Post Wow, is Less More? A Critical Approach to Animated Mapped Projection for Art Historical Knowledge Sharing: The Twentieth-Century Mural as a Case Study

This paper critically considers digital curatorial practices, increasingly used both in commercial and museum settings, involving the animated mapped projection of digitised works of art. It draws attention to the problematic and common misuse of the term ‘immersive’ to designate such practices and examines their effectiveness for art historical knowledge sharing and meaning making. Through first-hand observation of a number of such exhibits, the paper considers the lessons that can be learned from them and how they would specifically apply to a corpus of twentieth-century frescoes that make up the study object of a research project on art historical digital curatorship.