Rethinking Museum Exhibitions: Merging Physical and Digital Culture—Present to Future

Abstract

As we move into the future, more than ever, museum exhibitions will ride the wave of rapidly advancing technologies, intrinsic to development across all fields and disciplines. We are entering the next wave of the digital revolution, having traveled from the 1940s at the dawn of computing and digital communication, to the 1960s’ introduction of the Internet leading to the World Wide Web in the 1990s; we arrive at the present where all media has gone digital. We take a deep breath, as we travel into new territory where digital technologies and computing intrude into real life, capable of mimicking human expression and behavior. New digital devices talk to us in human sounding voices, and robots look and act like humans. Digital has become real, as it takes on human affordances which in turn deepens our relationship with virtual life. Increasingly, we live in altered states of being as we see art through a digital lens. Creating art with our digital tools, we use artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, while our sense of self morphs and imitates digital reality. Looking into the future, exhibitions will increasingly feature digital art capable of molding digital media into real-life immersive experiences, so that digital beings will become more real. What will be the effect on the human psyche? Will we love art more causing museums to attract larger audiences. Surely, radical change is upon us, as the unstoppable force of digital progression makes its way to the heart of the museum.