REPORT FROM SALZBURG Virtual Museums on the Internet Symposium ARCH Foundation Salzburg, Austria May 8-10, 1998 by Robbin Murphy The Virtual Museums on the Internet symposium in Salzburg, Austria May 8-10 gathered together individuals involved with art, technology, communication and law to attempt to define and interpret new technologies as they may apply to museums in the future. It was sponsored by the ARCH Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and restoration of cultural heritage, and  held in the conference center of the Schloss Leopoldskron, home of the Salzburg Seminars. The small group of about twenty presenters with the same number of audience members, the beautiful, fairytale-like location and the unusually warm weather combined to give the symposium itself something of the aura of unreality often associated with the word virtual , especially to those us more accustomed to assembly-line conferences held in sterile convention centers or spending our time isolated  computers. The Schloss Leopoldskron is instantly familiar to most Americans as the setting for the movie The Sound of Music - much to the annoyance of the locals, who would rather promote their native son, Mozart - and it wouldn't have surprised me at all if Julie Andrews and her children had stepped up to the podium to burst into song before traipsing off for a hike and a picnic in the distant Alps. Andrews and crew never materialized though the melodies of Mozart did seem to follow us around  giving the whole weekend the feeling of a movie. And that was, I assume, part of the reason the organizers chose the site - to catch us off-guard in an alternative reality in order to reconsider what we might mean by a virtual reality. The Schloss is, in fact, not a true historical restoration from the 18th Century when it was originally built but a theatrical recreation by director Max Reinhardt, who bought the castle in a near-ruined state in the 1920s and restored the building and grounds to relfect his own reality. The ARCH Foundation was founded in 1991 by Francesca von Habsburg in response to the destruction of cultural artifacts around the world and particularly Central and Eastern Europe. While the group still sponsors conservation projects they've expanded their mission with their State of the Art mellenium progect to encourage contemporary artists to explore connections between the past and present in their work. This requires new ways of thinking about the exhibition of art in museums as well as the idea of the museum and the possibility of creating an institutional structure that will, in the words of ARCH, define the four dimensional _frame_work of a new museum space which has no real world manifestation. In order to achieve this goal the Foundation was joined in the planning of the symposium by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; ZKM - Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe; Illuminations, London; University of Applied Arts, Vienna; and Techno-Z, Salzburg. The presenters, including myself, were a pretty homogenous group. With a few exceptions we were predominately white males of European extraction with many having established institutional reputations - hardly representative of global cultural heritage that was one of the topics we've gathered to discuss. On the other hand we did represent what I've started to sense is a kind of mid-life crisis taking place in what was only yesterday  called new media and what is now a conflagration of techno/video/electronic and/or computer art coming to terms with the Internet and all that it entails. Missing were some of the most interesting artists and theorists working on and with the Net today from around the world who could have added additional perspectives. As it was we seemed to be engaged in what could be called the shiny red sportscar theory of art history. We look out our window one day, adjust our bifocals and see gangs of young Tadzios and Lolitas frolicking in an open field. Though these youngsters  are immature and probably dangerous we see they are gaining ground and want to join them. Where an individual in the same position might buy themselves a shiny red sportscar, new media now has the Internet to hop aboard. Being older, of course, we wear our seat belts and obey the traffic rules but feel we're headed toward a living present and away from what seems like the increasingly cemetery-like environment of the traditional museum. Off on our roadtrip there were no clearly demarcated roadsigns but most of the symposium presentations seemed to have three general themes as their destinations:         1. Defining the virtual museum         2. Social aspects         3. Artworks The organizers of the symposium are to be commended for their willingness to experiment, to do a broad field survey that generated more questions than answers. Most presenters approached all three themes in one way or another from the vantage point of their own area of expertise. I will attempt here to give some sort of an overview of what was presented and to try to create not a superhighway but more of a pleasantly winding alpine roadway through the various ideas. DEFINING THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM The term virtual museum has become a popular clich=E9 on the Web - an AltaVista search turns up thousands of sites using these words as part of their _title_ -  yet what does it mean? A cursory review of sites show most of them engaged in some sort of simulation of an existing institutional structures and collections using the Internet as a means of distribution. These Web brochures can be extremely useful and convenient but add little more than guide books or catalogues do to the the museum itself while the Internet seems to promise the museum the promise of a new dimension. The basic premise of the traditional museum is as a place of fixity, where authentic _object_s are collected and displayed. In contrast the current trend is towards virtuality, process and participation demanded of communication media and network systems.  The talks that followed attempted to address some of the questions raised by this opposition. The Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany has been one of the foremost centers for the creation and collection of media-_base_d art in the world and is now in the position of creating a context for the development of the virtual museum. This is, however, at the risk that many fear of dragging the past into that future while ignoring the present social environment. Hans Peter Schwarz, director of the Media Museum at the ZKM started by asking if the museum, even in its state of inertia, still has a value as an institution that can stop the mad rush, if only for a moment, of visual communication so that we can obtain an image of the world for reflection of this environment? The museum's relationship with other social mass media, he said, has always been competitive and the relationship between new electronic image media and the traditional museum hasn't changed. We only have to take the resistance to photography as art by many museums as a reminder of the basic conservativism that hinders the positive acceptance of anything new, the fear of contact from the other side, meaning, of course, outside the museum walls. The very difference of interactive media art from traditional art _object_s, and its interrelationship with mass media, blinds museums to the possibilities they could offer  in the development of that art. What is needed now is the development of useful criteria for new media integration into museum collections and that means expanding the museum's scope.  This entails acknowledging the many museum-like environments emerging on the Internet created by people outside the professional museum walls. This does not mean an out-and-out surrender. The traditional museum has one advantage over all other mass media in that it confronts us with the foreign, the unknown and even the embarrassing when other mass media, dependent on public acceptance, cannot. Ironically, it is because of the museum's distance, its seeming intertia, that the virtual museum can be of value. Schwarz went on to say that the museum is one of the last places where one can assess reality in an age of simulations. The issue now is to accept that there are many realities, virtual and physical and that it might be art's task at the end of this century to define, interpret and shape the interfaces between these worlds. So it is then the responsibility of the museum to organize these interfaces between mixed realities. He ended by advising museums to be anticipatory - not imposing perspectives on the history of art, but opening up a pool of possibilities from which art might emerge. Not as a machine but as a structure with its own memory, reacting as much to us as we interact with it