HUANG Chien-Hung
Digital Museum
The paracolonial refers to any fluid, indeterminate relationship of domination and expropriation. These phenomena are particularly closely related to the processes of digitization and democratization. In the history of display and politics, museums are firstly one of the important symbols of democratization, which have changed significantly in the digital era. In their current stage of development, digital museums generally digitize the museum’s existing spaces and functions and expand their reach with online communities. Here, digitization is simply a tool of simulation. Museum “spaces” have never been built entirely digitally because the meaning and potential of digital technology has been formed and even generated within the contexts of rapid industrialization and “smart” lifestyles. Because it is oriented toward news and communities, it plays a role in society and politics. What the digital transforms and creates is primarily an immersive virtual hologram site, or an embedded site that is both simulated and virtual. Different kinds of sites can produce new consciousness and new communities. In this sense, if we see the digital museum as the generation of an all-new site, it is certainly an ecosystem in which the paracolonial and dis-colonial are presented and simulated and are able to struggle against each other. When we engage with digital museums through the relationships among art, artists, works of art, curatorship, art workers, and museums—namely, the flows of goods, people, information, capital, technology, consciousness, and power—the museum is revealed as a site of cosmotechnics. In engaging with digital construction and generation, we can offer corresponding dis-colonization proposals for the various paracolonialisms derived from this “fluid” site. (For more, see “Paracolonial”).