Virtual Museum Tours:
A study on the shifting museological boundaries
Case : Presidential Residence of Atatürk (TC Cumhurbaskanlıgı Atatürk Müze Köskü)
http://www.tccb.gov.tr/common/sanaltur/tur/index.html
Aslıhan Günhan – 07.01.2013
Introduction
The established history of transformation of the museum as an intellectual institution
has come to a new step that triggers us to re-question the inherent characteristics and the
boundaries of these architectural and intellectual entities. This paper aims to make a
personal introduction to the rapidly developing field of virtual museum tours, and trace the
conceptual, spatial, and social changes that occur with the addition of this relatively new
adjective – the virtual.
The paper keeps its critical position against the virtuality of the museum. Werner
Schweibenz in his paper on the virtual museums claims that the term “virtual museum” is
oxymoron, and that there exists no accepted definition for it.1 It is thus a conscious decision,
to name the paper as “Virtual Museum Tours” rather than “Virtual Museums”, as I would like
to keep my critical attitude towards the museumliness of the virtual tours. I believe it still
requires a time to wait and see the total transformation and consequences of the intellectual,
spatial, and social mediums of the museums into a complete virtual state of being. Therefore
the paper will focus on the issue naming it a “virtual museum tour”, making a situated and
constructionist discussion.2
The Presidential Residence of Atatürk, Virtual Museum Tour
Politically, mnemonically, and historically one of the most important houses in Ankara,
The Presidential Residence of Ataturk goes beyond being a house; it is one of the reasons
why it is museumised. The paper will not discuss the house museum in detail, but only point
it as an important example that has an immense institutional background. This institutional
background is one of the reasons of having a virtual museum tour for the house museum, as
it is still not very common in most cases to have an interactive website. Yet, it is not the best
Werner Schweibenz,“ The “Virtual Museum”: New Perspectives For Museums to Present Objects and
Information Using the Internet as a Knowledge Base and Communication System” Knowledge Management und
Kommunikationssysteme, Workflow Management, Multimedia, Knowledge Transfer. Proceedings des 6.
Internationalen Symposiums für Informationswissenschaft (ISI 1998), Prag, 3. – 7. November 1998, pg. 185
1
2
The discussion is situated, as I still would preserve my architectural way of looking to the issue. As a part of the
course GRA 517, I am incorporating the discourse of new media into an architectural domain; I am aiming to
construct my own context of discussion. These epistemological terms and positions are the outcomes of the Arch
615 Course given at METU Department of Architecture PhD program.
website; it is indeed very modest though there is much potential to enrich the medium. The
website http://www.tccb.gov.tr/common/sanaltur/tur/index.html starts with a satellite view of
Çankaya, pointing out three important virtual environments, the administrative building, the
office of the adjutant general (başyaverlik), and the presidential residence. The virtual tour for
the Presidential Residence (house museum) is organized as the sequences of the rooms
inside the house. There are also four sections for the near environment, including the
entrance and the monumental tree. The rest of the sections are organized for the rooms,
providing interactive panoramic images of the spaces. The interface is organized according
to the user’s movement of the cursor on the screen to right or left, or up or down. Almost a
spherical image is available for the user to interfere.
Fig. 1 The Presidential Residence of Atatürk, Virtual Museum Tour 3
It is, as mentioned above, not a very inspiring and totally interactive medium. The only
information available to the users are the images. A similar yet a more information giving
example of this kind of a virtual environment is the “Study Room” (Çalışma Odam) series of
ntvmsnbc.4 The object of inquiry is a house again, yet it enables the user to search for certain
objects of desire, on which the owner of the house has some story to tell about. The
presidential residence holds a potential for such a virtual environment, as it is an immense
curiosity cabinet for the ones who would like to dwell upon.5
3
The Presidential Residence of Atatürk, the dining room, http://www.tccb.gov.tr/common/sanaltur/tur/index.html
Last Accessed: 05.01.2013
4
See: http://calismaodam.ntvmsnbc.com/
5
Reading the house museum as a curiosity cabinet was one of the major arguments of my master’s thesis.
See: Aslıhan Günhan, “From Houses to House Museums, Architectural Representation of Different Narrations”,
Unpublished M.Arch Thesis, METU Department of Architecture, Ankara : September 2011.
