The Ludwig Muzéum in Budapest organised an online symposium enfolding the idea of the hybrid museum experience within an international, collaborative, practice-based research project Beyond Matter (2019–2023) that takes cultural heritage and contemporary art to the verge of virtual reality. In the first quarter of the 21st century, the palpable boundaries of museums seem to be less clear: Where does the museum begin? The museum’s reality and even before that, the audience’s reality 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.
As the roles museums may hold within a wide spectrum of societies, completed with 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.
HyMEx aims at deconstructing and reconstructing the hybrid museum experience through the involvement of multidisciplinary angles. The two-day symposium will bring together leading researchers, scholars in digital and experimental museology, curatorial practice, and collection care, as well as researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to exchange views on challenging situations and the latest innovations in the field of hybrid museum experiences, with a focus on contemporary art.
The publication of the HyMEx 2021 symposium is called HyMEx 2021 – Proceedings. Following a foreword and greetings by Julia Fabényi and Peter Weibel, 22 contributors share their written proceedings, accompanied by links and pictures.
The project was co-founded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.