HUMAN COMMUNICATION

The museum definition, approved by the International Council of Museums delegates in 2022, reads;

“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”

Nobel Laureate nominee André Malraux once stated a museum without walls is coming into being and this ideal is a new field of art experience, a Musée Imaginaire, a Museum without Walls. Here is an expectation for modern museums to be more than a place to store treasures but constitute an organizing principle. Augmented reality (AR) is the technology stack and practical toolkit potentially meaning in part the ‘how’ to Malraux’s preface.

AR is no panacea for visitor engagement. However, a growing number are incorporating it as part of a holistic approach. We see AR tools today because these tools have been simplified and made available to a greater number of developers via competing technology companies, with significant financial investment foreseeing future revenue streams. And people can access this via their mobile phones given the potential of today’s consumer hardware.

Perhaps it feels like just 300 developers are working in AR. From a perspective of mass adoption it is nascent but it is an ascending technology. It needs to be thought of as a medium, like paper or a digital screen. This piece takes a time view of five to twenty years and beyond. AR can be defined via three use cases, one is as ‘Monuments,’ and it is this category that museums, and indeed cultural destinations in general, can really thrive.

AR is an elucidating and peregrinating medium growing more capable of subverting bricks and mortar, undermining walls. Creating a new infinite number of ‘seeing places’ out of thin air. Meaning the Louvre can, in a Rousseauian sense, pull “up the stakes” and expand beyond confining land boundaries.

Museums, today’s digital technology & preparing for the game

One museum curator summarizes the current response by museums to digital technology — “The modern museum, unable to impose its hierarchies over online information systems, allows itself to be captured by the populist drive of social media. In the interest of renewing its own authority, the museum aspires to become a brand or to camouflage itself as an instagrammable setting.” “Established institutions, unprepared for this game, lose space to image-sharing platforms as arenas for artistic legitimation and dispute over historical narratives.” I once read a coinciding comment that resonates here, that Raphael’s importance would be buried under deluge if he had to compete only via twitter or instagram in such diffuse populist control regimes.

Overview of current discourse

The volume of philosophical works on this topic has been described as light yet it is an emerging subfield. Outputs include ‘Augmented Reality: Reflections on its Contribution to Knowledge Formation,’ edited by José María Ariso, and ‘Augmented Epistemology’ (C.Turner). On the medium’s potential impact one scholar notes, “perceiving and interacting with the external world would no more be the same, bringing about a dramatic change to our everyday epistemic practices,” (S.Palermos). There is wider scope to further detail how humans have already been augmenting places for millennia.

An impartial or fiduciary-like perspective on this medium is difficult to locate. Views are often required to be articulated via the lens of an academic niche, the narrative of a single company, overt skepticism or enthusiasm, or solely addressing an existing business ‘need.’ For philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in ‘La Formation de l’esprit scientifique,’‘need’ does not promote knowledge but only opinion, and “opinion thinks badly, it does not think.” As it were, “the roar of opinion and ugly rush to judge.” (Jony Ive, overseen industrial development of the iMac, iPod, & iPhone).

Monumental Museums, Legislating Names

Naming in this new medium is disparate. It is not unfair to say some terms, definitions, and categorizations do not “distinguish things according to their nature” (Plato, Cratylus). These three categories are practical names to outline the broad use cases for AR, with the latter two reflecting better the nature of the medium, in the inherent capacity for human creativity.

• Utilities
• Monuments
• Epiphanies

The latter two can cross over Noble Laureate Henri Bergson’s threshold of experience and are rationally based on the progress of underlining technological infrastructure.* Describing now in greater detail, utilities offer remarkable convenience, usability, and tremendous value for our daily lives. The latter two however are open ground to a situation that is not based on a universal necessity but a productive creativity like that found in nature, ceaseless and unfurling. And creativity Whitehead (philosopher) wrote, is “the universal of universals.” Bachelard makes a distinction, it is not utility that moves human beings to find out about the world but rather what he called “will to intellectuality.” All human beings aspire to knowledge primarily for its own sake.

Monuments and Epiphanies, Similarities

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins,” wrote Oscar Wilde. Both epiphanies and monuments combine various levels of apprehension and comprehension. The former grasps something of reality, but only to touch on it. The latter encircles, fully understands something in description and definition. Both can have a ‘momentary sense of discovery’ (Brian Friel, Playwright). Both could form a type of cathartic renewal. Both can have “a sense of wonder,” as Van Morrison wrote or a “sense of place,” who Seamus Heaney best described in language. Always beyond the language of science. Understand it is the ‘sense of,’ not ‘complete understanding of.’ Both are experiences that “wrench ourselves” out of “mathematico-physical line of approach” (Arnold Toynbee, Historian) and mean accuracies. The content type and volume for both categories are unlimited. Both experiences are something not seen before, melodies amongst the digital noise.

