Of all the articles featured in the special issue, McCarthy's is probably the most structurally complex, and the one which can best be generalised above and beyond the antipodean context. As she describes the 'architecture of interiority' of the Auckland Museum, Te Papa and the Otago Museum, her concept of architectural space as re-negotiating the 'interiority' of the museum and the visitor can easily be seen as a characteristic of all contemporary museums: all over the world the physical space of the museum is under redescussion, often finding itself more and more accomodating functions traditionally tangential to the museum (rest, entertainment, education, personal growth of the independent kind). While, on the outside, this dynamic seems to sprout a new museum as a sort of mall or cafè-cum-collection and, consequently, a visitor that enjoys the museum with the same thoughtless fun of an amuseument park or shopping district, the shift can be just as exciting: the museum's collections come to be part of an economy and a sociality that is larger than the museum itself, and better ingrained in the highly multitasking and dynamic 21st century subject, with relative empowering or destructive potential. Whichever side one might take, it seems clear enough that the museum as a 'boundary' of that which is in and that which is out is undergoing monumental changes.
What struck me as curious, however, is the oddly secondary place that, very often, the topic of the 'online museum' takes when the discussion is on the museum as a space. This seems to happen also in McCarthy: while she might be excused for not mentioning the online museum at all, since her accent is firmly on the physical, she does dedicate to the topic a few paragraphs. First, a somewhat dismissive branding of 'a twodimensional screen reality mistaken for exterior spatial depth', followed later on by a more nuanced assessment which acknowledges that computer mediation of a gallery, through flow and immersion, can ride a subtler mean between interiority and exteriority. Nonetheless, the experience of the online museum remains, even spatially, subordinate to the coordinates of interiority and exteriority established by the physical museum: if the latter constructs a certain perception of space and interaction as exterior or deep, that is the perception that the former will have to contend with, even as it vies with a completely different channel and substantial reality.
The result of this subordination as inplicit in McCarthy's article, coexisting with her thorough account and critique of phsyical spaces, led me to think: are her concepts of museum interority, boundary and spatial construction of experience applicable also to the online museum? In order to test my hypothesis, I took one of her examples - the Auckland Museum - and went as basic as I could: looked at its online presence, and compared. As one of the added difficulties of the online museum is its synchronic multi-locativity (aka many web sites that make up a presence) I took into consideration the official site, the Facebook page, the Twitter page, YouTube channel, Pinterest and LinkedIn - basically, all that is available.
The Auckland War Memorial Museum, or simply Auckland
museum (Tamaki Paenga Hira).
MacCarthy sets out by briefly investigating the architectural history of the museum, addressing one aspect that definitely seems to be lost in translation when one speak of a museum's online presence. This invokes, however, at least two questions: first, is there a formal relationship between the museum's architectural forms, and its online presence's visual and structural qualities? if not, where does, for example, the museum's web site take its formal layout from? Beyond a perhaps appropriate yet somewhat ham-fisted parallel between the structural dynamics engendered by the window metaphor, there seems to be little shared between the museum's physical and online presence, architecturally speaking. It is, in this case, more appropriate to look at other sites as informing the visuals of the Auckland Museum's page. One starting point could be the structure of the museum's own Pinterest page: the use of free- floating windows placed on a sort of virtual pin-board is replicated in the museum's web site where, in place of the traditional site structure that sees sub-domains as sub-clauses, a more horizontal approach makes use of tagged units of informations (exhibit, event, concert...) displayed in a sort of cascade that resembles not only Pinterest's structure, but also quasi-blog Tumblr. In the end, at least in the case of the Auckland Museum's page, we see the formation of a consistent digital aesthetic that, however, has little to do with the architecture of the museum (this holds true if we consider the building or the collections, in the latter case even more as many museum displays seem to have drifted away from the 'pinboard' aeshtetic of Pinterest in the first place).
Auckland Museum's Web page
Auckland Museum's Pinterest page
MacCarthy then addresses what she dubs 'museological interiority': which is the internal cohesion of the museum as a unit, informed and upkept by all those museum environments, staff, policies, assumptions that collectively make up the 'spatial and ideological directions of inwardness and togetherness' that generates the sense of place of being in a museum. This museological interiority is always contained and contaminated by the exteriority, that which is not museum: external knowledge, the daily life and activities of visitors and even staff, the wider political, economical and social implications of the museum existing within larger society. The museum exists, therefore, at a perennially liminal stage, always busy renegotiating its interiority and relationship with exteriority.
While it would take a long time and a large amount of resources if one wanted to research 'online museum interiority' from an organisational level, there is one way in which the online museum would seem unmatched in generating interiority and negotiating exteriority: that is, where visitors are involved. The social media revolution has given both the means and the ideological bases for unprecedented inclusion of the visitor in the museum's inner workings and economy, mostly through digital means: these range from sharing to tagging through commenting, and more.
The Auckland Museum employs various instruments that extend the museum's interiority into the realm of the online visitor's daily browsing activities, and vice versa. As often seems to be the case, on the museum's web site interaction and interfacing are visually marginalised in favor of showcasing museum content, and one has to scroll all the way down the page to find links to the museum's instruments for visitor interaction, mainly the museum's Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube pages. On these platforms, interaction seems to be relatively passive, with little user generated content: posts /videos /tweets are liked /shared but, overall, little visitor response seems to actually take place, and little non-museum content is generated. In this sense, one could hypothesise that, while the online museum provides many theoretical channels for generating and renegotiating museum interiority with relation to the public, this potential remains mostly unrealised; this could be due to a variety of factor requiring in-depth research, though I suspect the inherently performative aspect of going to a museum might raise the visitor's stakes in bringing exteriority into the museum, sparking non-normative uses of the museum as a meeting space of interiority-exteriority (i.e. using the museum as a meeting place / lobby / bathroom stop / bar).
MacCarthy then addresses museum collections and display as providing 'museological interiority its specific glue and the ability to determine the boundary conditions, coherency, self‑sufficiency, and discrete identity of each collection.' The extent to which online display of collections can engender museological interiority (in these terms or others) is a hotly contested topic in museum studies: what is the relationship between physical collections and online galleries? is there, and should there be, an ontological and epistemological hierarchy between the two? In the case of the Auckland Museum, but also many other museums across the world, the impossibility of applying MacCarthy's category to the online presence is due to lack rather than complexity: the body of works that are accessible digitally is simply not enough to form the 'critical mass' necessary in order to delve into more subtle issues of representation, indexicality and immersion. When barely ten or so artifacts are sufficiently visible online, out of hundreds of thousands, any possible interiorising power of a digital collection does not have the necessary quantitative support to realise itself, positively or negatively.
In the end, my very preliminary observations suggest that, notwithstanding some exemplary global outliers, the online presence of museums such as the Auckland Museum remains highly problematic and, in the end, irreducible to its physical counterpart's standards and parameters as formulated by MacCarthy and others: this is not always due to the inherent complexities of the digital realm (not always due to a surplus of the digital over the physical), but can sometimes be attributed to some ongoing and hardly resolved lacks of many museum's digital presences. It is arguably difficult for the museum and the visitor to interiorise digital collections and display that do not exist; it remains to be seen if 'thick' collection display tools, such as crowdsourcing games and Google Art Project, have a potential to resolve these issues. In this sense, MacCarthy's assessment of the online museum as 'a twodimensional screen reality mistaken for exterior spatial depth' might, sadly, not be too off the mark.
All quotes from MacCarthy (2006).
Auckland Museum web site: http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/
