Art and Technology

I got to attend a wonderful conference in Vienna, and I have to say it was the perfect start into 2019.

“Das Kunstmuseum im Digitalen Zeitalter” (The Art Museum in the Digital Age) was organized by the Belvedere and held in the museum’s beautiful Blickle Cinema.

Welcome slide on the screen in the vintage Belvedere Blickle Cinema. A laptop on a speakers desk, the stage is empty.

The vintage Blickle Cinema in the Belvedere museum is an amazing venue for a conference.

The two conference days were packed with interesting talks and discussions. While Art Education/Outreach doesn’t seem to fit in with my work, it was a great conference for me. My research is, at its core, exploring how people creatively use new technologies to communicate, build communities and structure their everyday lives – and this is exactly what this conference was about.

Topics like representation, accessibility and inclusion were also discussed throughout the whole conference. It was a joy to see how museums incorporate the internet and digital tools with the traditional visitor experience.

Conference Presentation, the slide shows a tumblr site dedicated to "Ugly Renaissance Babies", it is presented as a museum hack.

New Technologies also means new ways of playing and interacting with a space.

This second picture made me smile, it came from a presentation about visitors “hacking” the museum.

The overall message in the talks was clear: While it is important to implement stable long-term plans and tools for, it never hurts to get creative in order to engage with visitors and perhaps even a virtual audience.