The Museum Imagination: A Reflection on the Status of the Object in Digital Culture

As a large part of our communication processes are digitally mediated and the information we exchange in these processes is delivered in binary numeric form, the experience of tangible materiality becomes more and more rare. With the example of the collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin we are tracing a parallel development towards a gradual virtualization of the material object in the arts and in the sciences. The paper describes the conceptual background and design decisions that were made to reflect on the status of the object in the Cine-Interactive “Venture to the Interior/Vorstoss ins Innere”, a real-time 3d experience exploring the idea of the museum as a place of cumulative knowledge construction.