Abstract

This thesis examines the Google Art Project, a division of Google that gathers and curates digital reproductions of museum and gallery holdings. Using the collections of the McCord Museum and Royal Ontario Museum to focus the discussion, I examine the Art Project's practices of collection. Drawing on scholarship in museum and archive studies, digital media and software studies, as well as on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault on the archive and the heterotopia, I argue that the Art Project occupies the positions of hybrid and heterotopia. From this position, I examine the ways that the Art Project re-orders and interprets the items it collects.