The Display Case, The Computer Screen
Almost all of the discussions on museums start with curiosity cabinets. Curiosity
cabinets, with the features they introduced, as being the spaces of the classification of
knowledge and its display, have been regarded as the origins of the contemporary
institutional collections and museums. The importance of the term for this study is that, the
curiosity cabinet holds two terms together; a curiosity which is the reason of display, and a
cabinet or a display case. The curiosity in Presidential Residence may be interpreted in
several ways, one being an important expression of civilized modern life in Early Republican
Period. The cabinet, or the display case is the spatiality of the house itself; the curiosity is
exhibited within its own cabinet. What this paper argues is that, in the case of virtual museum
tours, the display case becomes the computer screen. Even though the images are
panoramic, the virtual tour of Presidential Residence offers a 2-D screen on which the user
may interact. It maps the 3-D environment on a 2-D screen. It converts the haptic into optic.6
It unfolds the museum, and projects it on a 2-D screen. However, this two-dimensionality of
virtuality is still subjected to criticism. Beyond the discipline of museology, the materiality and
dimensionality of the screen was discussed in Jessica Helfand’s article “Dematerialization of
Screen Space”. She says that:
“Nowhere do we see the kind of variety, or depth, or topographical distinctions we might expect,
given the boundless horizons of Internet space… Nowhere do we see, or feel, or discover a
new sense of place, freed of the shackles of Cartesian logic- space that might ebb and flow,
expand and contract, dimensional space, elliptical space, new and unusual spaces”. 7
The projection of the 3-D architectural museum space onto the computer screen is
also problematized in the article “Digitization to Presentation – Building Virtual Museum
Exhibitions”. The authors claim that:
“Recent advances in web technologies as well as virtual and augmented reality present an
opportunity for museums to exhibit their resources online and therefore greatly expand the outreach of these cultural heritage institutions. However, most current museum websites take a 2-D
only approach, presenting the viewer with flat images of cultural artefacts with textual
description – in effect a web based catalogue”.8
The virtual museum tour of the Presidential Residence is located between a 3-D
interactive media and 2-D catalog of flat images. The rooms of the house are available for
the users to “visit”, and construct their own narrative routes; however it still lacks an
6
These two terms are originally used in Alois Riegl’s discussion on early antique and late antique styles.
Jessica Helfand, “Dematerialization of Screen Space”, Graphic Design Theory, Readings from the Field, ed. By
Helen Armstron, New York:Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.
7
Patel, M., White, M., Walczak, K., Sayd, P., “Digitisation to Presentation – Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions”
Vision, Video and Graphics, 2003, pg. 189
8
augmented interactive web site that would both culturally and museologically expand and
broadcast its virtues. Nevertheless, it provides a modest basis for the rest of the discussion.
Virtual museums: What and Why?
Keeping in the mind the criticisms on the limits of contemporary virtual museum
tour(s), I believe that it is important to understand the importance of the virtual museums,
what do they offer and in which aspects they change the conventional boundaries of
museums. In order to understand the innovations of the virtual museum, I need to briefly
mention Andre Malraux and The Museum without Walls, which is historically earlier than the
introduction of virtuality. Andre Malraux in his imaginary museum, brings together the
photographical reproductions of art works, enabling the subject to independently construct
his/her own narration. The photographical reproduction is seen as the tool of democratization
and free thought.9
Fig. 2Andre Malraux, The Museum Without Walls10
Hal Foster on the other hand in his essay “The Archive Without Museums” connects
the imaginary museum of Malraux to the virtual medium. He states that:
“If, according to Malraux, the museum guarantees the status of art and photographic reproduction
permits the affinities of style, what might a digital reordering underwrite? Art as image-text, as
Nezaket Tekin, “Andre Malraux’nun Hayali Müzesinin Çağdaş Sanat Politikaları Ve Güncel Sanat Projeleri
Açısından Önemi”, Unpublished Dissertation, Dokuz Eylül University, Institute of Fine Arts, İzmir: 2010, pg. 2
9
10
Andre Malraux, The Museum Without Walls, http://grupaok.tumblr.com/post/18739422082/andre-malraux-withthe-illustrations-for-le-musee Last Accesssed: 05.01.2013
info-pixel? An archive without museums? If so, will this database be more than a base of data, a
