On the Origins of the Virtual Museum

Through the dials of your Teleset you will share in the ownership of the world’s great art treasures. (Frederick Kiesler)Introduction: the notion of the virtual museumThe notion “virtual museum” has been evoked so often in cybercultural discourses that it has lost all of its novelty value. The list of websites purportedly falling under this category is long, and growing. A 2002 Google search for “virtual museum” brought up more than 141,000 hits; by January 2009, the fi gure had grown to over 1,190,000. Such a “category” is understandably extremely vague, accommodating entries that have little to do with each other regarding both their institutional status and their interpretation of the word museum. There are “virtual museums” that might more conveniently be classifi ed as libraries or archives, although the cyberspace defi nitions of these are not absolutely clear-cut either. If “wired” virtual museums have a common denominator at all, it is a very general one, referring to almost any kind of collection of material (supposedly of “historical” or at least “cultural” value) put on general display on the Internet.