GROUNDBREAKING
21st
Century Art
Virtual institutions? Audience-led curatorial programming?
Buying art with bitcoin? New technology is emerging across
the globe, producing innovative ways of interacting with
art yet also challenging our historical practices. Author and
cultural strategy consultant Andrs Sznt, who moderates
the Art Basel Conversations event Digital Museums,
Virtual Audiences on December 8, helps us crack the code.
T
he Digital Museum of Digital Art doesnt ex-
ist. Then again, it does. I went there on a warm
afternoon last July. My body was at Transfer,
a gallery in Brooklyn. But my mind was on a different
planet. I strapped on an Oculus Rift headset. With the
gallerys owner, Kelani Nichole, gently guiding me, I
approached a crystalline palace made entirely of data.
The entrance looked like a Greek temple, and the mu-
seum edifice was perched on a piece of interstellar rock.
Farther in the dark space beyond hovered an array of
luminous planetseach one a work of pixel-based art.
Entering DiMoDA, I heard footsteps, presumably
mine. Alfredo Salazar-Caro, a working artist and a co-
creator of DiMoDA, added that touch as a nod to the
sensory conventions of the real worldlike fake engine
noise in electric cars. Soon I was floating inside Theo
Triantafyllidiss Self Portrait (Interior), a piece consisting
of the artists giant head. I slid down his larynx into a
stunning virtual-reality landscapea teeming tableau of
pink stalactites, snaking microbes and oozing lagoons.
This is DiMoDA 2.0. Its new, slightly weird, and pret-
ty awesome. It was born out of necessity, back in 2013,
says Salazar-Caro, who is 28. I was frustrated that I rare-
ly saw works like this in regular galleries. Thats when
Will Robertson and I launched DiMoDA as a way to
create a purely digital museum.
HACKING THE MUSEUM
Is this the future of the museum? Even Salazar-Caro
doesnt see DiMoDA as a substitute for traditional in-
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stitutions, but as something that complements and en-
hances them. Still, it offers signposts to the future.
First, this museum is created by artistsand its high
time they had a say in how art is presented. Second, the
visitor is in charge: I could go wherever I wanted and
stay all day. Third, the museum could adapt to its sub-
ject. No legacy architecture here. DiMoDA could as-
sume different visual attitudes for each exhibition. All of
which made me excited about the road ahead except
for one thing: I felt lonely. The experience was locked
in my brain. And I felt dizzy.
Its still early days for the virtual museum and the
generational project of digital transformation in the art
worldbut its finally really happening. Innovations
like DiMoDA are poised to change every facet of the
museum, from how a curator plans a show to how a visi-
tor navigates through it. Soon, we can expect plausible
virtual-reality gallery experiences. A new world of pos-
sibilities is opening up, and at the same time its shroud-
ing the museum sector in a mist of cultural anxiety. To
be frank, were not really prepared for what comes next.
CHANGE IS IN THE AIR
It may seem a paradox that the art world came late to the
digital party. Art may be rebellious, but its institutions
are conservative. I have a theory for why disruption
has lagged: Its because art is the most complex form
of data. Finding a deal on a plane ticket requires a rela-
tively simple database search. Figuring out the meaning
of a picturethats an algorithmic challenge of a
GROUNDBREAKING

different order. But with recent leaps in comput-

ing power, big-data analysis and artificial intelli-
gence, technology is finally catching up with art.
Mind-boggling things are happening. CERN,
the European Organization for Nuclear Re-
search, is developing a portable particle acceler-
ator that can reveal molecular traits in forgeries.
Google, with 500 million art-related searches a
month, has added more than 440 museums to
its Street View map function. Meaningful rela-
tional picture-searching technology is around
the corner.
The digitization of museum collections is
opening the door to unfettered sharing of art.
New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art has
made its more than 375,000 high-resolution im-
ages of public-domain artworks freely available
since February. (Disclosure: I oversee a leader-
ship institute there.) Museums are deploying
Bluetooth tracking and digital beacons to gather
data about their audiences. Augmented real-
itywhen digital information is overlaid on real-
world imagesis helping visitors see animal flesh
around fossil bones at natural-history museums
and revealing how Antoni Gaud imagined his
interiors at the Casa Batll in Barcelona. At the
Cleveland Museum of Art, visitors watch screens
as they match their bodies to the pose of an an-
cient sculpturea visceral and fun way of engag-
ing with the art form.
Change is afoot on the commercial side of the
art world, too, as more and more of the trade is
transacted digitally. Bitcoin is making inroads.
The BBC reported that in 2015 the Austrian
Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art
(MAK) became the first to use the digital cur-
rency to buy an artwork.
Despite all this bubbling innovation, museums

