The virtual museum.
Item
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Title
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The virtual museum.
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Identifier
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AAI9946230
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identifier
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9946230
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Creator
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White, Michele E.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Carol Armstrong
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Mass Communications | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines three "virtual" museums. The virtual museum, like traditional museum structures, displays scientific, artistic, historical, and other collections. In the traditional museum, viewers walk through a physical site in order to look at discrete objects. A virtual museum presents a view or account of a museum rather than offering the beholder a physical structure. The virtual museum participates in a reflexive representation of its own parts because it oscillates between representing and being a museum. This self-depiction can reveal the ideological underpinnings of the museum or it can give the illusion of greatness, facilitate easy access, and itemize the elements of the museum.;Three case studies are employed in order to critique the object-based focus of the physical museum and its investment in exhibiting valuable and original objects. The first case study is the nineteenth-century photographically extra-illustrated The Marble Faun, which was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The purpose of this case is to interpret one of the many histories of the virtual museum and to thereby refute the contemporary belief that virtual museums are a computer-facilitated phenomenon. The second case study considers the many reproductions of the Louvre museum on the world wide web. The Paris Louvre has produced a version of its "real" structure on the web in order to maintain its unique claim to the name Louvre. Web museums remain composite structures despite such efforts. The third case study is the LambdaMOO museum. Multi-user object oriented world or MOO museums are text-based but they still rely on schematics and processional representations of space in order to convey a traditional museum experience.;These virtual museums, in which the presumptions of the physical museum are both undermined and employed, can offer an alternative model and highlight some of museum's conceptual failures. My employment of aesthetic and museum critiques is intended to provide a model for the further application of these studies to virtual structures. This dissertation also sets out a critical framework for defining and critiquing virtual settings by describing the virtual museum's structural and spectatorial differences from the traditional museum.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
