New media technologies to enhance learning and audience engagement in cultural institutions

New media technologies have drastically changed most aspects of our daily lives in a short time span. They have become ubiquitous in the workspace, they have made their way to our homes and remarkably changed the ways by which knowledge is disseminated. The growing pervasiveness of those technologies has led to fundamental transformations in cultural institutions’ organisational factors on a global scale (Bearman and Geber 2008, 387). New media technologies have also contributed to changing educational institutions on a managerial level and on a pedagogical level; they have paved the way for the digitalisation of the classroom and for more interactive ways of learning, some of whose concepts have been implemented in cultural institutions for the dissemination of knowledge. In this internship report, we will particularly drive our attention towards the use of new media technologies in cultural institutions and to the correlation between those technologies, audience engagement and learning experience enhancement within cultural institutions. It is our belief that such technologies have the potential to enhance cultural institutions’ educational programs, strengthen audience engagement, and create stronger and more genuine links between traditional institutions and the audience. In this report, we will qualitatively and critically shed light on how new media technologies have fundamentally contributed to changing audience engagement and ways of learning within the cultural institution. We will put the highlight on the institutional shifts and extensions that new media technologies gave rise to. Then, we will drive our attention towards the educational possibilities that those technologies have led to, we will see how new media technologies can contribute to improving engagement and learning for audiences with disabilities, and we will, finally, shed light on the experiential metamorphoses that new media technologies have induced within cultural institutions. We will use our case study, which is a Viennese augmented reality application named Artivive, in order strengthen our analyses and respond to our research question