MUVA: a virtual museum in Uruguay Alicia Haber

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MUVA: a virtual museum in Uruguay Alicia Haber An architecturally stunning museum with a unique collection of contemporary art, MUVA can be found only on the Internet ± and in the imagination of the

1 MUVA: a virtual museum in Uruguay Alicia Haber An architecturally stunning museum with a unique collection of contemporary art, MUVA can be found only on the Internet ± and in the imagination of the creative team responsible for its existence. Alicia Haber is its director and guiding spirit. She is a teacher of art history and has served as artistic adviser and chief exhibition curator for the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Montevideo since The author of many books and monographs, she has also received a number of prestigious grants and awards, including the Rockefeller Foundation Mentor Grant and a Fulbright grant for research on art administration to work at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of Uruguay's most renowned art critics, she was elected the best Latin American critic of the year in 1988 by the Art Critics Association of Argentina. MUVA, Museo Virtual de Artes El PaõÂs (El PaõÂs Virtual Museum of Arts), was launched on 20 May 1997 ( diarioelpais.com/muva in Spanish and in English). It is the biggest and most important Web site in Uruguay and the country's first virtual museum. Devoted to Uruguayan art in this first phase, it plans to open a section on Latin American Art. The rationale for its creation was very much related to the situation of art in Uruguay and not only to the impact of the Internet as a new medium. Visual arts are very important in Uruguayan cultural life and both national and international experts judge artistic production to be one of the country's most outstanding characteristics and of great relevance to the Latin American art scene. Nevertheless, the country's artistic life faces many problems linked to socio-economic factors that hinder its visibility. Funds for art, museums and art centres are insufficient because the country has undergone a prolonged crisis lasting more than thirty years from which it is only now slowly emerging. First priorities are, naturally, health, education, recovering stability and resolving long-term issues. In such a context, art is not considered a major priority, and although Uruguay has a tradition of wide social and cultural services provided by the government, there is unfortunately almost no tradition of private support for the arts and no incentives such as favourable tax-deduction policies. The creation of MUVA is in part related to the frustrations and limitations stemming from these socioeconomic realities and to the constraints of Uruguayan society, many of which might somehow disappear in cyberspace. Nevertheless, a Web museum will not solve the problems of Uruguayan art and the intention is neither to substitute for reality nor to usurp contacts with real artwork. My dream, as a curator, art historian and as a Uruguayan is that we might have in the future real state-of-theart museums and collections and enough Photo by courtesy of the author Original oil on cardboard by Pedro Figari, Tango, exhibited at MUVA. From a private collection in Montevideo. 26 ISSN , Museum International (UNESCO, Paris), No. 205 (Vol. 52, No. 1, 2000) ß UNESCO 2000 Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA (USA)

2 Photo by courtesy of the author funding for exhibitions. This Web museum is an alternative medium to give more visibility to Uruguayan art and calm frustrations in another realm ± the virtual world possibly giving Uruguayan art a new place in the real world. Concepts about museums are going through a period of change. Museums no longer necessarily have walls and are no longer only repositories, but can also be online information resources, a forum for discourse, an aid for research and dissemination of knowledge. A Web museum has the advantage of being an interactive system where any art may be experienced by any person at any time and in any place. And this idea is not so new as some of my colleagues have pointed out: Marcel Duchamp created a portable museum (La BoõÃte aá Valise) and AndreÂ Malraux invented the concept of Le MuseÂe Imaginaire. At the same time, the creation of MUVA is linked with the local situation concerning the Internet, which is growing quickly and showing dramatic increases in use. Uruguay is one of the countries with the largest per capita use of the Internet in Latin America. Tele-density in Uruguay is actually quite high and it is the only country in the Americas with a 100 per cent digital telephone system. A newspaper steps in In 1996 I started to develop the idea and wanted to create the virtual museum as soon as possible but, knowing the difficulties the country was undergoing and the slow pace of change following a long period of crisis, I was concerned about questions of red tape and bureaucracy. Therefore, I approached a sponsor, El PaõÂs, the most important newspaper in Uruguay. The project was accepted and General view of the exhibition by JoseÂ Gurvich. ß UNESCO

