Summary: | When art history makes use of new technologies to represent itself, a change in its traditional transmission models occur. The involved devices of representation which traditionally support the contents also change them. In this paper we will explore such transformations by going through a number of examples of artworks, museum's websites, and theoretical concepts such as databases, interactive interfaces, and graphical representations of the information involved. The user who employs this kind of systems is faced with an aesthetically characterized experience that requires a performative and active reading mode of its hypermedia components: this induces a different reception of information by the user. We therefore ask whether, in a field like the history of art which traditionally raises resistance to this kind of practices, such systems could be, instead, an instrument of reactivation of its procedures and meanings.
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