Negotiating Visitors’ Presence and Engagement in Immersive, Hypermediated Art Experiences: Towards a visitor-centered phenomenology at the Nxt Museum, Amsterdam

This study reconfigures museum visitors’ art experience in the digital age through a transdisciplinary analysis based on digital ethnography, media phenomenology, and affect theory. Through interviewing visitors of the Nxt Museum, Amsterdam, this thesis investigates the ways in which persons engage with and are present in front of the hypermediated installation art in the exhibition Unidentified Fluid Other (June 2022–September 2023). The immersive and spatial qualities of the installations retain an enticing quality that are a popular photographic motif for visitors and designate the institution as a heterotopic environment. Moreover, the installations possess an alluring aesthetics of hypermediation that provokes profound, embodied and affective sensations in their viewers. Instagram usage and smartphone photography hereby significantly reshape and restructure visitors’ attention and behavior in the gallery space, resulting in a remediation of their embodied experiences via the...Show moreThis study reconfigures museum visitors’ art experience in the digital age through a transdisciplinary analysis based on digital ethnography, media phenomenology, and affect theory. Through interviewing visitors of the Nxt Museum, Amsterdam, this thesis investigates the ways in which persons engage with and are present in front of the hypermediated installation art in the exhibition Unidentified Fluid Other (June 2022–September 2023). The immersive and spatial qualities of the installations retain an enticing quality that are a popular photographic motif for visitors and designate the institution as a heterotopic environment. Moreover, the installations possess an alluring aesthetics of hypermediation that provokes profound, embodied and affective sensations in their viewers. Instagram usage and smartphone photography hereby significantly reshape and restructure visitors’ attention and behavior in the gallery space, resulting in a remediation of their embodied experiences via the hand-held device that oscillates between a desire for immediacy and profuse hypermediation. In renegotiating their sense of presence and sense of selves in the art experience, visitors resort to a dual engagement with the installations whereby they actively experience the art with and without their phones. This research therefore identifies smartphone photography as an additional trajectory in the contemporary museum experience, as an extension of the visitors’ selves. The effects of smartphone remediation on embodied affectivity and presence of visitors in art spaces thus retain beneficial qualities which may inform cultural institutions and art historical research at large.Show less

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Negotiating Visitors’ Presence and Engagement in Immersive, Hypermediated Art Experiences: Towards a visitor-centered phenomenology at the Nxt Museum, Amsterdam