Digital projects

Research and curating in the digital space

The “Digital Projects” research cluster is one of several research clusters that were established in 2023. Colleagues from various departments work closely together in these research clusters: The curators from the Exhibitions/Collections department, the Deutsches Museum Research Institute and, of course, the Deutsches Museum Digital department. One particular concern is to expand the traditional museum workflow - i.e. planning and organising exhibitions in the exhibition building - to include a contemporary option: digital exhibitions. This format provides the opportunity to present individual special objects as well as thematic or specialised areas for which there is currently no possibility of presenting them in an exhibition. In this way, we are creating additional spaces for communication that extend the museum beyond its physical boundaries and enrich access to our collections in the long term.

A digital exhibition project: The glass fibre dress - a fabric with a particular billiance

We are expanding our exhibition space with digital exhibitions. We can make exhibits accessible to the public that we are often unable to show in our exhibition rooms due to a lack of space. The so-called "glass fibre dress" is one of these exhibits in our collection, whose interesting history, social implications and technical context we want to convey, while we cannot show it in a physical exhibition space.

To create the digital exhibition space, we are providing content ranging from the history of the exhibit and its social connections to the technical context in the form of images, films, sound and texts. We create the exhibition space together with an artistic designer.

We also want to reach a digitally savvy audience. At the same time, we use the Internet to create global links to other exhibits in other museums.