Reframing art online through collective meaning-making

ABSTRACT Building on the embodied consumption literature, we draw on Merleau-Ponty’s theory of art to consider how new modes of visibility arise in interactions between individuals online. Focusing on one particular virtual and collaborative museum programme, we use ethnomethodological analysis of interactions to analyse video recordings of virtual arts conversations. The analysis explores how participants render visible their orientation to each other and to the works of art discussed in the workshop. Thus, we can see how participants produce the sense and significance of works of art in, and through ‘intercorporeal interactions’ while participating in a virtual arts programme. Observations and findings from our research have significant implications for the strategic management of virtual consumer experiences.


Introduction
Over the past two decades, consumer research has taken a 'corporeal turn', paying closer attention to the role of embodiment in the consumer experience (Kuuru & Närvänen, 2019;Scott et al., 2017;Stevens et al., 2019).This is part of a wider focus on the multisensory in consumption spaces.For example, recent studies have shed light on affective atmospheres (Biehl & Vom Lehn, 2021;Biehl-Missal & Saren, 2012;Preece et al, 2022;Hill et al., 2014;Steadman et al., 2020), sonic soundscapes (Patterson & Larsen, 2019) and olfactory presences (Canniford et al., 2018) to account for new ways of consumer sense-making.While the visual has been privileged in the focus on the sensory in marketing, the role of the body in what we see and our 'ways of seeing' (Berger, 1972) has been largely ignored, with one notable exception: Joy and Sherry's (2003) study of how the body informs the logic of thinking about and interpreting artworks.
In taking a multisensory and embodied approach to the aesthetic experience, Joy and Sherry (2003) draw on the work of phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty to show how perception and understanding are the product of not only the act of seeing but are also impressed upon the body through various sensations.In exploring the link between the body, vision and the mind, they show the need for marketers to attend to the body for memorable consumer experiences.What is lacking in this analysis, however, is an understanding of how collective meaning-making, or what Rosenthal and Bourgeois (2002, p. 119) term a 'community of meaning', emerges and is negotiated through embodied intercorporeal interactions.While much of the more recent marketing literature on embodiment accounting for the significance of the collective often focuses on group activities (e.g.Kuuru & Närvänen, 2019;Scott et al., 2017), due to the significance of meaning-making and interpretation in consuming art specifically, we suggest that attending to the significance of embodied intercorporeal interactions in the museum context can uncover how meanings are rendered visible for all those 'in perceptual range of the event' (Goffman, 1981, p. 3).Given the significance of the visual in marketing research (Schroeder, 2005), while this article directly contributes to the recent stream of arts marketing research focused on the consumption experience (e.g.Stavraki et al., 2018;vom Lehn, 2006vom Lehn, , 2010)), it also feeds into wider debates on consumer experiences and servicescapes (Kozinets, 2002;Kozinets et al., 2004;Rosenbaum et al. 2011) beyond the cultural sector.
Indeed, the visual, the embodied and the sensory have been noted to be of particular significance in our experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1998), yet all the literature cited above limits itself to physical and face-to-face retail and service consumptionscapes.Arguably, the visual becomes even more significant in the context of virtual experiences where consumers connect primarily through the visual interface of the screen.As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, businesses were forced to close their physical sites and rushed to move their products and services online.Furthermore, due to the increased prevalence of video-mediated communications, bringing consumers together in video-mediated, realtime interactions with one another has become commonplace in a wide variety of experiential settings, from the workplace to educational contexts, and cultural activities.This opens up new forms of embodied experiences that have not yet been examined.
We focus here on one specific live online art event run by a small American art museum on Zoom.In these online sessions, visitor participants are invited to engage with selected works of art and discuss and share their experience of the pieces with each other and with museum representatives.Drawing on video data and using an analytical framework from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we ask what are the new modes of embodied intercorporeal visibility available in the digital consumption of artworks?To answer this question, we turn to Merleau-Ponty's, (1948/2004) theory of art to consider not the physicality of artworks, but rather, the physicality of aesthetic consumption (online).Works of art, according to Merleau-Ponty, are sensuous, making the invisible of our perceptual contact with the world visible and providing us with new ways of seeing and new styles of being.Our analysis focuses on how, via talk and bodily conduct, consumers develop and shape one another's virtual embodied experiences and understandings of the artwork and the world.

