Appropriazioni virtuali. MoMAR, Audio Tour Hack, Recycle Group. La realtà aumentata come sovversione della narrazione museale = Virtual appropriations. MoMAR, Audio Tour Hack, Recycle Group. Augmented Reality as a subversion of museum storytelling

Abstract

In 2018, an art collective called MoMAR has transformed, with its project “Hello, we are from the Internet”, MoMA’s Jackson Pollock room, in New York, into a personal exhibition area of Augmented Reality. By downloading a specific app, or via smartphones distributed at the entrance of the building by the artists themselves, visitors could access “augmented paintings”, created by the collective on the basis of Pollock's works of art. In this as in other similar cases, the museum's hack can be considered a real artistic practice, valued with great interest even by critics and gallery owners against whom this operation is direct. In MoMAR, as in other experiments, this subversion was the result of an overlap, in a literal sense, of online and offline environments, capable of reconfiguring a new type of museum narrative. Museums have often resorted to narrative schemes to communicate with their audience, as they employ art objects as elements in institutionalized stories (Ferguson, Greenberg, Nairne, 1996). Storytelling, in this sense, presents itself as a set of choices made to convey the contents of the museum, and its absence can be perceived as disconcerting by visitors. If the concept of museum narrative is linked to that of authority, the practices mentioned above seem to undermine the very legitimacy of the museum institution, through the use of technologies and virtual environments. The aspect that emerges as crucial, as this paper will argue, is the non-hierarchical nature of the images that represent the world, and that can lead to the development of alternative narratives in the perception of the same.