Compared to the virtual museum the physical museum is indeed limited to a relatively small audience because it is fixed to a certain location. On the other hand, the effort that people have to make to visit the physical museum is one of its charms as well; the audience might be small, but also more united. This is also due to the fact that people who visit the physical museum, actually ‘go there’, or as Jeroen puts it, who experience ‘closeness’. This ‘going there’ goes far beyond the experience of entering the virtual museum, which is nothing more than the illusion of closeness. After all, visiting either the website of the museum or the virtual museum, you are still sitting on your own chair in your own room.

Obviously, the virtual museum is not able to bridge the gap between the website and the physical museum completely. Just because it is re-mediated, it loses the direct relationship with its location. The feeling evoked by the emergence of museums in the 19^th century stresses as well that location is something very important. In those days people complained that museums would destroy history instead of preserving it. The museum was said to endanger the ‘authentic’ relationship between the exposed objects and their social origins. Until today museums attempt to emphasize the tie between the exhibition and the surrounding society (Maleuvre, 1999, pp. 1-2).

The website of the Armenian genocide museum explicitly describes how the museum ‘fits’ into or ‘belongs’ to the location on which it is founded: “Set high on a hill, dominating the landscape, it is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. The austere outlines convey the spirit of the nation that survived a ruthless campaign of extermination.” As a visitor it is almost impossible to miss the intertwined relationship between the museum and its location. Being located on a hill, you see Yerevan from above; its human and lively character with mount Ararat dominating the skyline. Especially this mountain has a very strong symbolic power, because this national symbol is clearly visible from the museum but in the same time detained by the Turkish border.

The physical museum is obviously not a ‘window on the actual physical space’, it is that physical space. Or is it? It depends on what we mean by ‘physical space’. In case of the virtual museum, the physical space is the space in which the physical museum exists; the ‘reality’ on which the medium provides a window (cf. Bolter & Grusin, 1999). But, the physical museum in turn aims at depicting another physical space; the space in which the Armenians lived in times of the genocide. Or, to put it differently, the virtual museum remediates the reality of the physical museum, which subsequently remediates the reality of the letters, photos and documentaries (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 45). In fact, one might argue that remediation has no end, as everything is in some sense mediated (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 58).

Even though the qualification of remediation on second thought does not seem to differ that much between the physical and virtual museum, people still experience the physical one to be more real and authentic. This is therefore one of the tricky qualities of the physical museum; it evokes the feeling of ‘being there’ (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 48), but in the same time it is no less a mediation and representation as is the virtual museum.

A tip for the reader of this blog: visit the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. It’s easy to get there, and not even that expensive either. Return flights to Yerevan, Armenia from Amsterdam, Brussels, Düsseldorf or Frankfurt cost between € 550,- (with Aeroflot, transfer in Moscow) and € 1500,- (with Czech Airlines, transfer in Prague), and you can get a budget-hostel for less than € 30,- a night. Once you’ve arrived in Yerevan (allow for some time to transfer flights in Moscow), you can take the efficient subway to get to the centre of the city, from where you can take a bus to the foot of the hill where the museum/memorial is. Armenian language can be a bit tricky sometimes, as not all signs (e.g. on buses and subway stations) are translated into English or even Latin script. It will help if you can read Cyrillic and know some Russian, because some of the (older) signs are easily understandable in that case. Just in case, here are some pointers that should get you there:

Armenian Genocide Museum: Հայոց Ցեղասպանության թանգարանը (Музей геноцида армян)
Memorial: հուշակառույց (Мемориал)
Bus: ավտոբուս (автобус)
Subway: թունել (метро)

Once you’re in the city centre of Yerevan, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute is easily accessible. Just follow the instructions on their website: “From the Sport Music complex or Athena Street walk to the memorial complex approximately 15-20 min walk”. To help you just that last bit further, the memorial complex is located here on Live Search Maps (Google maps has no information on Yerevan). Try to find some signs pointing to the entrance once you reach the hill of the memorial complex that is called ‘Tsitsernakaberd‘ (Ծիծեռնակաբերդ / Цицернакабéрд).

Alternatively, click here for the virtual version of the museum (requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher), which shows you the exact same thing, or does it?

