A History of the British Museum
The 18th Century: Origins of the British Museum
The British Museum was originally founded in 1753 as the world’s first national public museum and to this day continues to make its collections accessible to all 'studious and curious persons'.
Its origins lie in the will of the physician, naturalist and collector Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) who bequeathed his 71,000 historical and natural curiosities to the nation in return for a £20,000 payment to his heirs- over £2.7 billion in today's money.(1) The museum's doors first opened to the public on January 15th 1759 on the site where the museum still stands. (2)
1- Inflation adjusted to 2118
2- I wanted to communicate the idea that although the collections are digitally accessible in the future, there is still a museum building (the setting for the installation).
The 21st Century: Downsizing the Museum
By 2020 a significant drop in government funding (3) toward heritage meant the museum could only sustain itself by auctioning off mass quantities of its artefacts to wealthy individual collectors. Digitisation of the museum's collection had begun in 2012 with web-based archival and photogrammetry to record virtual copies of its artefacts, and these records were used to reproduce objects lost from its physical collections. Although its material collections continued to deplete rapidly, by 2030 over 50% of the museum's artefacts were viewable online.
3- To explain the loss of the museum’s physical collection I imagined that the withdrawal of EU funding from heritage projects after Brexit severely impacts this sector.
The 22nd Century: A Virtual Museum
Today the museum's once-crowded galleries have been cleared and visitors are able to access full digital records on items from the collection, including interactive holographic projections. Since the permanent decommissioning of the museum’s material collections in 2075, its 40 million artefacts have been made available for free download worldwide. 3D printing stations throughout the museum and in your home enable everyone to own a piece of history: from printable, handheld replicas of the Rosetta stone to millions of images at your fingertips: our digital records are yours to explore.
About the Exhibition: Digital Trenches
Conservation of digital collections can often be n often be as challenging as maintaining physical artefacts. Since the museum's contents were first digitised over a century ago, some files have become incompatible with modern technology and can only be accessed via the Old Internet. The drawings in this exhibition represent attempts by archaeologists to reconstruct our fragmented files as they may have once appeared when they were originally archived in the 21st century. (4) By delving into the so-called 'digital trench', these archaeological illustrations piece together data from centuries-old online databases to reconstruct the lost artefacts of the British Museum. You can view isolated fragments of the artefacts by accessing 'The Collection' on this iKiosk. (5)
4- An explanation of the remixed and transient nature of data on the internet, to communicate the lack of stratification in the digital trench. This description also shows that the viewer is privy to the discrepancies in the drawings whereas the archaeologists of the future are not.
5- Information Kiosk. Also, Apple will probs stick an I in front of everything anyway.
