Networked Multi-sensory Experiences: Beyond Browsers on the Web and in the Museum

The defining characteristic of the digital era is the potential that it brings for “real-time” interconnection between anything that can be measured, expressed, or controlled digitally. The World Wide Web stems from one type of digital interconnection: well-defined standards linking a “browser” with remote machines presenting information to be browsed. Yet digital technology enables more than just new approaches to presentation, browsing, and searching. It can create dynamic connections between different physical spaces and across sensory boundaries, and provide experiential interfaces for interaction that move beyond the mouse, keyboard, and screen. It can relate the physical space of the museum to the virtual space of the Web for both individual and group experiences.

Using our past media-rich installation and performance work as a reference point, this paper will present a vision of digital technology for the museum as a dynamic connection-making tool that defines new genres and enables new experiences of existing works. The authors’ recent works include the interactive media-rich installations Time&Time Again… (with Lynn Hershman, commissioned for the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Germany), Invocation & Interference (premiered at the Festival International d’Arts Multimédia Urbains, France), Behind the Bars (premiered at the Central American Film and Video Festival, Nicaragua), and …two, three, many Guevaras (commissioned for the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles), as well as the recent UCLA performance collaborations Fahrenheit 451, Macbett, and The Iliad Project.