The first official Internet Museum scores with less formal ingenuity in the presentation when entertaining with net art.
Who wants to visit the Adobe Museum of Digital Media, requires only a browser. The AMDM is the first official Internet Museum – without guards and open all day. Behind this is the Californian company Adobe Systems, best known for software such as Photoshop or PDF format.
The site will however be more than a platform for art on the net. The makers take the word ‘museum’ seriously.
To show the AMDM as a virtual building. Three huge, organic-looking towers, the architect Filippo Innocenti has designed. Like corn stalks they wind around each other. A trailer demonstrates how the futuristic museum fits into known Cityscapes – New York, Venice, Paris. In the real world, the building would provide 57 680 square meters of exhibition space, more than the Tate Modern in London.
Unfortunately, the Internet miss one thing: It still has no material outside. And so is the supposed buildings rather meaningless metaphor. While the visitor enters a virtual atrium. Click to rotate in a kind of billboard posters, the exhibition, is to click on it. But the design looks more like the Cover Flow function, such as Apple uses to display album art in iTunes.
What makes this project, other things. It allows to experience art through play. As with children attending a technical museum, is one concentration: pressing buttons and see what happens. The Adobe Museum cultivates the joy of clicking.
The first major exhibition, Valley comes from the U.S. video artist Tony Oursler. It begins with a hand-painted menu that leads to various exhibits. Here, visitors can distort the mouse three-dimensional faces, dance or pie charts can explode cart can. And again and again pops up a round clown face, which are cryptic comments by clicking on its own. A fun ghost train on the web.
The second opening was originally scheduled for April. On a small Japanese island, the artist Mariko Mori has created two sculptures that respond to sun and tides. Tida Dome this installation extends to the Internet. In a short text Mori is known, however, because of the tragic disasters in Japan, they have decided to postpone their work.