repository of the given?"11
The importance of the virtual museum lies at the intersection of what Malraux
suggests and what Foster claims; it should go beyond being a 2-D catalog, a data base, and
it should provide the user to interact, to create his/her own narration, own route, own walk
way. It is therefore the claim of the paper that the virtual reality12 shifts the major components
of the conventional museums. Werner Schweibenz states that “The virtual museum [the
museum without walls] opens itself to an interactive dialog with visitors offering them
connected digital objects and information that is readily accessible from outside the
museum”.13 Moreover, virtual museums are not obliged to imitate the physical space of the
museum itself, but they may offer other experiences that are not physically available, with the
use of 3-D models, sound, movies, videos, texts and so on. The authors of the “Digitisation to
Presentation – Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions” state that:
“With this richer data model of digital representation of museum collections, museums can now
build online virtual museums complete with interactivity in virtual or augmented reality
environments. Such a virtual museum affords further advantages in that it is possible to display
artefacts which would normally be inaccessible except to a select few; for example, exhibits which
cannot be made available due to their fragile nature or because of other preservation issues or
those which cannot be displayed simply due to a lack of physical space.”14
The virtual museum thus offers certain advantages, one of which is preservation as stated in
the quotation. It brings together the values of the information age, such as accessibility,
interactivity, speed and repertoire.15 Before discussing these changes under the three key
points of museology, namely archive, narration/route and observer, I would like to underline
two main important concepts that govern the changing key conventions in this
transformation.
The first term “rhizome”, as introduced by Deleuze and Guattari, suggests a nonhierarchical network system that may branch and re-connect at any point. It provides the
Hal Foster, “ The Archive without Museums” October, Vol. 77 (Summer, 1996), pp. 97-119.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/778962)
11
In Jonathan Taylor’s article, the three component of the virtual reality are given as: the computer system
enabling the interaction, a 3-D virtual environment, and the interaction of the user in real time. See: Jonathan
Taylor, “The Emerging Geographies of Virtual Worlds” Geographical Review, Vol. 87, No. 2, Cyberspace and
Geographical Space (Apr., 1997), pp. 172-192 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/216004)
12
Werner Schweibenz, “ The “Virtual Museum”: New Perspectives For Museums to Present Objects and
Information Using the Internet as a Knowledge Base and Communication System” Knowledge Management und
Kommunikationssysteme, Workflow Management, Multimedia, Knowledge Transfer. Proceedings des 6.
Internationalen Symposiums für Informationswissenschaft (ISI 1998), Prag, 3. – 7. November 1998. Pg. 191
13
Patel, M., White, M., Walczak, K., Sayd, P., “Digitisation to Presentation – Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions”
Vision, Video and Graphics, 2003, pg. 189
14
Hal Foster, “ The Archive without Museums” October, Vol. 77 (Summer, 1996), pg 112.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/778962)
15
connection of one point on the system to any other point, each time enabling multiplicity of
variations.16 Rhizome here is important as it models the activity of the observer, and thus
changes the mechanism of narrative construction. Although modest and primitive in this
sense, in the rhizomatic virtual museum tour of the Presidential Residence, the visitor, or the
observer has the chance to select different instances, and connect them in any possible way,
creating a unique narration in each time he/she interacts.
The second term is the statement of the author (myself); the architectural space, the
artefacts, and the various temporary exhibitions that are not capable of existing at the same
time, are projected to the virtual medium. Therefore, the archive is the archive of temporality;
the images in the virtual tour are images of images. In the article “Digitisation to
Presentation”, the three phases of display object in the virtual museums are named as: the
cultural object (the original document), the acquired/refined object (created by the museum
curator), and the media object (the display in the virtual medium).17 Considering the museum
as the medium of representation, the virtual museum tours construct a double
representation, with the introduction of the media object. As every representational
transformation, it enhances certain aspects, and eliminates others.
