EVA2001, Glasgow, July, 2001 Susan Hazan, Doctoral
Student, Media and Communication Studies http://www.shazan.com/flaneur _____________________________________________________________________ The Virtual Aura and the Digital Flâneur
Abstract As Walter Benjamin described in his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", the role of art in society and the notion that art has become modified through mechanical reproduction has engaged not only artists, but also curators and the museum public. Benjamin embraced the severing of the quasi-mystical 'aura' from the original as a potentially liberating phenomenon, both for the reproduction of works of art and for the art of film, whereby making works of art widely available, introducing new forms of perception in film and photography and allowing art to move from private to public, from the elite to the masses. While the loss of the aura for Benjamin represented new possibilities, what was forfeited in this process, were the 'aura' and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition. Using three models of museum web-sites each with their own metaphor for the traditional museum, I will evaluate the different ways in which museums are responding to life on the net. In the first model, the virtual museum metaphor is explored in MUVA, El Pais Virtual Museum of Art (http://www.diarioelpais.com/muva2/). The El Pais site exemplifies a virtual construction, which maintains a tenuous base in reality. For the second model I have selected a hybrid gallery and net-art project, Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, (http://telematic.walkerart.org/), a traveling show, including some 40 works by 25 artists that include the real, the virtual and the hybrid all rolled up in one. To continue in the search for the elusive aura, and the spirit of the art experience that evokes wonder, I will turn to the Geist Project, (http://www.mediascot.org/geist) by Colin Andrews of the New Media Group, Scotland, which presents an eerie web-site involving ghosts. While post-modernists are always lamenting the loss of something or another, we perhaps might want to think about what might be gained in this equation. Not only are we witness to a proliferation of compelling content driven museum web sites, we might also welcome the emergence of new and perhaps enchanting cultural phenomena, the virtual aura. Key Words: Benjamin, Baudelaire, aura, Foucault, Lash & Urry, Giddens.
Paper "The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito (Baudelaire: 1964). How easy it is to get lost in the pull of the vortex. At the click of a button we are transported, effortlessly into the electronic infinite. At once at home yet everywhere, digital flâneurs take to the web as fish to water yet at the same time remain invisible. In much the same way as we may watch a film or a television program in a state of distraction, we act as an examiner, but an absent-minded one. As we sit in front of the monitor, and connect to the dancing images in front of us, we allow electronic images and sounds to penetrate the screen, and to seep into our inner world. In post-modern, wired society, the on-line museum brings the virtual image from remote locations into our foreground, "amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite" while at the same time allowing the spectator to remain hidden from the world. Material objects in the concrete museum are replaced by electronic surrogate, liberated and dispelled from their rhizome and distributed in electronic packets to remote locations into a networked world. A yawning abyss opens up between the visitor and the museum validating the anonymity of the museum visit. How easy it has become to see without being seen. Have we all become digital flâneurs in a world of the virtual aura?
The Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin, writing against the backdrop of the Nazi era in 1936, in his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", described the role of art in society and the way that art had become modified, through mechanical reproduction. Benjamin embraced the severing of the quasi-mystical 'aura' from the original as potentially liberating phenomena. By making works of art widely available, it opened new forms of perception in film and photography, and the accessibility of art could move from private to public, from the elite to the masses. While at the same time questioning the need for authenticity, Benjamin welcomed the close-ups and slow motion of the moving image in that they opened up new values for art that were no longer so dependant on cult values or ritual. Thus Benjamin's' work was seminal in bringing into focus the notion of art as politic. This, insight according to Benjamin meant that 'For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual (Benjamin: 1935, 1992, 218)'. What had been forfeited in this process, were the 'aura' and the authority of the object, scarred, yet also embellished with the patina of time and prismatic with the marks of human endeavor. It was the aura that contained within it the value of cultural heritage and tradition. Even though loss of the aura for Benjamin meant the loss of the original, the transformation or liberation of the art object to the ordinary represented a gain. For Benjamin, what had then replaced the original was the illusion of the moving image and duplication of the photograph. For post-modern society, it has become the digital image. Benjamin celebrated the magical aura that had been forfeited, as a liberating phenomenon, but in his celebration, one can't help wondering if there is still a need for a space of wonder or enchantment in a technological world. Perhaps society still craves for such a space, now more than ever and seeks it in extraordinary places, such as in the museum. If so, then can this lost aura be compensated for, or reconstituted in any way in a virtual environment in a networked society? Click to Go! The speed that we are able to access remote museums and pull them up side by side on the screen is alarmingly immediate. We do this at the click of a mouse, and in a nano-instant of time. This is a far cry from the turtle-walking flâneurs of the Parisian arcades who proudly walked around, in turtle-time through the labyrinth of the inner city. The digital flâneur sees the world and is at the same time at the center of the world, lost in the same anonymity that the arcade flâneurs favored. Scott Lash and John Urry, (1994), argue that in the wake of organized capitalism, the flows of objects, (goods, capital, money, communications, commodities) as well as subjects (labor, immigrants, tourists) are accelerating in ever wide-ranging trajectories. According to Lash and Urry, this has disturbing implications for society. As social relations are 'distanciated', it 'compresses' time and space, and is leading to an emptying out of both subjects and objects. This accelerated mobility causes objects to become disposable and to decline in significance, while social relationships are emptied of meaning (Ibid. 1994). In one click we can access an entire museum. We are able in one glimpse to visualize in miniature all of its multi-functions represented on its home page. While there is no doubt that this provides efficient and meaningful information for the remote visitor about a potential visit, but should we query what kind of experience the visitor gains when he or she views the digital collections, represented as tiny, two dimensional, electronic reflections of the original work? Could we conclude that this media is orientated exclusively towards information and interpretation, or could there be more to it? Anthony Giddens, (1994) argues that in post modern society there has been a separation of time and space and their recombination in forms which permit precise time-spacing "zoning" of social life; consequently causing the disembedding of social systems (Giddens, 1990). Giddens points to this severing of time as the cause of place becoming increasingly phantasmagoric in that locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences that are, in fact, quite distant from them (Ibid. 1990). Giddens emphasizes that, "What structures the locale is not simply that which is present on the scene; the "visible form" of the locale but what is present is also the relations concealed in the distance, and it is the remote relations that is determining the nature of the local (Ibid. 1990)". For example, the city with numbered houses based on boulevards and the grid structure, in which the high street has its Benettons, McDonalds, and Nexts, is more abstract, more emptied out than the pre-modern city of winding streets and numberless houses. The remotely accessed database of museum collections seems to offer a similarly disembedded experience. The vast distance covered in mere nano-seconds, acts to dissolve the concrete-ness of the real museum in front of our eyes, resulting in an emptying out of the traditional visitor/museum experience and the disembedding of cultural systems reflected in the museum. This disembedding, according to Giddens, is caused both by the circulation of symbolic tokens, such as money, as well as by our putting our trust in the expert systems, the experts who have contributed their expertise with their expert mechanisms and environments on our behalf. In a world that has become so complex for us to navigate alone, we look to doctors, lawyers, and architects to act on our behalf. All human beings routinely "keep in touch" with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it (Ibid. 1990), however the ground below our feet is constantly shifting as new information supplants old knowledge and new knowledge replaces new paradigms. Giddens reminds us "no knowledge under conditions of modernity is knowledge in the 'old' sense, where 'to know' is to be certain (Ibid. 1990). For Giddens, in conditions of modernity, this is perceived as pathological, where the social world can never form a stable environment in terms of the input of new knowledge about its character and functioning. Our sense of helplessness in being unable to take on all this knowledge requires us to rely on others. This placing of trust in expert systems acting on our behalf, according to Giddens is one of the causes of our becoming dislocated or dis-embedded from our own environment. Living in-Vitro In post-modern society, our participation in the public sphere, understanding of current events, entertainment and life long education have come to depend more and more not only on expert systems acting on our behalf, but also on mediated resources rather than first hand, getting our boots dirty experience. The second hand, virtual narratives either through television or digital interaction cause us not merely to reflect on these experiences but to actively construct our daily lives through them. We cannot be physically present at every national celebration, and we do not want to be present in a war-zone. We are content to let the camera be our eye and the anchorman our mouthpiece. Where much of our life is lived through mediated rather than through first hand experience, much of our daily interaction is becoming more vitreous than visceral. Over the last 40 years, most of the world's populations have spent countless hours watching the world in vivo, in vitro on screens in their living rooms, bedrooms and classrooms. Content to watch live sporting events from the comfort of an armchair; we receive the daily fix of news on the allotted time slot and as faithful voyeurs of other people's lives, some real, some not, playing out on weekly dramas on the screen. Marc Auge reminds us of, "The false familiarity the small screen establishes between the viewers and the actors of big-scale history, whose profiles become as well known to us as those of soap-opera heroes and international artistic or sporting stars (Auge, 1995)". On the screen, the remote players become miniaturized in our own personal microcosm and as these tiny, yet familiar images flicker into our internal vistas, they penetrate our lives just as potently as other daily interactions and are often just as persuasive in their messages. How often have we put down a book to be rudely awakened to realize that we sitting in our favorite armchair? How is it that we are shocked by the brutality of the house lights turning on as the last scene of the film fades away from our inner eye? Margaret Morse, (1998), describes this state of distraction as the fiction effect, that is the partial loss of touch either the here and now, a state of distraction experienced on the freeway, in shopping malls, and in television viewing (Morse, 99, 1998). Can digital images and messages be just as compelling as the magic of literary space and cinematic experience? Can the tiny electronic stage, set for one person and for one person only, be a convincing space of enchantment? Seeking the Sacred Space According to Michel Foucault, (1994) we live our lives within many kinds of intersecting social relations that overlap yet remains discrete. He argues that while social space has been moving towards de-sacralization since the time of Galileo, this process has been mainly theoretical. Where once there was a hierarchy of sacred and profane spaces, as Foucault describes, "all laden with qualities and haunted by fantasy", in practical terms, both in private and public space, relations are still being controlled by an unspoken sacralization (Ibid. 1994). In order to fulfill this desire for the sacred, contemporary society seeks to define spaces, separate from mundane, everyday living. Foucault describes these spaces as utopias, as spaces having no real place, as fundamentally and essentially unreal. Acting as an analogy with the real space of society. However, according to Foucault, every civilization creates real places, actual places, that serve to stage experiences and consequently sets them aside for extraordinary action. Despite Benjamin's celebration in the mechanical reproduction that caused the separation of art from cult values and ritual, we cannot deny that there is still a need for the sacred in postmodern society. The liminal spaces, that Foucault calls heterotopias, while based in objective reality, act as the mirror that reflects. While this reflected space may be concrete, in that it exists in a real location, it's social function, at the same time serves to provide society with an abstract locale in which to act out experiences at a time of crisis; a local for adolescents, menstruating women, women in labor, old people and so on (Ibid. 1994). A derivation of the heterotopian space, according to Foucault, are the heterochronias of time that accumulates indefinitely - for example, museums and libraries. "Museums and libraries are heterotopias in which time never ceases to pile up and perch on its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, and up to the end of the seventeenth century still, museums were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating every-thing, the idea of constituting a sort of general archive, the desire to contain all times, all ages, all forms, all tastes in one place, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time and protected from its erosion, the project of thus organizing