Monuments and Epiphanies, Differences

Monuments have higher proportions of comprehension, over apprehension, and epiphanies the reverse. Monuments will have a stronger anchorage to a specific place – you can see the relevance here for museums. Epiphanies certainly can be anchored to a place, but not limited to. Epiphanies tend to be more ephemeral. Monuments exist longer, digital experiences may reside at a location for months, epiphanies tend to be sudden and unexpected. Monuments tend to be known destinations, epiphanies tend to be unexpected. The same epiphany may be perceived particularly strongly by one’s own individual interpretation. It may be Monumental Michelangelo’s David in hologram, content to complement the Lanting Pavilion in Zhejiang, or it may be an epiphanal line from Patrick Kavanagh hovering suddenly along your path.

The Antaeus-like power of monumental AR — Knowing thyplace

In Greek mythology, Antaeus was the son of the gods Poseidon and Gaea. He drew strength from the earth and was invincible while he was in contact with it. This is akin to monumental AR, to have something digitized is one thing, to be able to have it tied to the ground and viewable in three dimensions is something other. There is nothing preventing curation from getting detached from its own building and nevertheless continuing to function. Where digital content “floats unfurled” (James Clarence Mangan, who is to Irish words as Van Gogh is to landscapes). Helping an individual learn where they live, knowing thyplace.

The museum institution’s connection to its building persists almost as a metonymic trace. As photography was in Malraux’s mind, it is a type of organizing device yet these digital experiences do not fetter the human imagination and deny it access to new modes of feeling by which it is nourished. In the mind of the visitor, it gives articulation to invisible ephemeral realities that, with the physical objects in the building, form the total experience.

Monumental Museum, Ground over building

Philosopher Martin Heidegger in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ notes a view of dwelling that “cultivates” (“colere”), cherishes and protects, preserves and cares, in addition to the constructing, raising up of edifices, “aedificare.” People dwell in an environment of land, buildings, and things.AR is a thing made, it is like a building because digital content can be ‘anchored’ to land, it may be experienced in intervals, between sessions however, in some sense it could become more permanent potentially outlasting the life span of a building. Legitimizing glimpsed temporal things, Friel reminds us, “the real benediction of all art, is the ringing bell which reverberates quietly and persistently in the head long” after it is seen.

Land has its duties as well as its rights.“And ancient Ireland knew it all” wrote Yeats, and one adage is ‘tig talamh thar oibreachaibh,’ ‘the land grows over buildings’ (Eugene O’Curry, Irish scholar). Another Irish Ollamh James Joyce noted, “places remember events.” In this emerging technological fueled land, places are defined not so much by erecting enclosures or buildings as by being known and talked about and experienced digitally. A local memory, loci memoriae, opening scope to anthropomorphize the land beyond linguistic universal toponyms such as ‘foot’ of, ‘mouth’ of, and ‘headland.’

Digital loci mermoria, Vision is validation

Cicero’s explanation of loci memoriae in ‘On the Orator,’ can be reappropriated here in this content where “the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves,” and “employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.” On this, Cicero notes, “one must employ a large number of localities which must be clear and defined and at moderate intervals apart, and images that are effective and sharply outlined and distinctive, with the capacity of encountering and speedily penetrating the mind.”

According to Cicero “the keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight.” And consequently what the ear hears and the intellect conceives is best preserved if the eyes help to keep it in your head. Museums provide order and containment for cultural forms by means of reproducing discourses and regimes of display. AR is another opportunity to expand how these forms are reproduced, using space around objects, buildings or a landscape in untapped ways.

Digital memories are a complex phenomenon, which has various, and at times contradictory, implications for individuals, cultures, and nations. Memory recovers and ‘re-covers,’ haunts or empowers, hurts or heals. Helping articulate the nuance of a collection may link to a myth or reveal a story of its history, creator, or impact. If a myth claims to teach a type of truth, then memory brings together the past and the present but it also leads us towards the future.

Digital conservation, Liminal space

Phidias was an eminent Greek sculptor of god and goddess statues on the Athenian Acropolis. It has been said that “he alone had seen the exact image of the gods and that he revealed it to man.” His lost works, as with the “hard-won wisdom” of Xizhi’s calligraphy,are still available to us via replication, underscoring its usefulness. Via digital conservation there is scope to produce high-definition two and three dimensional replicas. It does not change the object and at times involves no physical contact with it but a digital memory is created.

