Connected by Culture: MAP’s Tech-Driven Museum Model

Technology is not the end goal, it is a means to facilitate deeper engagement, curiosity, and dialogue.

As we think about the future of museums in India, the challenge is not just to preserve history but to remain relevant to the audiences of today and tomorrow. At the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), we engage with a predominantly young audience, an opportunity and a responsibility. This generation navigates a rapidly changing world, shaped by digital culture, shifting identities, and urgent socio-political concerns. To remain meaningful, museums must evolve beyond static displays and authoritative narratives into dynamic, participatory spaces.

Technology is central to this transformation. At MAP, we integrate digital tools to enhance accessibility, interactivity, and engagement. From immersive installations to gamified learning experiences, technology allows audiences to connect with art and history in ways that feel personal and intuitive. While technology is not the end goal, it is a means to facilitate deeper engagement, curiosity, and dialogue.

The pandemic of 2020 saw museums and cultural institutions across the globe working hard to reimagine their programming and shift to the digital medium. We launched as a digital museum during this time and made art collections, online conversations and art history available to people from the safety of their homes. For us, making art accessible and democratic goes beyond opening a physical museum and ensuring that our collections are diverse, eclectic and original. It is inevitable that we adapt to digital mediums to make our collections and museums accessible and available to a wider audience.

At MAP, we believe strongly in the transformative potential of art and how it enriches lives, sparks curiosity and connects people. Our mission to democratise art and reach out to as many visitors as possible pushes us to continually innovate, be it in the nature of programming, education or our digital interventions. At MAP, Bengaluru we integrate technology in a multitude of ways to enhance the museum-going experience. The majority of our audiences are in the 18-25 year old demographic and find comfort in the digital medium. We offer digital interventions that help them engage with art in ways that are meaningful and encourage a deeper curiosity into South Asian art and culture. We use Bloomberg Connects, an app to help audiences navigate the museum. It is available in multiple

languages, and we feature ISL videos and image descriptions on it. It also allows us to look at artworks at home, and listen to audio guides, giving it a podcast-esque experience. The app makes it easier to find your way around the museum, making it an inclusive experience via its language and accessibility features. For those who prefer a more analogue method of content consumption and are looking for an overview of the exhibitions, our curatorial note, wall text and labels provide context and narratives into the curation, along with details of artworks. For art enthusiasts and those interested in the scholarship of art, the publications produced in conjunction with exhibitions offer further insight into the research, contexts and art history of a specific exhibition.

Technology is also used to make the museum experience more engaging. Our auditorium has a 3D screen that allows audiences to experience the magic of 3D. The Sasken Gallery, allows you to look at previous exhibitions, and specially curated stories from the collection. Immersive experiences like the 3D painting allows you to walk into an artwork from the MAP collection and interact with various elements of the painting—sparking great conversations on the art process and details of the artwork in new art enthusiasts. The Kaleidoscope room lets you use artworks from the museum’s collection and your own personal images to create a kaleidoscopic video of them, which is very popular among our visitors.

Our online audience is ten times that of the visitors we get at our physical museum. To cater to our digital visitors we craft unique experiences that allow them to engage with art from anywhere in the world. Online exhibitions allow visitors to experience the essence of a physical exhibition. The curation of artworks within a particular narrative highlights lesser-know stories and historical contexts, making it a creative learning experience for any online visitor. Cumulus is a web-based art collection management system, designed and developed by our in-house technology team to manage the diverse collections, allows users to catalogue, organise, track, search and manage the metadata of the entire collection. By making our collection digitally accessible, we are supporting a new generation of learners and researchers to engage with art history in a more meaningful way, and spurring a new wave of scholarship on modern Indian art.

The video series Museums Without Borders, which was developed during the pandemic, reinvents the way in which ideas and artworks could travel and became a conduit through which museums could share collections, knowledge and resources. Featuring two artworks, one from each of the museum’s collections, it explores artists, themes or a singular motif. The idea is to pair together and create access to artworks separated by borders and create a conversation that builds bridges across time, geographies and cultures.

For many visitors, their phone is the first point of contact with MAP—it is the way they begin their journey. Identifying and engaging with audiences, no matter where they are and providing them with an experience that appeals to them is integral to our vision. We look to our visitors and listen to what they say, so when they engage with the museum that interaction is one that brings them joy and allows them to leave having a better understanding of art than they did before they visited MAP, be it in-person or virtually.

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