As the text above clearly shows, access is a crucial difference between any ‘physical’ and a ‘virtual’ museum. While the ‘actual’ museum/memorial in Yerevan doesn’t charge for admission to the site, it remains limited in its public access to individuals who ‘happen’ to be at that specific location. As a consequence, it is practically inaccessible to most of the people on the planet. Besides the inhabitants of Yerevan itself, and the surrounding regions of Armenia, the museum/memorial is only available to those lucky few with sufficient economic, political and cultural resources to visit the city. Economic resources, because flying there is relatively expensive (and land-travel problematic from most areas in the world). Political resources, because Armenia has rather ‘problematic’ political relations with two of its neighbors. The country is landlocked between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, and its borders with both Turkey and Azerbaijan are closed to all traffic due to the Nagorno-Karabakh War of the early 1990′s. Finally, potential visitors are required to have specific ‘cultural resources’, because they have to be interested in the Armenian genocide in the first place in order to harness their other resources to visit the museum/memorial.

The virtual museum, on the other hand, only demands one thing of the visitor; to have an internet connection (and to have specific software (i.e. Microsoft Internet Explorer) installed, which is free). The potential pool of visitors to the virtual museum, therefore, is only limited to the number of people on the planet who have an internet connection. Or is it? As a medium, any publicly available website on the internet (such as this one) is in principle accessible to all people who have access to the internet. Nevertheless, actual visitor numbers will be restricted to the people who are interested in Armenia and/or the Armenian genocide. Google finds “about 475″ websites that link to the museum website, and only one website that links directly to the virtual museum itself (which is accessible through a link on the museum website). Therefore, people visiting the virtual museum are not only required to have an internet connection; they should also be interested in ‘visiting’ the museum/memorial site. They will have to actively search for information on the Armenian genocide, and since the only website linking to the virtual museum itself (beside the museum website) is in fact in Armenian, they are most likely to ‘stumble upon’ the virtual museum rather than find it directly. This significantly reduces the potential number of ‘visitors’ to the virtual museum, and thus limits the added ‘advantage’ of the virtual museum over the physical museum.

Nonetheless, for the select group of people who are interested enough in the Armenian genocide and the museum/memorial in Yerevan, ‘visiting’ the virtual version of Tsitsernakaberd is much easier than visiting it in the ‘physical world’. The remediation of Tsitsernakaberd into ‘cyberspace‘ thus potentially enables the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute to communicate its message to an audience infinitely larger than it would have had just a couple of short years ago. Sure, the institute has an extensive website, which may offer even more extensive and up-to-date information on (research on) the Armenian genocide than the actual museum in Yerevan, but simply putting this textual and even photographic information ‘out there’ doesn’t allow the visitor of the website to undergo the experience of ‘going to’ the actual museum/memorial space. It offers a lot of information, but no sense of ‘closeness’. The specific interface offered by the ‘virtual museum/memorial’ can therefore be seen as an attempt to bridge this ‘gap’. The architectural layout of Tsitsernakaberd in physical space is quite impressive, on a hill overlooking Armenia’s capital city with Mount Ararat in the distance (the Mount is one of the most important Armenian national symbols, but it’s located in Turkey – it is also prominently featured on their website, by the way). The institute’s website cannot convey the ‘emotional’ experience of ‘being there’. The “logic of transparent immediacy” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 23) behind the virtual museum remediates the physical space into the web browser of any interested individual, and thus places the online visitor ‘on’ the Tsitsernakaberd hill, in a way striving to a more ‘immersive’ mediation than the regular website offers (see Ryan, 2001; Wurth, 2006, p. 3). With the moderately realistic three-dimensional rendering of the museum/memorial complex filling the computer screen, the interface to the information (and emotion?) becomes immediate – ‘transparent’ to some degree.

“To some degree”, because the user is unlikely to forget that she is “confronting a medium” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 24). Bolter & Grusin’s words apply to the virtual Armenian Genocide Museum/Memorial as well: “We notice immediately the cartoon-like simplicity of the scene […]” (1999, p. 22). It is a ‘window’ on the actual physical space – a remediation of it. It shows a medium (the physical museum) in a medium (the virtual museum). What’s more, it offers new possibilities for navigating the remediated space, finding the information you want, and undergoing the ‘emotional’ experience of ‘being there’.