The Fourth Wall

With the advent of the World Wide Web, new art forms are being created where the vehicle bringing the art form to the visitor, via a small and intimate screen can be accessed equally well from within and without the museum walls and are in fact accessed from a remote computer far beyond the fourth wall. In 1996. Udi Aloni exhibited Re-U-Man" at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. "Re-U-Man", an interactive digital presentation that had been conceptually devised for a web-site: http://www.re-u-rnan.com With virtual exhibitions on-line, original digital art flowing into our personal computers at the click of a mouse and now entire installations becoming available beyond the fourth wall, why does the visitor need to even come into the real museum?These and similar questions are already being faced by curators who have the responsibility of presenting similar works to the museum public, but what is being challenged here is not the validity of these new art forms or the vehicle imperative to their presentation but the gallery space of the museum, as defined by the curator - real or virtual.