e-volution

Interestingly, and, according to Rob Semper not accidently, two of the first WWW applications were online exhibitions. Semper suggests this is due to an inherent similarity between the qualities of the web and the museum; either way, in web terms, there is a long tradition for developing exhibitions for online exploration.
Sadly, these very first iterations from the early nineties are no longer available online. I like to picture them in the style of crude 80’s graphics, pure net-nostalgia. But in reality, they may well have looked not much different from what is on offer today.
Take the 1996 Turbulent Landscapes exhibition, using a graphic representation of the onsite exhibition as a navigational tool for the online version of the exhibition. This same principle (albeit in a more up-to-date graphical style) is still in use, as in the just opened Stik gaflen i øjet exhibition at Statens Museum for Kunst. Or check the social software/user generated content concepts applied in the 1995 Remembering Nagasaki exhibition, long before ‘Web 2.0’ was even conceived.
Similarly, I was surprised to learn, through discussion with a more tech-savvy fellow student, that the technologies listed in Tinklers 1998 paper are still the ones most relevant to online content development.
And yet, even though we may still use the same technologies and principles, the way we use them and the way we perceive of them has changed drastically over the course of the last 10-15 years.