The Virtual Museum

Nowadays any display of exhibits in electronic form is often referred to as a “virtual museum” or “virtual exhibition”. We will not enter into a dispute here whether this is correct or not. But the subject of our discussion is those museums which do not exist in “real space”, whose collections can only be viewed in virtual form – via electronic publishing, or via the Internet.

Among the incentives for creating such a virtual museum is the necessity for historical reconstruction. Sadly, many of the world’s architectural sites are partly or wholly lost to us today. But they have a rich past, they attract large numbers of visitors, they are a source of interesting stories of bygone days. So those acting as guides to these places are faced with a very difficult task: of telling in words how this or that site looked many, many years ago, what kind of buildings stood there, what celebrated individuals visited them, how the people there worked and lived. In this situation multi-media technology can step in and “recreate” the outward appearance of sites by means of three-dimensional modelling. Such models of buildings and ensembles can provide a basis for serious scholarly work by museum experts, which, combined with computer-generated realisations of the highest professional standard, will result in highly faithful and exact reconstructions of vanished sites. These models can be used in various ways: as the basis for a series of illustrations in an exhibition or during a tour; for the creation of multimedia films incorporating elements of reconstruction supplemented with visual and informational materials; “living” models where the visitor can, as it were, walk around and feel himself to be inside the architectural space; and so on. Every cultural institution will approach this task in its own way; but there is no doubt that multi-media productions based on three-dimensional reconstructions are an interesting and innovative way of placing before visitors the history of an architectural site, the stages in its development, and even – at times – unsolved historical puzzles.

We can also envisage another task: the creation of a three-dimensional space which has never existed in reality. One might, for example, “construct” a virtual building which will serve as a place to display various “real” exhibits, that is, electronic copies of real works of art. Such a museum can be created, for example, for the displaying of items which are kept in store and only very rarely (or, alas, never) exposed to the visitor’s view. By placing paintings and sculptures in virtual space one can imitate the effect of actually being present in the museum’s rooms, looking at the exhibits “close up” or “from a distance”, thus receiving visual information about their size (including their size in relation to other exhibits).

If desired, a tour of the rooms of such a museum may include extra media-related possibilities. There might be annotations in the form of text or audio commentary, musical accompaniment, the possibility of looking at some details of the exhibit, or accounts of the history and subject of the paintings in animated and multi-media form, and so on. The virtual nature of the museum allows one to arrange the exhibits more freely and innovatively; as the “re-ordering” of the exhibits is a simple matter, a museum’s specialists are at liberty to experiment with the content and the arrangement of the exhibition on its virtual walls.