What if Google Took Over the Whitney? Art Project 2023 Imagines the Museum of the Future

Scoop.it watch Mar 12, 2014 1 Comment

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The fate of a certain Folk Art Museum has made headlines recently, with the midtown New York building being demolished by MoMA to make room for a new addition by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro. While the building is beloved by many, the realities of cultural institutions today have called into question the broader role and responsibility of museums—and of landmarked architecture—in the 21st century. Artists João Enxuto and Erica Love tackle this issue head-on in Art Project 2023, presented as a lecture at Shared Spaces, a symposium that addresses museums and social media. Their contribution is a speculative design fiction that imagines a quasi-dystopian future in which the Google Art Project consumes the Whitney Museum’s iconic Marc…

Hélène Herniou‘s insight:

“The project is really an extension of several trends in museums today—namely the Google Art project, but also the the increase of participatory exhibitions; technological advances in participation, such as real-time comments and the #artselfie and #museumselfie hashtags; and digital enhancements for shows, such as iPods, augmented reality, and QR codes as wall text.

Via a sophisticated, believable, and deadpan satire filtered through the lens of Google’s ever-expanding empire, the project offers a provocative vision of what a museum could be in the future, and how art will be displayed. It not only confronts the changing relevance of the institution, but also of architecture. Architects will not only need to address the de-materialization of the built environment, but also the increasingly digital experience of what buildings are meant to house. How will physical space accommodate these changes, and what will that look like?”

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Helene Herniou