personalized user interface model adapted to contemporary art contexts that will critically engage users while challenging innate confirmation bias. The results of this overall research will constitute a roadmap for future digital applications designed to support and enhance the role of contemporary art institutions in fostering democracy and social justice in today’s post-truth era. In order to demonstrate the practical viability of these research results, work on this action will ultimately yield the design specifications for an innovative ViMCA prototype application, developed during the fellowship’s final secondment phase at the academia-to-industry spinoff startup ORamaVR.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union