This paper considers the phenomenon of the virtual museum, or that site at which traditional museum spaces and practices mix and merge with those made possible by new media and technologies. In particular, the paper investigates the shifting semiotics of representing museum objects themselves -- from indexical to symbolic, from atomic to digital -- under the developing logics of the virtual museum, and the effects such shifts might have on the informational, pedagogic, and aesthetic experiences of engagement with virtual exhibitions of those objects.

This proposed paper will trace the roots of current museological debates over the adoption of electronic exhibition technologies to efforts a century ago to make museums more accessible to the general public through the re-design of exhibits and the adoption of the then-new media technologies of the phonograph, magic lantern slide, and motion picture. Clues for understanding contemporary museum attitudes toward new media technologies can be found in a number of experimental exhibits proposed (if not always installed) in American and European museums at the beginning of the twentieth century. Responding to what they saw as the narrowing attention span of the urban museum-goer, late nineteenth century curators charged with the task of making exhibits more user-friendly turned to novel technologies in search of suitable prototypes for the modern museum. This paper considers the manner in which a new set of contemporary advanced display technologies are engendering anxieties similar in some respects to those provoked by their technological predecessors a hundred years earlier.

Recent scholarship on the state of the contemporary museum has begun to address a significant transformation occurring within the institution's spaces: the galleries are rapidly becoming multimedia sites of display, incorporating the moving image into a wide variety of exhibitions. My paper offers one of many possible "pre-histories" for this shift, focusing on the effect of video art installations on viewing practices and displays within the museum space.