Collections in bits and pixels

Museum people are in the habit of declaring every once in a while that collections belong to everyone. They are part of the common cultural heritage of every one of us – you, me and our neighbours. Yet the limited volume of the Kiasma building is not enough to display but a small part of the museum's collections at a time. To overcome the problem of space, the museum has established virtual wings. The collections can also be accessed in bits and pixels: on the Internet.

A good example is the website Town and Again (www.townandagain.fi) produced by the Finnish National Gallery. Of course, from the start the website had to admit that perusing a physical work of art in a museum is quite different from examining an electronic representation on a computer. Therefore, the website plays around with hangings of a completely different kind.

To achieve this, the website employs works from the collections of several Finnish art museums. A thousand works or so were taken from Kiasma, and combined with nearly three thousand images of artworks administered by other museums. As a bonus the site also features material presenting cultural history from the mid-19th century to the present day: maps, documentary photos, texts, even a selection of Finnish literature. These ingredients make up the largest digitisation and content production project ever undertaken in the Finnish art museum world.

Urbanisation in Finland took place in different phases. Initially the towns celebrated the triumph of industrialisation, then it was European connections, until the second world war and the optimism of the reconstruction period redefined the cities. City culture made its appearance in Finnish lifestyle, which along the way had also gained new aspects from multiculturalism. These waves of urbanisation have transformed not only the physical urban setting, but also everyday life. Art too has followed these changes in its own way or denied them.

The Town and Again website explores Finnish urban life mainly through visual art, but new pictures and interpretations are being constantly added. From a collection of stories by artists and art historians and works from museums, it may gradually even become a collective site with the development of a section where school students can add their own pictures of the city to the massive database. As a result, the website not only explores and juxtaposes works from different eras and collections, but it also presents broader reflections on what the city and art mean to us now and in the past.

Riikka Haapalainen