Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This study contributes to the development of a relational, object-based understanding of participation. Despite the recent material and participatory turns in the humanities and social sciences, co-examining efforts within a context of aesthetics (i.e. culturally embedded sensation and perception) have been limited in number. Though oft employed in discourse on digitization, the notion of participation remains resistant to clear-cut definition. In order to discuss the notion’s ambiguous content and examine aesthetic and techno-cultural diversity dimensions of participatory experience, Socratic dialogue (SD) is used. SD allows participants to thoroughly reflect on their own experience, as they strive to agree on answers to the question posed. SD is rarely used in empirical research, and the study contributes to further development of the method in a qualitative research context. The study is a phenomenological analysis of online museum visitors’ reflections on accessing digitized artworks on Norwegian web museum portal DigitaltMuseum.no and online 3D design community Thingiverse.com. Through visitors’ attempts to answer the question “what does it entail to participate when encountering an aesthetic object?” the participatory potential of photographic and 3D rendered digital surrogate objects and the platforms on which they appear is explored, while co-examining perspectives of participation and materiality.