HyMEx – Hybrid Museum Experience Symposium

Museums as defined geographical spaces have been settled institutions since their inception. They provide a physical and theoretical location allowing assemblies and functioning as a platform for encounters between people, so as to exchange ideas and to produce knowledge.

Museums indicate, but also contribute to social change. However, in the first quarter of the 21st century, the palpable boundaries of museums seem to be blurred: Where does the museum begin since its physical demarcation lines have lost their almighty substance and since the museum experience does not begin at the entrance, nor stops at the exit?

Museums have the tendency to expand onto digital platforms and create additional content regardless of the location of the audience. The digital world increasingly dominates a museum’s reality and even before that, the audience’s reality. It intertwines the physical with the virtual, blurs the edges of sensing the dimensions that called the institution of the museum to life, such as the linearity of time. Under such circumstances, the museum shall transmogrify into a hybrid entity that may embrace at once a geographical location, various digital platforms, manifold ways of mediation, immersive knowledge production, participation and exchange.
It is one way to describe the hybrid museum experience, however the roles museums may hold within a wide spectrum of societies and the concept of the museum space approached from a perspective where virtual has a meaning beyond computer-generated technology anticipate an approach where the question is less about the technological side of the hybrid experience than the participatory side.

The symposium aims to seek interpretations of the hybrid museum experience within the contemporary art scene in the light of spatial and societal aspects, to elucidate the possibility of the deterritorialization of the museum space, or to understand the ways of constructing participative solutions through which the museum may be an active mediator towards the audience. Also, how to get hold of the ecosystems of museum experiences, or allow an insight into what immersive technologies may hold beyond the visual, personal experience per se? And as for stepping outside of its own confines: Can the hybrid museum experience help contemporary art gain more responsible functions in a societal context, further than cultural mediation?

HyMEx attempts to find pluridisciplinary perspectives that remain relevant and constitute a credible source of reference towards the artist, the artwork, the exhibition, the visitor and the museum expert.

 

HyMEx is an online symposium taking place on May 6–7, 2021 with a live programme.

No registration fee is required: once submitting your data, you will receive an automatic confirmation. Please note that the uploaded email address will be the one to serve your access to HyMEx.
The direct link to the symposium will be sent to you later on. The symposium’s language is English. HyMEx will be scheduled on GMT+1 (CET) time.

HyMEx Early Bird: Register before April 18, 2021 and get your link to an exclusive tour! Early Bird registrants get a virtual gift in the form of an exclusive live guided tour through the exhibition BarabásiLab: Hidden Patterns. The Language of Network Thinking at Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art soon after the HyMEx symposium.