a kind of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in a place that will nor move - well, in fact, all of this belongs to our modernity (Ibid. 1964)". Foucault argues that the museum is already an exceptional space, set aside by society for extraordinary activity. When we view this exceptional space from afar, through the glass of a television or computer monitor, vast distances separate us from the object of our attention and our material locale. Even though we may experience a dislocating fiction effect it is exactly in this state of mind that we are able to sense the extraordinary. Perhaps it is the transparency of the glass that lets us seep in, or perhaps it is the transparency of the glass that allow the images to seep out, but in the same way the concrete museum provides a liminal space, so the on-line museum may offer a little enchantment hidden in the electronic heterochronias of time. Museumification The visitor in a museum is responding to cultural processes that are reflected through the trajectories of the aggregated and contextualized objects. These sometimes precious, sometimes mundane objects are modified in the exhibition context, where they go through a process of museumification, extracted from distant locations and placed on a spotlight pedestal, or isolated in a glass cage. They become re-conceptualized and re-contextualized and serve to petrify cultural values in much the same way as the theatre projects the human condition through metaphor and allegory. While both the theatre and the heterochronical spaces of a museum are both artificial and temporary projections, the structure of the exhibition relies on 'real', culturally robust objects. Could this wonder resonate in the digital image of the new media? Could there even be such a thing as a virtual aura? While the exhibition is a discursive space of a mediated message or sets of messages, visitors traditionally expect to encounter the 'real' object. If the visitor comes to the museum and finds say a video, why would he even need to come into the museum in the first place when he could enjoy the work equally well from the comfort of his home on his own television set or video player? In a media saturated society we are bombarded with a surfeit of images that have been mechanically reproduced all around us; advertising on the street, art posters in public institutions and art catalogs in school and the home. If the museum were to be relied on as a location of culturally robust objects, the exhibiting of videos, electronic interactives, and virtual reality installations would seem to defeat the purpose of the art museum experience. But somehow we have all become accustomed to electronic surrogates. According to Kevin Robbins, "The idea that we are already living in a simulation culture has now almost become a cliché. We have actually come to feel rather comfortable with our new condition of derealisation (Robins, 1996)". As many of us are already firmly hooked in to mediated and on-line experiences perhaps we should take the time to consider whether digital 'flaneuring' online contributes to our becoming anonymous, invisible, distanciated and even disrealised. To evaluate the contribution made by the electronic museum I will turn to the on-line projects and will investigate how each project has made their individual screen debut and will consider how the visitor the experience. In this exploration of web-based museum projects it may be interesting to take a look out there between the dancing pixels in a search for some sort of resonance of Benjamin's lost aura, and perhaps even to identify a new cultural phenomena, the virtual aura. A museum that does not exist in objective reality and is exclusively constructed electronically on the World Wide Web is the MUVA, El Pais Virtual Museum of Art. This museum is a virtual fabrication, and maintains only a tenuous connection to reality. MUVA utilizes a 3D technique, Web2mil, to conjure up a magic environment. Alicia Haber, the Director of the museum, welcomes visitors the museum, specializing in contemporary Uraguayan and Latin American art, and its extensive collection of paintings by leading Uraguayan artists. Four architects, Jaime Lores, Raul Nazur, Daniel Colominas and Marcelo Mezzottoni were commissioned to prepare the plans for the building, on Avenida 18 de Julio, the main artery of Uruguay's capital, Montevideo. They created a fine arts museum, consisting of galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as spaces for informal shows, sculpture garden, restoration workshops, and administrative service areas. The building has five main floors where galleries are open to the public, twenty-four hours a day... virtually that is! Some sixteen graphic and web-designers, programmers, photographers and system managers modeled textures of the walls, stairways, windows, sidewalks, roofs and elevator, pixel by pixel, to provide a sense of 'reality' for the visitors. Intuitive navigation tools, allowed for fluid exploration around the galleries and collections were studiously hang and discretely lit. Through embedded 'hot-spots', in the paintings, click-able links refer to in-depth studies of the artist's work, biographies and further information on the thematic presentation of the exhibition. In order to construct the same museum in concrete, steel and glass, it would have cost over 100 million dollars, a prohibitive sum for the Uruguayan reality. Due to the efforts of this highly motivated and imaginative team, Uruguay's artists can now show their works collectively, substituting that impossible museum with their own virtual museum. To recall Lash and Urry's premonitions that there has been a 'compression' of time and space as well as Giddens' dubious