Embodiment
Over the past two decades, the turn to the body, widely heralded in the work of anthropological (Douglas, 1992) and sociological theorists (Turner, 1984), has challenged the dominance of mental processes over bodily ones in the fields of marketing and consumer behaviour.This corporeal turn has encouraged scholars in the field to fore-ground the body and explore the embodied aspects of consumption experience.However, much of the research in retail and service settings has had difficulty in moving away from the dominance of the cognitive system and has taken a psychological approach towards 'embodied cognition' (Shapiro, 2014).These studies focus on manipulating individual variables, i.e. haptics, olfaction, taste, vision, and audition to explore their influence on consumers' perceptions and behaviours in retail and service settings.Indeed, despite recognising that experience involves human sensory perception, this body of research mainly frames sensation and perception under cognitive terms and sees the body as a transmission device instead of the locus of an interactive process.
Drawing largely on Merleau-Ponty's (1962, p. 110) notion of 'motor intentionality', which is the spontaneous, non-cognitive and pre-reflective meaningful connections the body establishes with its environment, Yakhlef (2015) criticises interpreting consumers as disembodied agents who are influenced by environmental inputs and expected to display a desired behaviour.Arguing for an embodied perspective, Yakhlef posits that consumption experiences within retail environments should not be reduced to a matter of thought processes, cognitive perception, and mental representations.Rather, 'the unthought, the tacit, bodily skills that guide customers' everyday practices' (Yakhlef, 2015, p. 559), such as sensory perception and body movement should be taken into consideration.The consumer research literature has gone some way to answer this call, providing innovative methodological approaches (Canniford et al., 2018;Hill et al., 2014;Joy et al., 2020;Kuuru & Närvänen, 2019;Patterson & Larsen, 2019;Preece, et al., 2022;Scott et al., 2017) to open up new, more holistic understandings of the role of the sensory in marketing.Given that vision is the one sense that is most privileged in marketing research, it is understandable that most of these studies focus on other senses, i.e. the tactile, the olfactory, auditory, and so on.However, we argue that the role of embodiment in our vision (what we see) has been under-examined, and we build on this body of research to consider the role of embodied vision.

Embodiment and the virtual
Despite the significance of the virtual in our consumer culture, the consumer research literature has, as of yet, failed to account for embodiment online, characterising the virtual as the result of a 'disembodied gaze' (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999).However, it is clear that when we are online, we are still anchored to a body, as is obvious in video-mediated communications where we see ourselves (and others) onscreen, sometimes resulting in an uncomfortable self-consciousness which is evidenced by the numerous Google search results on how to 'hide' oneself on Zoom.As businesses and marketers increasingly establish a virtual presence and engage consumers online via a wide range of online shopping platforms, virtual stores and service environments, virtual tours, online brand communities, and so on and rely on increasingly immersive and interactive sensoryenabling technologies to do so (e.g.virtual reality and augmented reality), attention must turn back to the role of the body.