3 backed, and since then MUVA belongs to El PaõÂs which has the proper profile for this sponsorship. It created its own very successful Web site and the prize-winning digital version of the newspaper in March 1996 ( it has a Digital Department and a Systems and Computer Department. Not only is El PaõÂs interested in digital experiences and Internet projects, but it also has a long history of patronage and of creating specific spaces for the arts. The Digital Department, under the direction of Guillermo PeÂrez Rossell, organized a team and created the staff of MUVA as soon as the project was approved. The staff includes a curator and art historian, journalists, graphic designers, technicians, photographers, architects, two Webmasters, one graphic and digital designer, experts in computer science and a translator. One of the problems MUVA faces is its budget. We cannot overburden the newspaper. In this project, there are no hi-tech computers, high-end or state-of-the-art hardware and software. Thus, more technical creativity is involved and fewer resources are used than would have been the case under more favourable conditions. External consulting is not used; Uruguayans do everything. We all aim at achieving the best results possible in a cost-effective way. Taking into consideration the shortcomings of the Uruguayan art scene and the possibilities the Internet has to offer, MUVA endeavours to display the best Uruguayan art in a virtual realm that gives a strong sensation of reality. The idea is to use the Web as an exhibition medium that will re-create the museum experience and mimic as far as possible the sensation of being inside a building. The guiding principle in this line of thought is the generation of virtual environments closely linked to reality. MUVA is not a museum; it is not a linear walk through a catalogue of images. MUVA is located in a special building designed by architects, which could be built at any time. The rationale for the creation of MUVA's virtual building is that the construction of an art museum such as the outstanding ones in the great metropolitan capitals of the world would have cost a prohibitive sum in the situation of Uruguay. Thus, the progress in virtual reality and development of the Internet has made a great adventure possible: the design of what today is an impossible museum for Uruguay. Four architects were commissioned to prepare the plans for the building and they designed it with DataCAD. They worked as if they were going to build a real museum. The building area would occupy a real space of 6,000 m 2 and its virtual location is in the very heart of downtown Montevideo. The virtual building has five main floors and three additional levels, spatially interconnected using multiple heights. Another important idea behind the creation of the virtual building is the presentation of art in a spatial context in order to convey a sensation similar to the one experienced in a museum and enhance visual contact with the artworks. The building, its galleries and hallways, its public spaces and archives, all have a virtual dimension emulating that impossible museum. Based on the architectural project, the digital graphic designer Mario Buchichio took over the digital production of MUVA and created the threedimensional version of the museum. A very important part of this construction 28 ß UNESCO 2000

Photo by courtesy of the author process is the interaction with the physicist Leonardo Setaro to ensure that the design would be compatible with the technique for navigating MUVA.

4 Photo by courtesy of the author process is the interaction with the physicist Leonardo Setaro to ensure that the design would be compatible with the technique for navigating MUVA. The realistic effects of 3-D design are combined with a special use of HTML. One of the ideas is to enable the navigator to enter the virtual world of MUVA easily, forgetting about the PC and the browser. Thus MUVA encourages the user to visit the building, enter another reality, have a virtual sensation, live an illusion. The commands are intuitive and relate to the normal movements of human beings: the sensation of advancing from one hall to the other, moving around an exhibition hall, climbing and descending the staircases, travelling up and down in the lifts, approaching the information desk and sending messages. The users can rotate, advance and go back, look at images that simulate 3-D spaces and have, to a certain extent, the sensation of visiting a museum and enjoying its architecture while at the same time savouring the works of art. The intention, nevertheless, is to keep the pace relatively fast. A user with a standard computer and modem connected to a good ISP can visit the halls quite quickly. New opportunities for Uruguayan art MUVA specializes in one of the most significant contributions to Latin American art: modern and contemporary Uruguayan art and, in the near future, it will open its doors to other examples of Latin American art. It offers the visitor the possibility of viewing quality representations of the best Uruguayan art on a home computer and takes advantage of the Web and of a medium that is well suited to imageintensive exhibits of artworks. It thus seeks new opportunities for Uruguayan Main entrance to MUVA's virtual building. ß UNESCO

Photo by courtesy of the author Original oil on canvas by JoseÂ Gurvich, Mundo de imagenes y personajes, exhibited at MUVA. From the collection of the artist's family, Montevideo.