implications for society we may conclude that discern that the virtual metaphor of a museum has become emblematic of the emptying out of subject and object. Even so, while we do recognize a substantial loss, we might also side with Benjamin that, in this loss, there is a welcome gain. With the liberation of the original object and distribution over the Internet, this opens up, for the first time, the availability of Uruguayan art for remote visitors and the opportunity for these artists to reach a broader audience. The history of photography has long left behind the notion of the photograph as historical document, and through aesthetic appreciation has come to be a theoretical object, no longer perceived merely as a stand-alone simulacrum, eventually attaining a status of its own. This ontological evolution took almost a century and we now recognize the capacity of the photographic image to stir emotions and evoke wonder. Roland Barthes (Barthes, 1981, 2000) affirmed that photographs do radiate a certain kind of 'aura'. The aura of the lost in me and of lost memories much in the same way that Proust's textual reminiscences of the Madeleine pastry and the potency of it's smell that served to evoke buried memory. Barthes distinguishes the "punctum" as that accident of photographic detail that pricked him, bruised him and was so poignant to him that it evoked an almost transcendental experience, conjuring up poignant lost memories of his mother. The historical process of the photographic image emerged from window to artifact, as video has migrated from documentation tool to art form. Perhaps we need to maintain an aesthetic distance from the World Wide Web in order to distinguish the parameters of the still new medium, and to identify new spaces of enchantment amongst the cacophony of information. According to Lev Manovich, the new electronic spaces bring with them new representations of 3D space, connecting the static 2D image both with the 'kino-eye', (Vertov), to real-time communication and interactivity. His methodical discussion of the 'poetics of navigation' he reminds us that virtual environments open up new opportunities for the digital flâneur, as the navigator as explorer (Manovich: 2001). Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, (http://telematic.walkerart.org/) is a hybrid project that stages some 40 works by 25 artists that include the real, the virtual and the hybrid all rolled up in one. A number of electronic projects presented in the exhibition are presented in a real space while others are in real time. The Timeline module of this exhibition maintains aesthetic distance from electronic web projects to provide both a historical and conceptual framework to view the digital collections. Telematic Connections explores the convergence of computing, networking and human connections and which now extends, according to this premise, to a global embrace. Roy Ascott articulates one of the central questions posed by this exhibition... "This question, which seems to be at the heart of many critiques of art involving computers and telecommunications, suggests deep-seated fears of the machine coming to dominate the human will and of a technological formalism erasing human content and values. Apart from all the particulars of personal histories, of dreams, desires, and anxieties that inform the content of art's rich repertoire, the question, in essence, is asking: Is there love in the telematic embrace? (Ascott: 2001)". Some of the exhibits pull us into the realm of the supernatural, echoing Foucaults' reminder that we are still seeking the sacred and the fantastic heterotopias and heterochronias of the magical museum space. Ken Goldberg has found a way for you and me to turn our computers into our very own ouija board to contact the after-world directly on 'Ouija 2000'. This online project is accessible to all (spirits included), at the click of a button. Try it, if you dare! (http://ouija.berkeley.edu/ouija.html). "About half the works are world premiers", said Dietz, the Curator of the Exhibition "and many of the others are "classics" which are rarely seen". The web-site reflects not only the real and the hybrid elements of the gallery space, but also places the cornucopia of net works of the emerging net art medium into historical context. While much web art is concerned with the emerging environment of the electronic environment itself, playing with browsers, icons and networking, other artists are concerned with 'what data can do for you' and specifically remote access for museum visitors. TelePresence / TeleRobotic featured in the (real) Virtual Embrace Exhibition, visitors, situated in the local gallery, control a robot to build a model via the network situated in a remote location. The "real" TeleZone site is a robot unit at Ars Electronica Center, Linz in Austria, (http://telezone.aec.at/introaec/Eindex.html). The action and reaction can be viewed via WebCams and a virtual counterpart exists in the form of a VRML-world. In Light on the Net, Masaki Fujihata, allows visitors to turn on and off lights via the Internet - in Japan! (http://light.softopia.pref.gifu.jp/). And if all this excitement is not enough, you can sit down to your monitor and watch streaming seismographic data measured continuously from a site near the Hayward Fault above University of California at Berkeley. Mori, 1999, (described as a Internet-based earthwork) (http://memento.ieor.berkeley.edu/earthquake4.html), by Ken Goldberg, Gregory Kuhn, Randall Packer, Wojciech Matusik, exhibits data collected by the Berkeley Laboratory and relayed to a server in the Alpha Lab. But, just remember that when you sit down to watch the real time seismological activity online, or in the gallery