The work that does exist on virtual embodiment again relies on the theory of embodied cognition.It distinguishes between 'situated' embodiment, which occurs when consumers directly interact with a real stimulus (as is the case in most of the consumer research literature), and non-situated embodiment when de-coupled from the environment, i.e. when symbols representing real stimuli are used but are not actually present (Wilson, 2002) (as is the case online).The marketing studies that have looked at the latter place emphasis on the impact of different online features and interactive sensory-enabling technologies on consumers' behaviours, again taking a fragmented approach to the body and looking at the relationships between specific variables.For instance, Beck and Crié (2018) study the effects of virtual fitting rooms on consumers' intention to visit shops and make a purchase; Aboubaker Ettis (2017) examines the relationship between online store atmospheric cues and customer purchase and revisit intention; Hwang et al. (2020) explore whether interactive background music on online shopping sites affects consumer involvement; and others examine how different touch interfaces trigger engagement (Brasel & Gips, 2014;Chung et al., 2018;Mulcahy & Riedel, 2020).These studies primarily rely on a Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, focusing on 'physiological embodiment', i.e. the body as reacting and adapting to stimuli neurobiologically (having), rather than shedding light on 'enactive lived embodiment' (being, i.e. lived experiences rather than anatomised body parts) (Gärtner, 2013).In this article, we seek to examine consumers' 'enactive lived embodiment' (Gärtner, 2013), acknowledging that knowledge is tacit and bound to embodied activity, so experience and learning is a process of adapting sensorimotor knowledge to appropriately cope with the environment.In doing so, we elucidate how consumers, via their actions and bodily conducts, interact with and engage within virtual experiences.-Ponty's, (1948-Ponty's, ( /2004) theorisation of art examined how the artist's perception is embodied 'into' art.He argued that art is therefore most successful in giving expression to our fundamental contact with being.Crowther (1982) argues that Merleau-Ponty gives us a paradigm for applying the phenomenological to art.For Merleau-Ponty (1962), a 'practical synthesis' is the basis of our contact with things, that is, the body makes our consciousness possible through looking, handling objects, using them, and so on.Consciousness is therefore not solely a mental phenomenon but rather the result of the integration of all our senses, and our knowledge of the world comes through our body's exploration of it.Perception is therefore an encounter with 'meanings' which impress themselves on our bodies in a tangible and dynamic way.The body does not find meaning as pre-existent in the world but brings such meaning into existence in a creative way, through the body.This has been largely covered in the consumer research literature on embodiment beforehand (see, for more, Dion et al., 2011;Min & Peñaloza, 2019;Thompson & Hirschman, 1998).What is more interesting to us here is how the artist, according to Merleau-Ponty (1948/2004), makes such meaning 'visible', and how works of art speak to us.Some meanings, Merleau-Ponty (1960) tells us, cannot be immediately understood; they need to be further articulated.It is the artist who can do so, he tells us.As unique individuals, each person has their own 'style' in relating our body to the world, and the artist's life has been defined by a relationship to a medium (e.g.painting or sculpture).As such, they have learnt how to handle this medium through their body to allow for a fuller grasp on the meanings encountered in perception.What is transmitted to the canvas then is a way of inhabiting, handling and interpreting the world, 'a certain relationship to being' (cited in Lawlor & Toadvine, 2007, p. 255) which physically re-creates a perception.As would be expected, this style changes over time as the artist learns new techniques.According to Merleau-Ponty then, artistic creation is not just a cognitive process but also a physical one.This has implications for how art is consumed, if an artwork is the public embodiment of an individual experience, it creates new possibilities of meanings and can be integrated into the perceptual system of those who encounter it.Indeed, Merleau-Ponty (1960) argues that artworks can give voice to the 'silent' domain of our prereflective contact with the world in a way that language cannot.

Merleau
Artworks therefore move us, quite literally, by engaging our whole being rather than just our minds.In making art, the artist emphasises certain subject-matters while underplaying or omitting others, providing us with an interpretation or evaluation of that subject-matter.In this sense, what is absent or invisible can be as significant as what is not.Our everyday perception means that we cannot take note of all the diverse 'invisible' relations which we encounter.Merleau-Ponty (1960) explains that the artist does not therefore simply reproduce their perception but rather gives us a sensuous interpretation of it.It is therefore important to further consider what meanings become visible to consumers of art through the artist's indirect expression.If the artwork itself is a carnal response to the world and the artwork is an 'enriched being' (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2004), it follows that consumers themselves make sense and interpret the work in an embodied manner.
