The digital non-visitor art in America asks eight specialists to weigh in on new technology and the museum experience.

Art in America invites eight specialists (Orit Gat, Katrina Sluis, Lev Manovich, Maxwell L Anderson, Peter Gorgels, Sree Sreenivasan, Paul Schmelzer, Matthew Israel) to weigh in on new technology and the museum experience. The contemporary museum has audiences that never enter its doors. A curious visitor can take a virtual tour of a hundred museums on the website of the Google Cultural Institute, or browse the online database of the Art Institute of Chicago and use the 'My collections' feature to save favorite works to a personal account. There are other, less intentional ways that the digital non-visitor can come into contact with a message from a museum or a photograph of a work in its collection--a search-engine result, a post on Instagram, a retweet. How do museums turn weak contacts into strong ones? Can they--and should they--adapt their missions to suit the needs of diffuse and distant audiences? We posed these and other questions to a panel of experts, from digital managers and museum directors to critics and theorists. [Abridged Publication Abstract]