ABSTRACT
The idea of the distributed museum has great utility to help us understand the dialectics affecting museum practice and explore how they are manifesting in museums across the globe. The early instantiations of the idea of ‘the distributed museum’ explore the emergent shift in focus from the physical realm to the digital, and back again to a more nuanced approach that encompasses both. In ‘The Museum as Distributed Network’, Nancy Proctor adopted the then-provocative position of advocating for museums to treat their online audiences as a core audience rather than supplemental, and to develop unique engagement strategies for them, rather than applying those designed for physical audiences. Museums may be found in a tablet, a mobile application or a social network. One of the most challenging aspects of Proctor’s model of ‘distributed museum’ is her description of it being rhizomatic in structure: without a fixed direction of growth and or a clearly defined centre and periphery.