Joy and Sherry's seminal ( 2003) study pays closer attention to what they term the 'embodied imagination', through which museum visitors perceive and interpret art.In their study, however, Joy and Sherry (2003) are concerned with individuals' embodied art experience without considering the intersubjective aspects of people's engagement with art, particularly significant for art displayed in public places.Whilst drawing on Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodied existence, the two scholars ignore his keen interest in the emergence of intersubjective experiences.In fact, by introducing the concept of 'corporeal intersubjectivity', Merleau-Ponty (1962) highlights the reciprocal relationship between action and experience, as people act on the world, and the world experiences that action.This point has been taken up by Stuart (2012, p. 167) who suggests that 'agent, world, and action are necessarily intricately interwoven, and the agent's body, experience, action and world together shape the way in which she deals with her everyday pragmatic concerns'.By acting in and upon the world, 'we routinely spill over into the bodily experience of others' (Stuart, 2012, p. 170).
Merleau-Ponty's (1962) argument and Stuart's (2012) suggestions drawing on the French phenomenologist neatly dovetail with George Herbert Mead's (1932Mead's ( , 1934) ) view that actors make sense of the world not through introspection but through an active engagement with the world, including interaction and conversations with others.It is through interaction and conversations that actors become aware of divergent interpretations of the world, which allows them to experience the world also from the perspective of others.As people not only experience the world that they encounter but also are aware of how their actions orient to how others experience this world, a 'community of meaning' (Rosenthal and Bourgeois 2002, p. 119) emerges as a result of interaction.The meaning of objects, such as the meaning of works of art, therefore, results from people's interaction with each other.While the artist makes visible the meanings of their embodied work (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2004), consumers experience this work in, and through, their interaction with each other.In our analysis, rather than exploring how meanings are embodied 'into' art as per Merleau-Ponty, we wish to consider how meanings are embodied 'out' of art, in the interaction between people.
Our research builds on Joy and Sherry's (2003) study, focusing on art consumption and examining bodily responses to artworks.Since that study nearly 20 years ago, the role of embodiment in visual perception has received little attention, although it is central to much of our consumption behaviour.We focus specifically on intercorporeal interactions, which Joy and Sherry largely ignore as their data is focused on individual interpretations.Consumer research has long since recognised the significance of communal aspects of consumption, examining brand communities (Cova & Pace, 2006;Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001;Schau et al., 2009), subcultures of consumption (Kozinets, 2001), and online tribes and communities (Brodie et al., 2013;Laing et al., 2011;O'Sullivan, 2010;Wirtz et al., 2013).Similarly, the retail and service literature has also noted the relevance and significance of social interactions, both in customer-to-customer and staff-to-customer interactions, for individual experience and consumption (see, for example, Argo et al., 2005;Borges et al., 2010;Colm et al., 2017;Evanschitzky et al., 2012;Lloyd & Luk, 2011;Nicholls, 2010).Despite this 'symbiotic relationship' between sociality and consumption (Jafari et al., 2013(Jafari et al., , 1731)), marketing research exploring customers' embodied and sensory experiences, both in offline and online environments, primarily addresses the individual experience.This preoccupation with the individual fails to address the complexities of collaborative situations and social contexts in which the consumers' embodied experience typically and inevitably arises, especially in the offline and traditional retail and service environments.A few exceptions include studies by vom Lehn (2006Lehn ( , 2010)), which explore museum visitors' embodied conducts in accompanied visits, and Llewellyn (2021), which explores consumers' embodied conduct when they interact with frontline staff at ticket counters.We draw on this work to further consider the experience of new forms of virtual, communal art spaces.

