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Web Graphics: Art on the NetMark Harden, texas.net Museum of ArtEvolution of a "virtual" galleryThe standard metaphor for a multimedia art presentation is, of course, the "virtual gallery". CD-ROMs, with extremely high bandwidth, are effective at using this "walking through the museum" interface. Unfortunately, online bandwidth is still too limited to provide this sort of experience to the majority of the visitors to a web site. The navigation process would simply be too slow. One workaround is a video file, such as a Shockwave plug-in. A drawback to this approach is the extensive "dead" download time for these typically huge files, during which the visitor is staring at a blank screen. Another drawback is the low level of interactivity associated with video. Only a professionally produced multimedia product will provide a rewarding experience, and this then becomes an issue of technical limitation as far as an individual's site is concerned.Given these constraints, the texas.net Museum of Art has approached the "virtual gallery" metaphor in a less literal sense. The earliest "virtual gallery" exhibition was "The First Impressionist Exhibition, 1874". In this case, a mimetic representation is almost completely avoided. Rather, the sense of integration is attained through a combination of images, text (contemporary critical commentary) and catalog facsimiles for each of the featured artists. The only visually accurate aspect of the online exhibition (other than the painting images themselves) is that, within each artist's gallery, the paintings are shown to relative scale. The next stage in the evolution of the "virtual gallery" is "One Man Show: Rembrandt". Here, a mimetic depiction of a gallery is obtained. The paintings are even skewed into the frames to accord with the perspective of the photograph. A contrast of black & white versus color accentuates the fact that the paintings are linked to more conventionally displayed images. Unfortunately, this "virtual gallery" is inert. It acts only as a set of thumbnails for the larger images. Although it does have the virtue of offering a visual depiction of a roomful of Rembrandts which will never be seen in the real world, even the relative scale of the paintings has been sacrificed to fit them into the frames of the gallery photograph. An effective expansion of this mimetic gallery representation would be to include a doorway to another gallery, which would be linked to a similar "room" with a different set of paintings. This would be similar to a CD-ROM interface, but using one-shot static images rather than full-motion video. The latest effort to provide a low bandwidth "virtual gallery" is "Goya: The Black Paintings". In this exhibition, the interior of Goya's "Quinta del sordo" is schematically represented. The schematic graphics reduce the bandwidth in comparison to a photographic gallery representation. The quicker loading of images imparts more of a sense of moving around the rooms with the click of your mouse. The schematic depiction is in accordance as well with the limited art historical knowledge of the Quinta del sordo, long destroyed; experts know the relative locations of the paintings on the walls, but the precise architectural details of the cottage itself are open to conjecture. In this exhibition, not only are the paintings depicted in the proper relative location as in the original dwelling, but they are represented accurately as far as their relative size. In another enhancement of the "virtual gallery" metaphor, successively more detailed images of the paintings are revealed in a navigational interface that simulates "stepping closer" to the paintings. Next: Integration of image and text Return to Table of Contents
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