On Monday, 9 December 2024, Prof. Dr. Sophia Prinz (Zurich) held a lecture on the topic “The exhibition as an interface. Analogue and digital displays” (in German).

The ‘digitalisation’ of exhibitions is mostly one-sided. Analogue elements are simply copied into digital media  – as 3D renderings of rooms and objects, QR codes with texts or collection databases. The museological order of knowledge and practice remains untouched and thus also its historical evaluations or immanent power relations.
Using the example of ‘Mobile Worlds’, Prinz showed that digital forms of exhibition offer the opportunity to come a step closer to the ‘pluriversal museum’. To achieve this, however, the analogue display, which still determines the majority of everyday museum life, must be thought of digitally  – as an interface that changes through interaction. In turn, collectively organised web platforms should decentralise curatorial research and decisions. In this sense, the pluriverse museum is post-digital.

Prof. Dr. Sophia Prinz is Professor of Design Theory and History at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and headed the exhibition project ‘Mobile Worlds’ (2015–2018), which she initiated in and which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Her research encompasses practice theory and perception, design and society, exhibition theory and aesthetics as well as global modernity and transculturality.