Research context
As discussed above, much of the current marketing literature on embodied and sensory experience largely focuses on consumers' interactions with real products and physical environments.During the pandemic, many forms of consumption have not only moved online but have also incorporated a variety of interactional and collaborative elements to reflect customers' need for companionship in times of isolation.The advancement of sensory-enabling technologies (Petit et al., 2019), along with the increased popularity of video tele-conferencing software such as Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and so on, opens up new forms of engagement.Not only do these new experiences provide more instant and real-time interactions but they also provide opportunities for richer multi-sensory experiences as well as enhanced personal and interpersonal embodied experiences.Some examples include online bar and club rooms, online auctions and fund-raising events, online virtual tours to museums and tourist attraction sites, online medical consultations, Zoom reading groups, and so on.There is a lack of understanding as to how to engage consumers in these contexts; current research examining virtual communities is largely limited to traditional platforms such as web forums or social media groups (Brodie et al., 2013;Laing et al., 2011;Lima et al., 2019;Zhou et al., 2013).
Over the past decade, museums and cultural organisations worldwide have actively engaged in establishing a virtual presence.This has resulted in a wide variety of institutional websites and online activities hosted on different types of platforms, including but not limited to interactive online galleries, three-dimensional simulators and models, and live recorded conversations between museum staff and visitors (Hecht & Din, 2007;Parry, 2010).However, with doors closed due to the pandemic, museums have accelerated the development of their online programs and created new forms of participation, broadening audiences through widened inclusivity and access (Feinstein, 2020;King et al., 2021).In most cases, these online programs and activities were designed for individual participants (Kim, 2018).Yet, as a response to the lockdowns and resultant demands for virtual connection with other individuals, some museums have recently begun to engage visitors in video-mediated, real-time interactions to view and discuss works of art amongst themselves and with museum staff, beyond the asynchronous forms of interaction that were already available on their official websites and social media pages.
One notable example is a periodic art programme run on Zoom by an American art museum.In each session, visitor participants are encouraged to participate in an interactive and in-depth discussion where they share their experience and interpretation of a few selected artworks.Two representatives from the museum facilitate these sessions: one from the museum's Docent Team (referred to in this article as 'docent') and the other from the Learning and Engagement Team (referred to as 'staff').The docent determines the theme, selects the artworks to be discussed in the session and leads the conversation among the participants, often by raising open-ended and thought-provoking questions and inviting responses from the visitor participants.The staff member is the Zoom meeting host, and for the whole session, shares her screen which features the images of the artwork and takes the main responsibility of controlling the shared screen (changing the images, moving the cursor, etc.).The staff member also supports the docent in leading the discussion when necessary, and sometimes contributes to the general discussion by sharing their own interpretation about the artworks alongside the visitor participants.The number of participants in each session ranges from 5 to 20 people.Participants can make comments or ask questions either by talking or in writing via the chat box.
This art event provides an ideal context to study the virtual, the collaborative and the embodied of arts consumption for several reasons.First, the programme can be regarded as a virtual service encounter where museum staff directly interact with a group of visitors through an informal, educational journey exploring artworks.Zoom is a video-mediated platform, heavily used by many businesses other than the museum under study.Second, as for the collaborative element, this is a group service encounter (Finsterwalder & Kuppelwieser, 2011) in which there are numerous interactions not only between museum docents/staff and visitors but also among the visitor participants themselves.Third, multiple elements of the non-situated embodiment (Wilson, 2002) are present in this research setting.Participants in the events do not engage with the real artwork (the real and physical products) but rather its representation in the form of a 2D image on the shared screen.They also do not engage with the real others but rather their 'user embodiment' (Benford et al., 1995(Benford et al., 1997) ) in the form of video windows often featuring the face and upper body.Fourth, Zoom's ability to facilitate video-mediated interactions and shared screen allows opportunities for new and enriched forms of embodied experience, both personal and intercorporeal, to emerge.Participants in this setting are allowed, to some extent, instant access to others' faces, bodies, talk, and visual conduct as compared to traditional forms of virtual communities such as web forums or social networking sites.

