The role of mobility networks in the practice of spaces. Museum as a space of flows

Communication networks are reshaping concepts of time and space: a new social theory, grounded on the model of network, replaces the notion of space of places with the one of space of fluxes (Castells 1996). According to Castells our contemporary megalopolis are growing by the influence of communication flows while a new architecture of flows is gradually reshaping forms and functions of public spaces and institutional places: city airports, stations and recent museums, like Meyer’s Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona and O’Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, represent some examples of this new direction. (Mitchell 1995, 1999; Castells 1996, 2004). Architectures of flows are gaining an increasing symbolic value due to their role as tourist attractions and related to the new forms of social practice and communication they can fulfill. In this paper I will investigate the idea of museum as space of flows and I will focus on three issues related to tourism practice: virtualization of space, delocalization, colonization of the institutional setting of museum by private communication.