Art Online
How significant are the creative possibilities of going online?
William Mitchell
In general, then, cultural institutions that add value to high levels of presence will be the ones to survive - in physical form - in the city of the future… they will concentrate on those aspects of their physical manifestation, while carrying out their remaining functions more cost-effectively using lower levels of presence. One the one hand, they will create intense foci of hands-on, face-to-face experience. On the other, they will employ digital electronic means to deliver access to large highly dispersed audiences to broker information on an unprecedented scale.
William Mitchell & Oliver Strimpel `There and not there' Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing Peter Denning and Bob Metcalfe (ed.) New York: Copernicus, 1997, p. 258
See also City of Bits
| High Presence | Low Presence | This table contrasts different effects of exhibiting art in traditional (high presence) or electronic (low presence) forms (taken from William Mitchell & Oliver Strimpel `There and not there' Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing Peter Denning and Bob Metcalfe (ed.) New York: Copernicus, 1997, p. 256 |
| High cost | Low cost | |
| Fixed location | Flexible locations | |
| Fixed opening hours | Flexible opening hours | |
| Limited numbers of visitors | Potentially unlimited numbers of visitors | |
| Navigation on foot | Hyperlink navigation | |
| Limited to on-site collection | Can combine resources to dispersed sites | |
| Aura of the original | Aura is lost | |
| True scale | Variable scale | |
| Unlimited detail | Limited detail | |
| Group experience | Individual experience | |
| Contextualised | Decontextualised |
Home pages are an electronic form of advertising.
Bill Gates The Road Ahead 1995