Research methods
This study is less interested in reconstructing the cognitive aspects of the participants' embodied experience, which has been the focus of a majority of marketing research on embodiment.Instead, the article views participants' experience of the virtual event as an active and collaborative achievement that arises in and through interaction with others and aims to shed light on participants' 'enactive lived embodiment'.Hence, the analysis focuses on the ways in which the participants use their talk and their visual and bodily conduct to interact with and within the virtual and collaborative arts environment, thereby shaping their own and influencing others' embodied experience of the artworks, sensing, unpacking, and constructing meanings in the process of these intercorporeal interactions.
Marketing research exploring embodied and sensory experience largely relies on quantitative and experimental research (Bhatia et al., 2021).This research places emphasis on the antecedents and outcomes of the embodied experience, rather than shedding light on the process through which customers use different aspects of their body to interact with the product, and the environment, as well as other consumers and staff.This allows for an understanding of the 'physiological embodiment', the neuro-biological aspect of embodiment, rather than 'enactive lived embodiment', which is the main interest of this article (Gärtner, 2013).The qualitative research exploring embodied consumer experiences usually employs ethnographic, auto-ethnographic and subjective personal introspection methodologies (see, for example, Hill et al., 2014;Kuuru & Närvänen, 2019;Scott et al., 2017;Stevens et al., 2019;Valtonen et al., 2010).These methods have been demonstrated to best capture cognitive aspects of embodied experience, such as how we draw on embodied metaphors to interpret our lived experience, that is 'intelligible embodiment' (Gärtner, 2013;Joy & Sherry, 2003;Stevens et al., 2019).When it comes to 'enactive lived embodiment' and, more specifically, the actions and bodily conduct through which consumers interact with the environment, these methods can fall short of expectations due to their heavy reliance on recollection as well as their inability to capture the spontaneous and pre-reflective dimensions of embodied experience.This is where video recordings provide a better choice, as they capture the event as it happens and provide access to minute details of such actions and interactions.While this type of data has been previously used in marketing (Belk et al., 2005;Llewellyn, 2021;vom Lehn, 2006), it is more common in organisation studies (Hindmarsh & Heath, 2000;Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007) and human-computer interaction (Bowers et al., 1996;Hindmarsh et al., 2000Hindmarsh et al., 2006)).
The data informing this study are video recordings of the virtual and collaborative art programme.A corpus of 40 sessions, each lasting about an hour, was collected.The recordings were recorded in the format captured by Figure 1.As can be seen in this figure, three important elements of collaborative and embodied experience are visualised through this interface.First, it includes the shared screen shown to all participants by a member of museum staff.The shared screen is used to display general information about the session and, more importantly, the 2D images of the artworks.Second, the Gallery View in the Zoom Meeting interface is selected so that all of the small windows showing the face and upper body of each participant (if they choose to turn on their videos) are visible.Third, the Chat Box where participants can post messages is also captured.
Video recordings of virtual multi-party interaction events are a complex type of data, and as such require a particular approach.For data analysis, we draw on the analytical framework of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel, 1967;Sacks, 1992), which prioritises the situated and emergent character of social interaction as well as the participants' perspectives.The analytical framework pays particular attention to how the production and design of each action, whether vocal, bodily or material, is produced in the light of the immediately prior actions of others, and then creates the environment for others to produce their next actions (Heath et al., 2010).This allows for detailed analysis of participants' interaction, both their talk and embodied conduct, and takes into consideration the sequential organisation of action as well as the material environment in which people actually and practically experience artworks.The method is therefore particularly suitable for this study to examine firstly, the 'enactive lived' (Gärtner, 2013) aspects of embodiment (the moving and sensing body) and secondly, the intercorporeal interactions between lived bodies.
Data analysis entailed reviewing all the data and similar events to build up various collections which reflect different phenomena of interest.The analysis then proceeded 'case by case', comparing and contrasting sequences of actions.At this stage, we transcribed the participants' talk using the transcription system and techniques widely used in conversation analysis (Jefferson, 1984) and cognate approaches to the study of social interaction (Goodwin, 1981;Heath et al., 2010).Please refer to the Transcription Notations in the appendix for a better understanding of the transcripts of the talk presented in the Findings section.We then mapped onto the talk transcripts the participants' actions which are visible on screen, including the staff members' movements of the cursor and the changes in the participants' visual orientation as far as they could be perceived in their video windows (Heath et al., 2010).From this, detailed inspections of single instances and comparisons between various fragments, patterns of conduct and interaction started to emerge.In common with more traditional ethnography, the instances discussed in this article have been selected because they clearly reflect the common patterns that have been identified.

