Art exhibitions and digital technology: new languages, new audiences, and new originals?

The object of investigation of this article is the use of digital technologies in art exhibitions. The continuous digitalization of the contemporary world is connecting, more and more, people and information; also bringing, increasingly robotics and augmented reality to everyday life. This scenario has given rise to a paradigm shift in exhibition spaces and museums, in general - which have been concerned with conceiving exhibitions with highly immersive design, promoting visitors' engagement in content, meaning, and personal connection - and in art exhibitions in particular. Technology allows the democratization of access to artifacts and works of great value - that usually involve complexity and high costs to be gathered and transported -, allowing them to be reproduced in very high quality, preserving all the characteristics of their colors and surfaces, besides the magnification of details previously unnoticed to the naked eye. It has the potential to mediate interactions with visitors, to tell stories, and to give new meanings. An expanded curatorial production process can allow artworks to be integrated and information to be provided in a digital structure designed to empower public engagement in a participatory manner. Artists and galleries have invested in areas such as New Media Art that generate installations involving video to digital audio, virtual and/or augmented reality, and the relationship of elements of space and time in the visitor's experience. Also thanks to the advance of digitalization, the partnership program between galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM), which makes the content and resources of the institutions available through Wikipedia, have redefined and redesigned the space for the presentation of artworks. Despite all these possibilities, one has to question whether, in the digital/virtual age, the original is still valued. A digital experience is not inferior, less authentic or a substitute for a physical experience. It is an experience of a different nature. From this assumption, the paper intends to investigate the relationship of technology to art exhibitions from three aspects: 1) its ability to arouse interest and attract the public to knowledge of the arts; 2) its potentiality to desacralize the "aura of the original"; 3) its ability to generate the development of artistic languages and poetics. Considering the first two aspects, including their possible antagonisms, this article will analyze some emblematic examples such as the traveling exhibitions of the Australian company Grande Exhibitions and The Lune Digital Art Gallery, in Melbourne (from the same company); L'Atelier des Lumière, in Paris; the exhibition of Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains. at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2017); among possible others. Considering the third aspect, will be analysed artistic works that uses digital medias and technologies, from painting and sculpture to music and video, and also interactive installations, developing new techniques and methods of expression. Some examples are Daniel Rozin, Zach Lieberman and Sebastian Labrunie.