DRESDEN.- The Gem鋖degalerie Alte Meister of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden is opening a counterpart in the desert. But only in the virtual world, of course. The three-dimensional clone of the museum can be visited in Second Life�. The magnificent rooms of the museum are reproduced true to scale, and all 750 masterpieces in the exhibition are on display. The doors are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Visitors can view the art, chat with each other, access information about the works of art, participate in art education events, note their impressions in the guestbook or browse in the shop � all in real time.

No previous reproductive medium has so far succeeded in providing such an effective spatial impression of a museum visit in real time, even though the history of museums has always been intimately bound up with the history of reproductive media. For example, in 1753, shortly after August III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had opened the Gem鋖degalerie in Dresden, the 揔鰊igliches Galeriewerk� was published, presenting the highlights of the collection in the form of large-format engravings. Over the centuries, new media have constantly been used, from photography to the CD-ROM. It is a logical step in the historical development of the media that we should now take on the challenge of experimenting with the possibilities presented by Web 2.0 technology, so as to provide a worldwide community with access to a 3-D virtual reproduction of the museum.

Dresden抯 Gem鋖degalerie Alte Meister is the first museum of international rank to have responded to the new challenges of the web by producing a genuine 1:1 clone of itself. This concept is therefore fundamentally different from the many purely fictitious museum creations on the web which have no counterpart in real life. In the year of the Documenta and the Biennale di Venezia, such phenomena raise crucial questions that touch on the identity and sense of purpose of museums in the 21st century. We regard the virtual presentation of the Gem鋖degalerie Alte Meister as an experiment in which we do not yet know what the 憆esidents� in the artificial Internet world will make of this unique opportunity. The Institut f黵 Kommunikationswissenschaft at Dresden University of Technology will supervise the project under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Lutz M. Hagen.