Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

Rethinking the Museum – New Hybrid

The new digital technologies have substantially altered the way things are experienced and perceived. They have changed the interaction between the individual and the world and the modes of communication within it, in which the museum has an important role.

The paper suggests to think of the museum through the concept of hybridity, which became central in New Media and Digital Culture theory. In light of the analysis of the theoretical and practical implications of this concept, the paper proposes to realise how the contemporary museum – as an institution whose mission is to stimulate public debate and serve as a constitutive cultural factor – generates the mechanisms for critical self-reflexive examination of the ways in which meanings are being created within it. It relates to the hybridization of the museum’s real and the virtual spaces, of the museum’s archive and the collections, and of human and automated systems taking place in different aspects of the museum’s activities.

Based on this analysis, I demonstrate how seemingly contradictory concepts that characterize contemporary museology might be simultaneously integrated within it: the contradictions between the expanding experiential dimension of the museum, while preserving the status of the museum object as a source of information; the development of the mechanisms of democratization and public participation while maintaining the museum’s authoritative status, and the preservation of cultural heritage while relating to the current and the updated. I will claim that through the hybridization of such contradicting concepts, the museums gains in current cultural and political relevancy.