The recently opened Adobe Museum of Digital Media — an entirely online institution — has now begun to feature exhibitions that highlight the impact of digital media on culture and design. Soon to open is an exhibit from John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, featuring Arts + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC) an exploration of how relationships between the physical and the digital can create art.
During an exhibition preview shown within the virtual museum, Maeda explained that:
Computers let us imagine digitally what we once could only validate by handcraft in physical form [...] the infinite malleability and reusability of bits have forever changed the creative process. But […] digital tools have relied on many of the original tools and media used by artists in the pre-digital world.
Hosted by a leading thinker in the design world, the experience of viewing this kind of exhibit is supposed to make us think further about what it means to place in a work in a museum, virtual or not, and what that positioning will mean as designers begin to craft digital experiences rather than physical ones. We would normally embed a video preview here in this post, but there’s something to be said for having the imposed limitation of having to experience this exhibit within a specific online space — just as though you were actually walking through the delineated space a real building. It’s a bit counterintuitive in a world where links and videos are shared and distributed freely. But perhaps it’s the classification itself of the experience as a museum exhibition that gives the designers a framework for creating new kinds of digital experiences and social meeting grounds.
Adobe Museum of Digital Media
[via designboom]
A bit of expanded thought on the above:
I grew up with the idea burned into my head that you can't force anyone to think anything, that ultimately people are responsible for themselves. The subtext of the idea is that try as you might, if someone is making a bad decision, you have to let them make it, and they will learn from it.
On a certain level that's something I still believe, but I've since revised the scope of the idea to something like "you can't *directly* make people think anything." I've started to understand that what you *can* do instead is create environments within which only certain kinds of decisions are made.
A quick lateral jump: some of you may be familiar with the National Forensic League's policy/cross-examination debate, most known to those familiar with high school debate competitions. Within these structured debates, of the handful of methods of attack that one may employ against their opponent, the point of definition is generally considered the most base and least substantive. I get the sense this sentiment carries to the public in general ("you're just arguing over semantics").
I say all that because I consider classification to be one of the key methods of creating cognitive environments. Which is an abstract way of saying that names and definitions are seemingly superfluous but in fact they change everything. They have the power to shatter cultural conventions, as I allude to in the article above, drawing on the way people think about the difference between websites and museums.
