The museum of the Third Kind: in which the author envisions new directions for the art museum as audiences change, architecture evolves, institutions subdivide and electronic resources expand our capabilities and expectations

(24.) Beatrice von Bismarck, "Mit offenem Aus (und Kin) gang: Perspektiven archivierender Praktiken im Kunstfeld," in Kritische Berichte / Ulmer Verein fur Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften: Zeitschrift fur Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaflen, No. 2, 1998, pp. 44-54. See also Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, Beatrice yon Bismarck, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Diethelm Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig., eds., Cologne, Kunstraum der Universitat Luneburg, 2002.

(25.) At this writing, Digital Persona, Inc., is offering a new "fingerprint" mouse, which allows us for the first time to exchange tactility, no matter how limited, at a decidedly modest cost: www.digitalpersona.com. Of course the "digital glove," which has been available in advanced digital labs for quite a long time, makes specially prepared digital objects on a screen quite easy to touch or grasp. (At Brown University in 1995, thanks to the generosity of its then-president, Vartan Gregorian, I caught a ball thrown across the Atlantic Ocean.) And Dimensional Media Associates in New York, commissioned by the Pentagon in the late 1990s, developed a means of "touching" wounded soldiers at long distance.

Douglas Davis is an artist, critic, educator, political columnist and author of The Museum Transformed: Design and Culture in the Post-Pompidou Age, Abbeville Press, 1990. A Web-art pioneer, he created The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum.

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