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Today a museum is no longer a temple; it is a forum, a platform for communication.
And IT is a powerful tool for supporting and developing communication.
Museum exhibition made with active use of IT has evolved the same way as IT itself.
At first, there was huge enthusiasm about techniques, tools in museum exhibitions.
For example, everybody was installing information kiosks like mad.
Why? Because you couldn’t get the public away from them.
If you now have a look at an information kiosk in an exposition,
you will easily find out that nobody comes up to it.
What has museum computerization lead to?
Thanks to ICTs museums can now perform their traditional functions
more effectively and productively.
The only principal shift was the online extension of traditional museum space.
That to my mind is just the beginning.
ICTs possess a vast unrealized potential.
I don’t see any examples of museums doing something completely new and innovative.
Of course, I’m desperate by the fact
that there is no uniform IT strategy for museums in our country,
that the Ministry of Culture still hasn’t stated anything clearly.
If this happened, IT in museums would develop far more rapidly.
I think there are two possible directions
IT-technologies for the museums will evolve.
First of all ICTs can keep being merely a tool.
Second of all they can create some special field of art,
based on different computer technologies.
All those installations… Well, you know what I mean.
As for museums, I believe that our task is to keep from withdrawing,
to resist transformation into a visual environment
intended for an unsophisticated user who will just come,
see something random and take it back at the most primitive level.
I would rather like our museum information systems to try and perform their main task:
to incorporate the most of the abundance of knowledge
gathered by museums over the centuries of their history
because it is no secret to anyone that the main wealth of a museum’s information
is stored in the minds of its employees.
And our goal is to make it work in such a way that this knowledge
can somehow be transferred, translated and transformed
into a system of information chunks that will be stored and passed on.
Let’s imagine: what is an IT system in an art museum for?
Ideally, what do we want to get from it?
In my opinion, a good system will not justify those enormous expenses
until the work, significant work done in the museum,
depends on a system a specialist can’t work without.
My dream is related to using 3D technology,
so that we could not only have plane images, but could also move them:
look at a sculpture from all the sides, or at applied art items – a cup, for instance –
to turn it, to have a close look, to see the seal.
And I want this to be published online.
I think that museums will keep pace with new technologies anyway.
I think it’s inevitable.
I think that there is a absolutely obvious way to apply modern multimedia projectors.
For example, it is possible to create a museum of fine art from all other the world.
This museum could exhibit, let’s say, large-sized works of Velazquez, Veronese, Titian,
which are impossible to get under one roof.
That is a quite easy thing to do.
All it requires is sufficient space and some funds for the screens and projectors.
We can even take it a step further and imagine
that there will someday be a retinal projector, like a small device or an optical lens.
It would be possible for anyone to interact with any image
just sitting in an armchair in a dark room.
It could be almost like you are communicating with Michelangelo and Titian themselves.
You can ask me whether ICTs are essential for the museums
and for the exhibitions in particular.
I would say they’re useful but not always essential.
Sometimes they can even be obstructing, and sometimes on a contrary.
It is a really difficult and creative task to decide what and when must be used.
One should be very experienced and insightful to make those decisions.
This is especially true to exposition and exhibition activities,
because obviously collections management systems are necessary.
IT has penetrated virtually the entire museum space,
but the emphasis on it is shifting, wearing off,
for the simple reason that it has lost its attractiveness
in terms of the nature of the phenomenon.
A tool itself, in fact, isn’t interesting.
Tools are needed for implementing ideas.
So I wish you this: let your advanced and innovative
be in ideas, in contents, in structure, and not in hardware.
Hardware will perish in six months, and ideas can live for long.