Soffvisningar på Moderna Museet : Nya sätt att förmedla och betrakta konst i ett digitalt, interaktivt format via sociala medier

This essay investigates live-streamed guided tours made by Moderna Museet, so called sofa tours, streamed between February 2020­ and April 2021. The aim is to observe, describe and analyze the [Moderna Museet’s] sofa tours using a modality approach as well as relating the sofa tours to physical museum visits, using the concepts of media, mediation, remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy. The research questions concern ways of looking at art when participating in sofa tours and the differences compared to physically viewing art at the museum. In conclusion, the sofa tours made by Moderna Museet offers several alternatives to physical museum visits, not necessarily better or worse. Participants can actually modify their experience of participating in sofa tours and looking at art, for example by choosing to participate live or afterwards, with or without access to other participants comments, questions and reactions as well as choosing between using Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or the museum webpage to access the sofa tours. Comparing sofa tours to physical museum visits showed that both their principal function is to provide opportunities for people to view art together with other people, with or without the aid of a guide. However, most of the mediated space in the physical museum is unavailable to sofa tour participants. On the other hand, the sofa tour creates another set of unique mediations which do not exist in the physical museum space.