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF DIMODA (VIRTUAL MUSEUM); COURTESY OF LOCAL PROJECTS (ARTLENS WALL)
remain predominantly focused on delivering an-
alog experiences to live visitors. Defining change
will come when digital museums and virtual
audiencesthe theme of an Art Basel Conver-
sations talk I am moderating on December 8
in Miamiadvance from a peripheral to a core From top: Guests immersed in DiMoDAs virtual museum at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; the ArtLens Wall
(formerly the Collection Wall), developed by Local Projects in 2013, allows visitors to browse thousands of artworks from the
mission concern. Eventually, as with shopping, Cleveland Museum of Arts collection and create their own virtual tours to share with friends and family.
dating, news, entertainment and learning, an ev-
er-larger share of visitor engagement will shift on-
line. Physical and virtual experiences will blend
in surprising ways. No one quite knows what that
will look like, but I believe its inevitable.
Faced with changing customer demographics,
OPENING UP, LETTING GO
How, then, should institutions adapt? No one evolving expectations and an explosion of
wants to see visitors with heads down in devices, or
worse, staying at home (as happened after the ad- competing new entertainment options, museums
vent of high-definition opera broadcasts). A great must increase theirdigital proficiencyto offer a
deal of money and cultural authority is at stake.
Concerns converge on three areas: content, more engaging journey for their audience.

2 Art Basel | Miami Beach 2017

GROUNDBREAKING
Make a Face at the Cleveland Museum of Art uses facial recognition software to match visitors expressions to those of artworks in the museums collection.
staffing and the relationship with the public.
When it comes to content, museums are al-
ready developing a new vocabulary of digital sto-
rytelling around their collections and programs.
Lessons will need to be learned from entertain-
ment and experience designfields that museum
professionals often view with disdain, at their
peril. As a 2017 report titled The Digital Trans-
formation of Museums, from INSEAD, the inter-
national business school, bluntly warned, Faced
with changing customer demographics, evolving
expectations and an explosion of competing new
entertainment options, museums must increase
theirdigital proficiencyto offer a more engaging
journey for their audience.
In staffing, new skills are emerging. Heres one
that already exists at DiMoDA: virtual installer.
Thats someone who works with a digital artist, ad-
justing a works alignment, plasticity, luminosity
and other variable characteristics. Even in muse-
ums that eschew electronic art, digital experts are
destined to rise higher on the org chart.
The most wrenching adaptations call for new
attitudes. If there is a lesson of the digital age
thus far, it is this: Gatekeepers are seeing their
3 Art Basel | Miami Beach 2017
information monopolies erode as people access
content directly, unfiltered. The audience is de-
manding a voice. They want to be part of the
conversation. People are no longer content being
passive recipients of programming. Just look at
todays newspapers.
Should museums fully embrace the digital op-
portunities around them or fence off part of the
experience to create an oasis of reflection and
calm? Can acquisition and programming deci-
sions involve input from the public? Will the vir-
tual museum end up pandering to popular tastes
or will it maintain academic standards? As online
visitors fill the virtual galleries of the future, will
institutions invite the public, in ways we do not
yet fully fathom, to cocreate the museum?
THE APPEAL OF ANALOG
Understandably, such questions unnerve tradi-
tionalists. The good news is that museums hold
a trump card in our digital predicament. As life
shifts relentlessly onto screens and all thats solid
melts into air, the authentic experience of a live
encounter with a tangible objectin the company
of other living, breathing human beingsis be-
coming more sought after.
Art is best experienced first-hand, unmedi-
ated and unencumberedin context, with narra-
tive and history, says Jamie Zigelbaum, an artist
with tech credentials from the MIT Media Lab.
Just as you dont want Google glasses on your
face while having an intimate conversation with
a lover, you dont want some screen intervening
between you and a Rothko.
The fusion of technology and art will be-
come more seamless and satisfying as new ap-
plicationsaugmented reality in particularare
matched up in smart ways, so that technology
supports, rather than overwhelms, the encounter
with art. For Zigelbaum, that will happen when
digital innovators figure out how to weave con- PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF LOCAL PROJECTS
text into in-person direct experience, in transpar-
ent and minimal waysthat is, if we design them
properly.
This is the challenge of digital innovation in
museums. Next come more trials and failures,
surprises and disappointments, until technology
finally lives up to the nuance and complexity of
art. As for the Digital Museum of Digital Art, ver-
sion 3.0 just came out in November.