The dispersive look. Seeing the artwork in the era of museums without memory

Abstract

This essay is a reflection on the operation of the contemporary museum and, in particular, on the perceptive dynamics that the installation, the interactive or the multimedia work set up with the user, in relation to the space that contains them. The disappearance of the concentrated look, in favor of a dispersive, atmospheric and enveloping vision, favors in the museum the consumption of a sensory experience, that is no longer merely peculiar to the memorials. The museum designs a more fluid visual and bodily experience of the artworks, not a "distracted", but, we could say, in a state of distraction experience, that calls for circulation and exploration. A microcosm that discourages the linear orientation and the sense of the distance, and that is inclined to making present the relationship with space and time. The present of individual feeling is today the privileged dimension of existence of spaces that once emerged to preserve collective memory. A kind of perception without memory evolves from the spaces of the contemporary museum.