The virtual museum is not simply a museum in virtual space

• It follows that the virtual museum is a collection of virtual objects and the linkages between them.
• But what are those objects?
• We cannot assume the objects in the virtual museum are limited to the objects in the physical museum: if nothing else, the stories which explain those objects will themselves be objects in the virtual museum.
• Both “collection objects” and “catalogue entries” are represented in the same digital fashion. The catalogue entries, in other words, are objects in the virtual museum.
• We do not carry a catalog as we browse the virtual museum… “collection” and “catalog” merge.

The virtual museum is its own virtual catalog.

• And this is because the digital democratization of information which obtains on the web renders the “art object” and the “art-historical text” functionally equal.
• In fact, “digital democratization” allows for the expansion of presentable content to include not only visual and art historical materials on an equal footing, but also all manner of other texts, the world of literature and drama, architectural renderings, mathematical analogs and explanations, sounds and musical items…
• Thus the virtual museum need not and should not limit itself to physical objects [eg pictures, sculptures] and associated texts, but can and should contain linkages to other arts and modes of representation [eg musical, literary, historical, scientific and mathematical expressions].
• Furthermore, the virtual museum need not limit itself to the objects in its sponsor museum’s holdings, but may also contain linkages to the holdings of other museums: indeed — and importantly — web-based “frames” make this possible without the viewer leaving the originating web site.
• Not just the museum catalogue and reference library, but also the world’s other museums, private collections, text libraries, record libraries and databases are all available as reference points for the items in the collection.
• Linkage, in other words, is the “new” in our context, while objects and their stories are the given.
• We do not move from room to room but from link to link as we browse the virtual museum.

The virtual museum can be conceived as an ellipse with one focus in the originating collection and the other in world cultural history…

• The “virtual proximity” of other bodies of knowledge on the net and web invites the inclusion of multiple reference points outside the collection: effectively, the museum as we know it transforms into a repository of world culture whose special focus is the collection:
• The virtual museum is thus no longer archeologically or artistically based: it encompasses all forms of expression.
• The museum becomes an expression of cultural totality.

The floorplan of the virtual museum is an n-dimensional graph of nodes and links.

• The essence of the difference between the museum and the virtual museum is this: objects in the virtual museum are “next to” a far larger number of other objects than objects in the physical museum.
• The system of linkages inherent in the structure of the Internet and the World Wide Web expands our concept of the museum by making possible a bewildering variety of new “throughways” between and among the items displayed, and “outside” the museum: thus raising new problems and possibilities in sequencing the experience of the “visitor”.
• What happens as a result is that linkage itself blossoms from a narrow and largely sequential business into a multiplex affair.
• The juxtaposition of one artefact with another explodes in an unimaginable freedom, and a system of constraints must therefore be imagined to limit and lead the viewer — through a “garden of forking paths” — to a desired and appropriate outcome.

To understand this is to make a virtue of the virtual … and a cathedral of the museum.

II

The virtual museum is not simply a museum in virtual space, but the virtual presentation of whatever the museum-as-archetype has been or will be in the labyrinth of human vision.

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