installation, your display is delayed by a full 30 seconds due to frame buffering at the detector. If you discover an earthquake on your screen, don't forget that you have actually missed it by half a minute! While some of the exhibits in Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace simply re-iterate the world we know in digital form, others are posing new questions and this exhibition, and others like it, have opened up new spaces, which need new evaluations. "This will and must change. As telematics become more integrated into our physical world, so too will the telematic artwork. In such established genres as installation art, live performance, electronic theater, and environmental work, interaction with the network will become, and is already becoming, an integral part of the artist's creative task, and fundamental to the viewer/listener's experience. We are only now beginning to view the Gesamtelewerk of the future (Randall Packer, 2001)". The Geist Project, by Colin Andrews, of the New Media Group, Scotland is an eerie web-site involving ghosts and was exhibited at The Pier Art Centre, Stromness, November 2000. Four remote sites across Scottish, traditionally 'haunted locations' are networked and act as nodes, gathering data, such as changes in temperature, and fluctuations in electromagnetic radiation. The information is then relayed via electronic networks to the library at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney where it is used to 'feed' an audio installation. The audio is derived from traces of 'voices' recorded at each location. The work is experienced as a four channel audio installation, with each of the four channels representing one of the four remote 'haunted' locations. The audio is derived from traces of 'voices' extracted from recordings made at each location at an earlier time. According to the New Media Scotland Commission, Geist is not about the existence or otherwise of ghosts but rather about ghost or spectrality as metaphor. It attempts to explore our contemporary condition of omnipresent absence - presence through the use of haunted locations, recorded sound, and network technology. This spine-chilling project reminds us that contemporary communications technologies belong to unseen places - they connect us instantaneously across vast distances yet make our words, impulses and feelings pass through an uninhabited and invisible domain. "Geist is about being and not being here and there simultaneously. It is about communication through the exchange of electrical energy, about recording and playback, about returns and repetition. It is the domain of specters and spirits, of slippages in time and space and communications across boundaries, (From the New Media Scotland Commission electronic promotion)." The World Wide Web offers many kinds of spaces. Sometimes mundane, at other times spectacular. While the traditional museum flows through and into many kinds of cultural discourses, the virtual museum melts silently into the labyrinth of net space filling in the gaps between the Benettons, McDoonalds and Nexts. This paper probably raised more questions than it answers as it considered the digital spectator, the electronic visit to the museum on the net, and the lost aura. If however, the virtual museum can provide a moment of enchantment, we may choose to feel comfortable with our new condition of derealisation, and find a little turtle-time to pause a while, in the company of a new cultural phenomenon, the virtual aura.
Parts of this paper were first published as: 'The Virtual Aura - Is there space for enchantment in a technological world?' Selected Papers from an International Conference, Museums and the Web 2001 - Seattle March, 2001, Edited by David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, USA, 2001
Bibliography Roy Ascott, (2001) Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? (Telematic Connections web-site) Auge, M. (1995), non-places, Verso, London, New York Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucinda: Reflections on Photography, Vintage, UK Benjamin, W. (1992), Illuminations, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Fontana Press, UK Baudelaire, C. (1964), The Painter of Modern Life, New York: Da Capo Press Giddens, A. (1994) Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, UK Foucault, M. Aesthetics, (1994) Essential Works of Foucault 1994-1984, Vol. 2 Different Spaces, from a lecture presented to the Architectural Studies Circle, March 14, 1967, first published in 1984. Llash, S. and Urry, J. (1994). Economies of Signs and Space, London: Sage Manovich, L., (2001), The Language of New media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, London, England Morse, M. (1998), Virtualities, Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, Indiana University Press Robins, (1996) K.S, Into the Image, Routledge, UK
Susan Hazan is the Curator of New Media Education Unit, Head of the Internet Office at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and Doctoral Student, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University London currently researching the virtual in the museum. She has created museum applications and teaches hands-on multimedia workshops for artists, teachers, children and museum staff. In 1995, she was responsible for establishing the Israel Museum web site, serves as its Webmaster and has developed numerous interactive educational activities for the web site; March 98, launched "In the Light of Menorah - Story of a Symbol", a Virtual 3D Exhibition and September released the Museum@school program in conjunction with "Galim", The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her Masters is in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. |