Lets consider the museum as empty space.
The model of the contemporary museum space, with its compartments and white plastered walls, has the exceptional quality that its spaces are ‘undesigned’, meaning the functionality of the space is yet undetermined. Undesigned means undesignated: the space has no connotation attached to it except that it is a space. A meaningless volume, like a white piece of paper on which anything can be drawn or written.
Space that has this empty quality is rare. In a mediatised society with its overload of unwanted information, designation and fast interaction, it is possibly the only public space that provides the possibility for a highly personal silent experience. It is exactly the emptiness of the museum that offers an audience the unusual concentration of experiencing one thing at a time, and in a timelenght and order of their own desire.
On the other hand it is exactly the openness and multidimensional possibilities that new media share with the museum. We can consider the internet equal to an undesigned open space, ready to be utilized to our wish and demand. We publish materials and information in any sequence and proportion, creating our own scope of meaning and inspiration to share with others. The result is that the internet is built as a enormous collection of spaces where we can as well move through freely, creating our individual designation and interest based on selecting and timing the offer of materials in any way we want to.
It is exactly this unbound relation between the one who offers and the one who recieves, like artist and audience, that the museum shares with the internet. In the museum one creates his own sequence of events, leaves out the unwanted and pays special attention to that what is in his specific interest. The museum represents the physical model of individuality that characterises the virtual space of the internet, with such a large effect on our present-day society.
For an artist this equals the possibility of composing in space like music would come to being on a new piece of paper. The given volume of the spaces and the organisation of them in one building is a given fact, but can lead us to define and connect the spaces in any way we want. A specific installation of light and sound, the possibilities in movement of performers and of the audience itself determine how the space will be experienced, and can turn the empty space into one which is charged with meaning.
Because the space itself is unsignified, anything or anybody in it becomes significant. Exactly for this reason Marcel Duchamps famous bicycle-wheel is art in the museum, and not when it is functioning on a bike. Art is an agreement between us, to look, to listen, to experience, to think and to reconsider. The museum provides us a space to make such an agreement.
Like every action on stage becomes theatre, and every tone in the concerthall is music, in the museum being is art, and doing is performative. But concerthall or theater cannot be turned into space with the qualities of the museum, with its undesignated content and possibility to interconnect the paths that we take individually.
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