Curatorship and mobile applications: The physical-digital interactions of museum visitors

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the mobile applications employed by various European exhibition spaces, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the History Museum in Vienna, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, to examine how these digital tools participate in the configuration of the visitor experience. The study examines the design of these mobile applications, with a particular focus on the activities that they propose during the museum visit. The analysis delves into the types of interactions that they propose with the museum’s architectural, curatorial, and artistic discourses, as well as between the visitors themselves. It seeks to address the following research question: How do museum applications, strongly linked to the use of social networks and access to online content, transform visiting practices and expand the museum experience beyond its physical confines? The findings indicate that while these applications can enhance the accessibility and personalization of the content available during the exhibition, their design disregards the spatial and material dimensions of museum visits, which involve the presence of other individuals with whom visitors interact and share the exhibition spaces. By interrogating the enunciative strategies of these digital tools, it becomes evident that the actions promoted by mobile applications involve practices whose spatio-temporal dimensions are incompatible with those of physical visits. This highlights the challenges of integrating mobile applications into contemporary curatorial practices.