Masters thesis exploring what digital engagement with art becomes when physical space stops being a constraint.

A museum visit is shaped by more than the art on the walls. It is shaped by the scale of the room, the presence of other people, and the freedom to move through a space on your own terms. These qualities are easy to take for granted in a physical context. They are much harder to account for when the collection moves online.

The National Museum holds one of the largest collections of paintings in Norway, and digitising that collection creates an opportunity that most cultural institutions are still figuring out how to use. Simply putting images on a screen is not enough. The question is what kind of experience becomes possible when the constraints of a physical space no longer apply, and what gets lost in the translation.

This diploma explored that question across eighteen weeks in collaboration with the National Museum. The work moved from field studies and expert interviews through to concept development and testing, covering four distinct use cases: someone engaging alone, a group visiting together, strangers encountering each other around the same work, and structured educational contexts. Each brought different demands on what a digital art experience needs to do.

The result is a set of interaction concepts designed to provoke discussion rather than close it. Art is too subjective a medium for one answer to serve everyone, and the concepts reflect that honestly. What they demonstrate is the range of what becomes designable when physical, expressive, and social factors are treated as variables rather than fixed constraints.