Paper short abstract:

The presentation will be focused on a series of aspects of the invention of the future museum from the past perspective historicising convergence of museums, technologies, and imagination beyond the museum practices through 19-20th centuries.

Paper long abstract:

Thinking about a virtual museum today, we can easily imagine a museum’s website with guided tours over the digitised spaces (e.g. Uffizi Gallery), an endless gallery of beautiful paintings in ultra-high resolution (e.g. Night Watch in Rijksmuseum), or it can be an immersive experience simulated in the rich environment of sounds, visual surrounding, imitation of the characteristics of the physical space (e.g. Virtual Dunhuang Cave). However, the museum of the future is still not created but can be imagined and enforced with insights, ideas, inventions, technological experiments, and their advancement. The presentation will be focused on a series of aspects of invention of the future museum from the past perspective historicising convergence of museums, technologies, and imagination beyond the museum practices. They refer to innovative experiments in the museums and their utopian visions, creating alternative institutions aimed to engage with cultural heritage in 19 - early 20th centuries (e.g. the Institute of Visual Instruction by John C. Dana). Another example of inventing the future comes from arts and is exposed in designing the imaginary museums in non-fiction, shaping the concept of the imaginary museums by futurists in 1970-1980es, and imagining the future technologies in art & cinema (e.g. the animation film ‘Closed Monday’) and envisaging how the ‘doomsday machines’ (or computers) become an essential part of museums.