Open AccessTheorizing Born Digital Objects: Museums and Contemporary Materialities
Author(s) -
Chiara Zuanni
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
museum and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1479-8360
DOI - 10.29311/mas.v19i2.3790
Subject(s) - materiality (auditing) , framing (construction) , materialism , relation (database) , semiotics , art , aesthetics , virtuality (gaming) , digital culture , sociology , visual arts , epistemology , media studies , history , computer science , philosophy , archaeology , database , artificial intelligence
This paper explores the characteristics of born digital objects and how their materiality is framed and transformed in the musealization process. It draws on vibrant materialism and web archiving, framing born digital objects as assemblages and proposing a distinction between these and reborn digital objects, i.e. their collected counterparts. The paper relates this new framing of digital objects to established museological frameworks, such as analyses of the musealization process through the lenses of semiotics and research on authenticity in relation to digital reproductions, in order to unpick the ontological and epistemological transformation this contemporary form of heritage undergoes in entering the museum.