ABSTRACT
How does the digital experience of an object differ from the physical? And how does it
matter? When artistic objects are used in teaching, quite typically that object is a
sculpture or a painting that instructors and students encounter in a museum. But
increasingly, a digital rendering of that object may reside online, and the Internet may be
used to locate and show art objects in digital form. With over 5,000 museums available for web
surfers (Davis, 2000), the digital experience may become the primary exposure to the arts
for many viewers, with the opportunity for instructors and learners to see more objects in
virtual visits to museums than in physical museum tours. For classroom teaching, there
is the potential to visit far greater numbers of digital objects than we would be able to show stu-
dents in real museums. However, although digital objects are made much more accessible
through online museums, experiencing the digital object is vastly different from seeing
the actual object in person. These differences can extend to the visual as well as the other
sensory experiences, and they affect the social experience of the museum visit as well.