The Archive
Archives are one of the essential parts of museums. They facilitate researches,
provide documents from which the knowledge is extracted and displayed. Melike Akyol in her
M.Arch thesis, states that “The archival space appears as both an architectural space and a
conceptual system which operates within that space”.18 She also states that the archives are
spatial constitutions; and archive is a physical space that can be inhabited. Seen from this
view, a virtual may never offer an archive. However, the archive of the virtual museum is their
ability to bring together different temporal fragments. The virtual museum tour of the
Presidential Residence for example enables the user to “visit” the private temporary
exhibition halls. Therefore I claim that the archives of the virtual museum tours are
transforming the temporality of the museum into permanency. The virtual museum tours also
offer another advantage; they overcome the problem of corrosion or fragility of the
documents. Akyol states that:
“A collection comes into existence with materials from different sources, gathered together on a
unitary purpose. A collection can be of anything, whereas an archive is made up of documents
16
Ballantyne, Andrew, Deleuze and Guattari for Architects, New York: Routledge, 2007.
Patel, M., White, M., Walczak, K., Sayd, P., “Digitisation to Presentation – Building Virtual Museum Exhibitions”
Vision, Video and Graphics, 2003, pg. 189
17
Melike Akyol, “Photography as an Architectural Document: A Visual Archive for METU Campus”, Unpublished
M.Arch Thesis, METU Department of Architecture, Ankara: September 2012.
18
only with an archival quality. Archival quality depends on “provenance” and “enduring value” of a
document”.19
As it can be understood from the quotation, the documents of the virtual museum
archives are not bounded as the physical archives. Firstly, regarding each document in an
archive as provenance, the documents of the virtual archives are reproductions. Secondly,
the archival quality does not necessarily depend on the enduring value, as all the inputs of
the virtual archives may be permanently stored. Thus, the virtual archives are not one to one
projections of the physical archives; rather virtuality offers new dimensions and a new
definition of an archive. It breaks with the traditional time.20 As also stated by Akyol for the
spatial archives, the virtual archives also fit to the “heterotopia” definition of Michel Foucault.
“Formation of an archive serves to accumulate the different periods of time in one place. An
archive as a heterotopic space brings different “slices in time” together.”21 The slices of time,
that are connected in new ways to each other (similar to the photographic reproductions in
the imaginary museum of Andre Malraux, and the independent existence of rooms in
Presidential Residence virtual museum tour) gives the archive a new meaning in virtual
museum tours.
Narration/Museum Route
Narration in a museum can be simply epitomized as a spine holding the display
system together in order to manifest a coherent story or several stories. Paul Cobleand
David Bordwell state that, “narrative is often seen as a form of representation bound with
sequence, space and time”22, “but it is also regarded as structure, a particular way of
selecting, arranging and rendering story material in order to achieve specific time bound
effects on a perceiver”.23 Narration of the museum space brings the temporality of the
walk/route and the spatiality together. It controls the narration; it suggests a route, selects the
display objects and orders them. In the “Narrative Spaces” book, it is stated that “The
majority of exhibitions are collections of individual narrative fragments. These elements may
indeed have been staged coherently, but the principle of the walk opens up alternative ways
of seeing and ways of experiencing them.”24 The act of walk in the museum space is
19
Ibid. Pg. 52
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, translation by Jay Miskowiec, in Diacritics, Vol. 16, No.1. Spring, 1986,
p.24
20
Melike Akyol, “Photography as an Architectural Document: A Visual Archive for METU Campus”, Unpublished
M.Arch Thesis, METU Department of Architecture, Ankara: September 2012. Pg. 2
21
Paul Cobley, Narrative, (London:Routledge, 2001), 3, quoted by Sophia Psarra “Architecture and Narrative”
(London: Routledge, 2009), 2.
22
David Bordwell “Narration in the Fiction Film” London: Routledge pg. xi in Sophia Psarra, Architecture and
Narrative, The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning (London: Routledge 2009), 2.
