Abstract
Following the question proposed by Steven Conn, this study discusses the politics of museum under the digital context from two aspects: the first part will go through the origin and early development of museums as cabinets of curiosities in the colonial period, as the birth of the museum deeply intertwines the decolonisation agenda and the ongoing digitisation. As Geismar points out, the digital is a new kind of materiality with its own features and cannot be taken for granted as immaterial (Geismar, Museum object lessons for the digital age. University College London Press, 2018, xvii); affordance of this digital materiality and its influences on museums will also be scrutinised. When museums in the age of digital reproduction seem to evolve in the progress of making themselves more participatory and accessible, the dilemma of museums still exists, and the digital is not a panacea. Therefore, in the second part, I look into two key features of the physicality of museums that cannot be replaced by their digital counterparts: firstly, museum architectures and spatial arrangements inside the museums create the aura of museum-visiting experiences; secondly, educational programs designed for multisensory experiences based on physical objects provide an ethnographic approach to better understand collections and cannot be replaced by virtual interactions through a digital screen.
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Li, W. (2023). Do Museums Still Need Objects? Politics of Museums Reconsidered in the Digital Era. In: Tam, Kk. (eds) Sight as Site in the Digital Age . Digital Culture and Humanities, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9209-4_4
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