The Museums of the Future: From Real to Digital, Experiences That Change the Way We Experience Art

Paraphrasing the radio programme Te la do io l’arte (Radio1 Rai), one might say that today art reinvents itself with new visions and new experiences.

Let us start with experiences. Once upon a time there was only the traditional museum, where visitors admired and learned about the works on display. In recent years, however, the museum experience has been profoundly transformed, and today many exhibitions have become places in which to “immerse” oneself and interact directly with the works, thanks to solutions such as immersive virtual reality.

As for new visions, the unexpected has itself become art – as in the case of the gigantic feats of engineering and architecture presented at the Evolutio – Infrastructure for human development museum (evolutio.museum), the first fully digital-native interactive Museum dedicated to major infrastructure works.

Today’s public, accustomed to the speed of images and to digital hyperconnection, increasingly prefers experiences that are rich, engaging and personalised, even when visiting museums.

Contemporary museum itineraries have responded, increasingly relying on augmented reality and immersive virtual reality. Augmented reality enables interactive experiences in real time, allowing visitors to observe works, artefacts and fossils with multiple layers of information and 3D reconstructions. Virtual reality, meanwhile, makes possible – among other things – immersive videos and virtual tours of physical museums. Let us look at some examples.

The TeamLab Borderless museums in Tokyo and Shanghai and digital art museums where digital installations move across walls and interact with visitors’ gestures, in a flow of images and sounds that constantly regenerates itself.

The Dubai Museum of the Future allows visitors to enter future scenarios projected to 2071, dedicated to robotics, artificial intelligence, space travel and sustainability.

At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, millions of works, artefacts and fossils have been digitised and made available online – a way of opening up vast collections to the world, overcoming physical and geographical limits.

Virtual tours of physical museums – accessible directly through their websites and dedicated apps – have become an unexpected success. World-renowned cultural institutions such as the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi Gallery, the Egyptian Museum in Turin, the Louvre, and the British Museum in London have digitised much of their collections. Through their online platforms, they enable users to admire them remotely, on any device.

Cyclopean feats of engineering displayed as works of art, worthy of a museum space – a place of discovery, experience, understanding and inspiration, accessible to all. From this premise came Evolutio – Infrastructure for human development (evolutio.museum), the first digital-native immersive Museum dedicated to infrastructure. The cultural project involves the creative director Bruno Genovese, the curator Nicolas Ballario, and the technical advisor Guido Guerzoni.

Evolutio is born from a unique, partially unpublished multimedia collection of around 1.5 million of photos and videos – some of which are digitized – that the Webuild Group has opened to the public, compiling 120 years of history into a story that blends ingenuity, technology, and culture.

The interactive Museum narrates the evolution, impact and meaning of infrastructure interpreting them within the socio-economic context in which they are built. It traces the techniques employed in their construction and the effect of these works on the well-being of communities. It does so in an educational and accessible language, with historical and cultural aims.

The Evolutio journey also includes insights into the spirit of the times and places that gave birth to the works on display.

Over 400 infrastructure projects built by the Webuild Group are showcased in the Museum:

Africa’s giants, such as the Kariba Dam in Zimbabwe and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the largest hydroelectric project on the continent; the rescue of the Temples of Abu Simbel in Egypt; the “eighth wonder of the world”, the Panama Canal; the sustainable mobility systems with metro networks built by Webuild in Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, Thessaloniki, Milan, Riyadh, Doha and elsewhere; the major road systems such as the Autostrada del Sole and high-speed rail lines; the iconic bridges that have made infrastructure history; civic buildings that stand as symbols of engineering excellence and futuristic architectural vision.

Within Evolutio, visitors can explore more than 12,000 photographs and a vast selection of documentaries and historical films from Webuild’s extensive multimedia archive, featuring experts in industrial photography such as Guglielmo Chiolini, and famous directors including Ermanno Olmi.

In addition, the Museum of infrastructure also includes an Edutainment Area with 3D videos and interactive graphics explaining, for instance, how to build a bridge and how Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) – the enormous machines used to excavate tunnels – function.

There are also three simulators that allow visitors to test themselves by stepping into a virtual construction site, turning the experience into a game: choosing machinery, following the stages of building a complex project, with the central focus always on people’s safety.