It is also used by traditional conservators to inform physical conservation. However, the ability to integrate these outputs, with a high degree of excellence and low latency, into AR internet-based consumer devices is limited. Yet the growing pace of technology limits this gap and these two disparate worlds come closer with digital progress. Another benefit of the move to digital, by its nature, is assisting with avoiding controversy linked to housing physical pieces.

A digital conservation project laser scanned Michelangelo’s David in Florence producing a three-dimensional digital twin, twice as high as the Stanford model made twenty years ago © Galleria dell’Accademia

Homo Faber, Making and recording things

Humanity is first of all homo faber, a maker, moved by the need to make tools and other useful objects. Philosopher Henri Bergson defined human intelligence in ‘Creative Evolution,’ as “the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.” Via the personal camera lens and AR, an event, even a small happening can be been isolated, and assessed, and articulated thereby investing a wider and deeper dimension.

One etymological survey notes the first use of the word museum in English was in the early 17th century when it was used to refer to a cabinet of curiosities. This overshadows its perceived origins from the Greek μουσεῖον, mouseion, meaning ‘seat of the Muses’ and designated a philosophical institution or a place of contemplation. This etymology elevates a collection and suggests the inspired nature of the work. Strabo (Geographer) affirms a museum’s significance as he confirms the spatial relation of the Mouseion in Alexandria which was “part of the Brucheion (palace complex).”

A museum has an inherent Imprimatur. It is a civilizing Omphalos which disinters human achievement, the works of those who, like they said of Phidias, as suggested from the etymology, took faithful dictation from the Muses. Through museums, science and myth conjoin, and we know better our mesolithic and classical neighbors. Our species is the only creative species wrote Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck, “and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man.” There is a lurking sense that human imagination is not just a luxury but an absolute necessity.

Museum not mausoleum, Beyond the analog

T.S. Eliot (Poet), in ‘Tradition and the individual talent,’ wrote “what happens when a work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new …” This extends to not just new works in a collection, it to is applicable to the introduction of new mediums designed to illuminate museum contents. Friel reminds us it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past reembodied and “we must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise.”

Conclusion, New city builders, Museums as prominent places

The current financial revenue and profit stream in place-based AR is marketing and advertising via existing mobile apps because the new technology entices users to spend more time on a platform thereby increasing the scope businesses can sell to potential customers. The motives for museums and cultural destinations differ. Museums at present “simultaneously adhere to the plurality of digital social networks while configuring a space of resistance against whims of algorithms.” Additional difficulty includes curating pieces which require greater receptivity than some audiences and critics are capable of.

AR deployed in museums with creativity can temporarily add something necessary by undoing the fixed nature of the current world, and the fixed nature of language which refers to it, while maintaining fidelity to facts of human experience. Like an extension of Descartes’ twelfth rule, “we ought to employ all the aids of understanding, imagination, sense and memory, first for the purpose of having a distinct intuition of simple propositions; partly also in order to compare the propositions.” A museum requires ongoing investment as George Bernard Shaw’s act to donate a third of the royalties from his work to the National Gallery of Ireland and another third to the British Museum reminds.

This new medium and how it can be applied is new territory and most people are illiterate in its use. Applicable here for museums is a statement from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, “what people call illiteracy to me is terrific virgin territory, unexplored territory. The idea that some poor person coming off the street is not going to be moved is a stupid idea. In fact to work towards that person being moved is more important than to work for somebody who said we’ve seen it all.”

Views the author’s own, whose articles have been published in various publications since 2018. B.Arch, MSc.

* Crossing Henri Bergson’s experiential threshold

Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson makes the distinction “though all the photographs of a city taken from all possible points of view indefinitely complete one another, they will never equal in value that dimensional object, the city along whose street one walks.” That is to say between an analytical versus an intuited experience of a city. This once clear experiential boundary is being blurred or at least achieving a closer orbit via AR, where we can simultaneously in space and time walk a city street while also experiencing the symbolized, digital photographs, and created media content in real-time, a type of new temporary experience of in-between.

Logically here, excellence in AR relies on a supporting 1:1 mapping specification and 1. highly accurate, 2. ultra-reliable, and 3. low latency localization infrastructure which eschews the panoptic perspective from which a systematized cartography can be drawn and dispenses with traditional cartographic tropes. AR ‘anchors’ the digital to place providing a direct link to the past, or to story, continuing presence in the landscape serving as a cipher that can open up previously hidden narratives. The landscape becomes an image, almost an element to work with as much as it is an object of admiration. This epitomizes, as per the Irish aesthetic Dindshenchas tradition, a sense of landscape as intertextual space, your own interpretation respectfully making room for competing voices, kaleidoscopic.