In 1947, theorist and writer André Malraux conceived the figure of the imaginary museum to address how photography could extend the art institution’s operational powers. The photographic image, generously transportable and reproducible, would constitute an ideal medium for the collection, the study, the comparison and, above all, the inscription of objects in the history of art – a medium more efficient than the objects themselves. Dilated by the artifices of technical reproducibility, the museum would grow simultaneously inward and outward and become able to comprehend things and reach places that would have been previously impossible for it.
Behind this idea, there is an expectation that the modern museum, more than a place to store treasures, constitutes an organizing principle. In Douglas Crimp’s criticism, the museum appears as a Foucauldian dispositif, designed to provide order and containment for cultural forms by means of reproducing discourses and regimes of display. As implied by the title of the English translation of Malraux’s essay – the museum without walls – there is nothing preventing this device from getting detached from its own building and nevertheless continue to function. In fact, at the height of cognitive capitalism, when social apparatus transition to diffuse control regimes, it is not surprising that many museums also need to do so. The institution’s connection to its building persists almost as a metonymic trace.
The global pandemic has accelerated this disintegration of museums within digital networks. Perhaps what we are seeing today on the internet is the imaginary museum in full swing, shuffling and rewriting our aesthetic repertoires by virtue of pure cognitive deluge. Established institutions, unprepared for this game, lose space to image-sharing platforms as arenas for artistic legitimation and dispute over historical narratives. In this context, artist Brad Troemel underscores the emergence of a “post-taste” art market, grounded not in the judgment of specialists but in the affective investment of fandoms. The modern museum, unable to impose its hierarchies over online information systems, allows itself to be captured by the populist drive of social media. In the interest of renewing its own authority, the museum aspires to become a brand or to camouflage itself as an instagrammable setting.
The moment requires museums to rethink themselves. How can the institution remain mobile and socially relevant in the face of an overabundance of “content” at our disposal? Could the internet be mobilized for the renewal of the museum’s capacity for creating dialogue and producing the commons? Could the newly-increased institutional porosity be used to manufacture more transversal ways of connecting with audiences, governing collections, and acting upon the world? Is it possible for the museum to cooperate with other communication platforms in order not only to resist, but also disarm the memetic violence over minor, dissident, and foreign cultures? Is the museum capable of constituting itself as a frequency modulator, able to slow down informational tachycardia to a level that allows meaningful participation of other human and non-human actors instead of overwhelming them?
In short, how can the museum simultaneously adhere to the plurality of networks while configuring a space of resistance against the corporate whims of their algorithms?
The Museum Without Walls project seeks to explore these questions by taking inspiration from the recent reopening of the Museu de Arte do Espírito Santo Dionísio del Santo (MAES), after a long renovation that recovered elements of the museum’s original architecture while making its exhibition space much more susceptible to its surroundings. As a literal museum without walls, with its windows open to the city of Vitória’s downtown, MAES inspires us to probe ways in which the art institution operates, both within and without their physical buildings, as systems for representation and discourse.
On this website, visitors will find a small collection of virtual reality museum projects. Here, this term refers not only to immersive image technologies but also to everything that persists as a possibility and a potential underneath institutional regulations. On the one hand, there are proposals that indeed idealize the museum space via computer-simulated, interactive, and sometimes fantastic environments. On the other, there are proposals that engage directly with more conventional and specific institutional forms in order to expand their scope of public action. Finally, in the middle, there are a series of audio guides, augmented reality filters, and digital simulations that make use of MAES’ untethering from offline realities as a pretext to multiply its media existence.
Together, these three modes of expressing the virtual seek to account for the imaginary character of the museum as nothing less than radical, as defined by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis: as the magma that constitutes all social institutions, which is also the fuel that allows us to recreate them in the face of the emergence of other worlds.