Toward An Evolution of the Virtual Museum: Collective Storytelling and Social Creativity in the MUVI Project

The use of the term "virtual" is commonly associated with the idea of an extension of reality. Similarly, the expression "virtual museum" is usually adopted to mean a process of duplication of a physical museum and its objects that is enabled by information technologies. Therefore, "virtual museum" has become a useful synonym for multimedia products and websites capable of providing new and fresh experiences of a specific museum and its heritage, or creating a large system of interconnections among different museums. However, in order to understand and explore further opportunities for the museum in the " virtual " realm, a profound reflection is necessary. We need to question and investigate the contemporary role of the museum, and then challenge this by producing innovative visions, solutions, and technological experimentations. Today's questions must be: what cultural role and significance can physical artifacts assume in the age of information technologies? In what ways do information technologies enhance the nature of the museum? Can a virtual museum promote the social dimension of creativity, and link it to the preservation of actual cultural artifacts? This paper aims at responding to these questions and identifying a new form of virtuality for the museum capable of enhancing the creative relationship among the physical tangibility of cultural artifacts, their actual interpretation, and their potential meanings. To sustain this argument, the paper describes and examines in detail the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of 2 Lombardia (MUVI) 1. This project provides evidence of how the collective memory of a local community represents a living heritage that—by means of different media and information technology—can be translated into actual cultural artifacts, and give raise to new forms of creativity and museum construction. Museums and Virtuality All museums are virtual, independently of information technologies. Museums extract each object from an environment that, as the site of origin, is deemed to hold some significance. The object is then transferred to a new site, the museum, in which the relationships with its original environment and time are recreated. In this sense museums are virtual, since they collect pieces that work as a switch to " something else ". In this sense they already represent, somehow, a " non-place " , as Malraux suggested at the middle of the past century (Malraux, 1951). Cultural objects, i.e. the objects placed and arranged within a museum, should also be conceived as virtual. They present the ambiguity …