5 Photo by courtesy of the author Original oil on canvas by JoseÂ Gurvich, Mundo de imagenes y personajes, exhibited at MUVA. From the collection of the artist's family, Montevideo. art and tries to give it more visibility. It offers a new venue for Uruguayan artists and wants to increase and improve opportunities for them to come closer to the national and international art community. At the same time, MUVA endeavours to decentralize culture by attracting new audiences for art and for the real museums and collections, and to stimulate them to enjoy real artworks. As the director and curator of MUVA, my goal is that it should make a broad spectrum of Uruguay's artistic creativity available and exhibit all kinds of first-class Uruguayan art. The museum is particularly pledged to modern and contemporary art and emphasizes its commitment to contemporary visual languages that receive scant attention in Uruguayan museums and are less known on the international scene. It tries to cover the art of the masters, the highlights of Uruguayan art and, at the same time, mid-career art and that of cutting-edge artists. MUVA is open to a variety of forms, styles and media. One of its main characteristics is to make it possible to get to know little-explored, often almost inaccessible areas. It allows viewers to reach works in artists' studios and in private collections, ranging from the youngest artists to the masters. MUVA tries to maintain the discourse and practice of museum exhibition as regards classification, context, viewer understanding and reception. It is interested in creating a visual experience that might give aesthetic pleasure and cognitive rewards as well as self-education, enhancing the cognitive function. A considerable amount of information has been put online about the artists and the images. MUVA aims at creating a substantive commentary on the works and their historical and aesthetic context, because we think that this is a very important characteristic of any good museum on the Web. It includes the normal information given by museums regarding artworks (title, date, size, technique, medium, and location), plus explanatory texts about the historical and cultural context and references to schools, styles or periods that the works of art represent. Biographies and bibliographies are also included. We also attempt to include personal statements by the artists, particularly in the case of young or cutting-edge creators. MUVA is a provider of original content, written specially for it by a professional art historian whose biographical data is on-line. We are aware of the difficulties of ascertaining the authority behind Web sites so we include all kinds of information. We try to be very interactive to stimulate the navigator to make choices and ask questions. The navigator can communicate with us via from almost every page and can choose a route. Following hypertext principles, the pieces of information are linked and there are many 30 ß UNESCO 2000

6 possibilities of hypertextual navigation and cross-references. In the matter of copyright, we are concerned with the unlawful appropriation of artist's images and the inadequate copyright laws applying to Internet. We do not scan from books but have the permission of the artists or owners to photograph the works of art, scan them and reproduce them online. MUVA takes into consideration that there are varying degrees of online literacy and has two help sections. We try to invite new users to feel comfortable with the new technologies and avoid alienating them. The MUVA team also decided to make the museum accessible to as vast an audience of viewers as possible and one month after the site was launched we duplicated it in English. Multilingual sites reach a larger audience and might be used for different purposes, for example, not only the teaching of art but of languages as well. For the relatively new virtual museum of a small country in the Southern Hemisphere, and considering that it belongs to a very peripheral culture, MUVA has already achieved considerable visibility. It is visited by twenty-five different countries per day and by sixty per month, has an average of 5,000 accesses daily and has already received thirty-eight international awards from many Latin American, European and North American institutions since its inauguration on-line in It has been selected, reviewed or recommended by many relevant cultural Web sites from all over the world and also by magazines such as Art Nexus and Humboldt. The most important award was received at the museologists' conference `Museums and the Web' which took place in Toronto in April It was a jury competition for more than 155 online museums and MUVA won the `Best of the Web' Award for a Virtual Exhibit, a welcome testimony to the success of our work. Note Space does not permit publication of the detailed bibliography provided by the author, which may be obtained from Museum International on request. ± Ed. ß UNESCO

ON THE NET Virtual Museums on the Web: El Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

ON THE NET Virtual Museums on the Web: El Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num3/net/ September 2004, Volume 8, Number 3 pp. 3-8 Jean W. LeLoup SUNY Cortland Robert Ponterio SUNY Cortland Museums and Culture ON THE NET Virtual