23
24
H. Kossmann, S. Mulder, F. Den Oudsten, Narrative Spaces, On the Art of Exhibiting, Rotterdam: 010
Publishers, 2012, pg. 47
transformed in the virtual museum tour. The visitor, who experiences and connects narrative
fragments by walking, starts to interact and play25 with the virtual medium. It is no more the
footsteps, but rather the individual choices, clicks that the “visitor” or the “player” makes to
construct a unique narrative each time. Remembering the discussion on the rhizomatic
network, the interacting subject is given the ability of connecting any fragment to another,
creating a multiplicity of networks. The narration thus starts to lose its autonomy; the
narrative fragments are given but the interacting subject is the one who is going to construct
different narrations.26
The Observer/The Player
The last part of the three-partite conceptualization of the museum is the observer, and
how it transforms with the virtual shift. The critical museum observer (the visitor) is a part of
the sociality created in the architectural space. Hal Foster states that “the subject is the
“deposit of a social relationship”, and often is the principal object of analysis as well”. 27 The
narration of the museum, the walk ways, the temporary exhibitions are designed according to
the user behaviors in the museum. The relation of the visitor to the curator, or the author is
also a well-defined relation in the museum. It is stated that:
“In narrative space the author and the audience share a special relation. The maker brings an
environment to life where the visitor then finds himself. He or she enters a space-time
constellation of material means that have been packed with narrative potential by the maker. The
expressive power of such spatial arrangement will only unfold when the visitor takes the time to
pay attention and starts participating. Only then can the staging take off.”28
Then what does change in the virtual transformation of the museum? Besides the
archive, and the narration, the position of the observer also changes. Virtual museum tours –
for the time being – do not offer a social environment. From now on, the visitor is not a critical
observer; rather s/he becomes a player, an active constructor of the narrative segments. The
relation of the author to the visitor also loosens. Werner Schweibenz says that “…mass
media people have in common: active dozing -a purposeless, planless activity that looks for
gaining and maintaining permanent stimulation/diversion.”29 The interaction in the virtual tour
“Play”as a concept in virtual medium had been inspired from the discussions during the course GRA517 by
Ersan Ocak.
25
26
If for instance, in Presidential Residence, the user starts from the temporary exhibition hall, grasping the
knowledge there, continues with the library or the study room, may construct a different narration – more on the
intellectual basis of the period- , than starting from the kitchen and continuing with the bathrooms and constructing
a narration on the hygenic systems of the early republican period.
Hal Foster, “ The Archive without Museums” October, Vol. 77 (Summer, 1996), pg. 103.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/778962)
27 27
28
H. Kossmann, S. Mulder, F. Den Oudsten, Narrative Spaces, On the Art of Exhibiting, Rotterdam: 010
Publishers, 2012, pg. 24
Werner Schweibenz, “ The “Virtual Museum”: New Perspectives For Museums to Present Objects and
Information Using the Internet as a Knowledge Base and Communication System” Knowledge Management und
29
is more planless, and it is a free choice learning. The meaning-making is left to the visitor;
the author starts to disappear whereas the visitor or the player starts to construct different
scenarios, bringing together different narrative segments.
Conclusion
Museums, as an architectural space, as a research institution, as social and
intellectual agents of the society, are still subjects of academic research. There are various
important concepts to be discussed under the main topic of museums, such as curiosity
cabinets, archives, display cases, labels, preservation, narration, and the visitor. This paper
has intentionally started from the curiosity cabinets and display cases, in order to emphasize
that the physical dimension of the cabinet is transformed into the virtual environment, and
that the curiosity as the main motivation of the museum is archived, narrated and visited in a
different way. The museumliness of the virtual museum tours is still problematic; therefore
the paper had intentionally names this medium as “virtual tour”. The non-hierarchical
rhizomatic character and potential of the virtual medium is emphasized; and the virtual
museum tour is conceptualized as a double representation. The modest web-site of the
Presidential Residence had been chosen to discuss the sub-topics through examples. As a
web-site, it has the potential to store and render accessible different temporary exhibitions
that occur at different times. As it offers a room-to-room structure, the visitor can break free
from the conventional museum tour that is indicated with red carpets, and independently visit
the spaces, or play in the environment. I believe that the conceptualization of the virtual
museums has still a lot to be contributed; yet the existing examples are very modest in the
sense of creating an interactive non 2-D medium for the players.
Kommunikationssysteme, Workflow Management, Multimedia, Knowledge Transfer. Proceedings des 6.
Internationalen Symposiums für Informationswissenschaft (ISI 1998), Prag, 3. – 7. November 1998. Pg. 187.
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