ABSTRACT
While libraries and museums continue to push ahead with the digitization of art and three-dimensional artefact collections, questions persist as to the role such surrogates will play in the museum of the twenty-first century (Frost 2002, Smith 2003, Jinbo and Mehrens 2007). Educators readily acknowledge the potential application for digital images in outreach and education efforts (Romer, 1996, Frost et al. 1997, Cameron and kenderdine 2007) but others are quick to voice concern over the nature of the likeness being purveyed and the decontextualization of works of art from the gallery experience (Jussim 1977, Thompson 1981/82 Jones 1990, Panofsky 1995). In addition, recent research (Taylor 2001a, 2003) has shown that museum visitors respond to the affective content of original works of art in ways that are significantly diferent from the ways in which they respond to the affective content of works of art reproduced as black-and-white photographs, pictures in books, colour slides, and even digital images. All of this, points to a growing awareness that creating digital reproductions that are accurate representations of an ‘original’ is much more complicated with image-based materials than it is for text-based materials, a fact frequently overlooked in the rush to digitize. And, while technologists have been able to refine some of the physical limitations of digital surrogates (i.e. relative density of the image, colour fidelity), a shortfall in other critical physical considerations persists (lack of dimensionality, limited sense of scale, a restriction to the single sense of sight) and, most important, little progress has been made in capturing the affective response individuals are likely to experience when faced, for instance, with a Rubens painting, a copy of the Magna Carta, a heritage peony garden in full bloom, or the ‘martyred village’ of Oradour-sur-Glane in France's limousin region.
