THE MEDIUM IS THE MUSEUM: Digital Creation and Art Contamination across Online Museum Collections

Research on the digital museum, as a change in museological and exhibition approaches, is an established and recognized fact thanks to the new technologies for cataloging and communicating collections (Huthamo, 2010). The virtual museum is a concept with which the history of art started to become familiar at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first readings of the museum space and the very concept of the museum by the historical avant-gardes. The cases I will present are either a result of users’ activities through online museums catalogs (tools such as the Rijikstudio, Artlens) or — as in the case of Tate Modern — creative approaches to digital art creation and image manipulation through the museum collection. The earlier the artworks in the collection, the more creative and problematic the obtained results.