I decided to go and have a look at Simon Birch’s (one of Hong Kong’s leading contemporary artists) new multimedia installation project.

This from the programme notes referring to that old chestnut Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’: “In Simon Birch’s intricate, labyrinthine installation project, Hope & Glory, [the] first step of the hero’s journey …. is enacted on myriad levels, across time and space. It is enacted when we step into the immersive environment of the installation; in the memories of wonder and fear that flash through us; in the spectacular collisions of history and imagination that implode around us; and in the multi-sensory pathways that lead us precariously towards the artist’s vision.”

I am so glad I didn’t read the programme before going around the space otherwise I would have had the raging hump (a technical term). As it was, my initial reaction was: “This is what would happen if a 13 year-old could graduate from art school.” Then something happened.

I started to have a reaction to everything I came across. In no particular order: uh?, ooh, bollocks (I inexplicably become foul-mouthed and indignant in contemporary art exhibitions), nonsense, great, shite (told you), cheeky, teenage bedroom, she’s nice, so’s that horse, awwww. Not deep insights, I’ll grant you. But reactions none the less.

More from the programme: “The paradox is that (like any circus) the physical materials from which this experience is created are mundane, of the present world: wood and paint, plastic and metal, computers and holograms. What this means, of course, is that the tools to transport ourselves are already here with us. We only need to understand and assemble them in a new way.” So …. there you have it: apparently you can make interesting things from stuff.

Back in the darkness, a fleet of Star Wars spacecraft was flying from a screen where a couple of blokes were amusing themselves in Halo over a skateboard half-pipe towards a white pile of rubbish surrounded by videos of people covered in balloons and foam blocks.

Many of the works (or “cells” as the programme would have it) were disarmingly personal about their influences – Star Wars, Superman, Halo. So I was surprised when I heard Birch talk about some of the thinking behind the work being a reflection on the hopes and eventual negativity of imperial dreams: Simon Birch talks about Hope and Glory.

In fact, there are supposedly three layers of inspiration – the Hero’s Journey, the hopes and negative impact of Empire, and Circuses (‘cos they were Victorian too). Sorry, I got the circus bit but the rest passed me by. Maybe I’m thick. Or maybe that’s the sort of thing you need to write in proposals to get a government grant for contemporary art these days.

Apart from the exhibits, what’s really interesting about the whole thing was the collaborative process involving around 100 people that it took to put it together. Birch gives you a blow-by-blow account of this at monkeymodified.blogspot.com

This is certainly a major art event for Hong Kong and deserves your support. And it’s not-for-profit. Go and have your own reactions.

It runs at Artistree, 1/F Cornwall House, Taikoo Place, Island East until 30th May. Open 10am to 8pm. Entry is free.

The mind-bogglingly big National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan is a great example of the adage that when you have a collection of great, authentic objects you can let them speak for themselves. For instance, who can argue with a jadeite cabbage?

So the exhibits here are very much conventional art gallery showcases with text-dominated graphic panels. And none the worse for that. However, I was intrigued to find that one of the most popular exhibits is the spectacular scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (traditional Chinese: 清明上河圖; simplified Chinese: 清明上河图; pinyin: Qīngmíng Shànghé Tú).

But rather than display this in the rather traditional way that the vast majority of other exhibits are presented in the museum, they have provided some very effective digital animations at a number of key points along its length. Some are simply beautiful (flying in and around regal pavilions), whilst others are amusing (an old man gesticulates wildly at a boat passing beneath a bridge). I’d like to think that I may have had a small hand in inspiring this exhibit as when I was at MET Studio Design and coming up with ideas for the Hong Kong Wetland Park we designed an exhibit which did exactly this.

As you move the screen over hotspots on the scroll it triggers digital animations and information related to wetland themes. It is one of the favourite exhibits I have worked on.

Once again technology has led one columnist to declare the death of the museum. GoogleEarth and Madrid’s premier art museum The Prado have teamed up to digitise 14 of collection’s masterpieces at a resolution of about 14,000 million pixels (1,400 times more detailed than the image a 10 megapixel digital camera would take). This project allows users to see details of brush stroke and expression online that would be impossible in a gallery environment.

In The Financial Times of 16th January, in a column entitled ‘Galleries, who needs them?’,  Christopher Caldwell’s enthusiasm for a joint project between Madrid’s Prado Museum and GoogleEarth led him to write:

“Should there be museums? Of course. But if we subject them to the same hard-headed de-mystification to which we subject, say, fox hunting, men’s clubs and smoking, and if we exclude social, traditional, moral and mystical justifications as somehow illegitimate, we will find it hard to make a case for them. Art museums will join the list of institutions – newspapers, for example – that are withering in the hot light of information technology, no matter how indispensable to civilised life they may once have seemed.”

There are a number of things wrong with this statement. Firstly, over the last couple of decades many museums around the world have taken great lengths to make themselves and their collections more accessible – even to the point of laying themselves open to the accusation of ‘dumbing down’. Art museums, admittedly, have been a step behind the general trend in museums to become more visitor-friendly but even that has been changing over the last decade.

Secondly, it is a brave man that heralds new technology as fundamentally changing the way we do things. I cannot tell you the number of technology showcases I have worked on in the last 17 years that have featured a fridge that orders your food automatically or a remote control that draws your curtains. We still go shopping and heave ourselves off the sofa at dusk. I suspect that in 50 years’ time we will still be reading books and newspapers, and still be visiting museums.

Tellingly, Mr Caldwell asks rhetorically: “Is the high-quality digitisation of the Prado’s collection not an improvement on the museum in every respect?” The answer to that is simple – “No” – because it ignores two of the most fundamental apsects of museum-going that the public fully understands; authenticity and a sense of a shared experience.

The notoriously snobby Louvre is the most visited art museums in the world, setting an attendance figure of 8.5 million last year, and the majority of people go to see the Mona Lisa. They suffer the queues and poor viewing conditions for one reasons – to be in the presence of a piece of great art. No amount of digitisation can replace that, I’m afraid.

And it has long been recognised that museums are social spaces that build and enrich communities. A bigger screen is not the only reason we still go to the cinema rather than watching DVDs home alone. Museums and art galleries have always been places to promenade, to see and be seen. It reminds me of the Victoria and Albert’s best-known advertising campaign of the 1980s – “An ace café with quite a nice museum attached”.