Creating an intersubjective experience
In this virtual art programme, the participants are shown successive images that are examined and discussed in turn.The discussion of each piece begins with the staff displaying the image of a work of art on the shared screen before the docent encourages the visitor participants to describe or comment on what they see (please refer to the distinction between the terms 'staff' and 'docent' mentioned in the Research Context section).One of the visitor participants then often volunteers to provide the others with their visual experience of the piece by voicing a short monologue.Consider Fragment 1, in which one participant (V1) provides a description of the artwork shown on the shared screen.

Fragment 1: V1 (Visitor 1), S1 (Staff 1)
The fragment begins when V1 shares with the co-participants how she sees the exhibit.Her talk emerges as an 'online commentary' (Heritage & Stivers, 1999) of what she sees and in what order.V1 highlights a few selected aspects visible in the work, 'a ca:t' (line 1), 'bi:rds' (line 3), and 'a little bird bath maybe' (line 3-4).Each aspect is followed by a location marker revealing wherein the painting the respective object can be seen, 'in the front the:re' (line 1-2), 'on the bottom right' (line 2) and 'in the window' (line 3).
By providing the name of the features along with their location, V1 shapes other participants' experience during this moment.While V1 is producing the online commentary, the museum staff (S1), who controls the shared screen in this session, uses the cursor to point to the aspects of the artwork that feature in V1's talk.The use of the cursor is encouraged by V1's production of a 'nonlexical vocalisation' (Keevallik & Ogden, 2020), 'er: m' (line 2), following the identification of the cat 'in the front the:re' (line 1-2).While the nonlexical vocalisation is produced, the cursor appears in the bottom right corner of the artwork before moving to and encircling the cat (Figure 2) mentioned by V1.As the cursor completes the circle around the cat, V1 voices an affirmative, 'yes' (line 2), and then turns to the next aspect of the artwork, 'bi:rds in the window (.) over there with a little bird (.4) ba:th maybe' (line 3-4) she considers noteworthy.V1's mention of the birds prompts S1 to move the cursor from the bottom of the artwork to the top right where the window is and point to the birds, while V1 continues talking about them and the 'little bird (.4) bath' (Figure 2).The use of the cursor occasions V1 to voice a silent '°yeah°' (line 4), confirming that this is the object she has been talking about.
The analysis of Fragment 1 begins to reveal the 'participation framework' (Goffman, 1981) of the art programme under study and the 'participation status' (Goffman, 1981) that each participant has in the examination of the piece.We can see that during this moment, one of the participants, V1, has secured a turn of talk to share her experience, while others stay silent.Moreover, for one, and only one participant, S1, the work of art is quasi 'in reach' and within the 'manipulatory area' (Mead, 1932) as she is the only participant who can use the mouse to move the cursor (as a virtual extension of a finger) on the shared screen and gesture at artwork features.Through V1's talk and S1's movement of the cursor in the virtual world, an intersubjective way of looking at and seeing the work of art is created.By virtue of talk, V1 vocally highlights some features of the artwork by naming them and providing some descriptions about their positions on the artwork.This talk noticeably shapes S1's cursor movement, via which S1 displays where she looks when V1, through her talk, draws attention to a particular exhibit feature.This cursor movement, coupled with the confirmation from V1, enables V1's experience, which has just been communicated vocally, to be transposed visually onto the shared screen, making it observable and intelligible to others.While not all participants can talk or move the cursor at and around this particular moment, all of them can hear the talk and see the artwork and the actions on the shared screen.The other participants, therefore, are in 'perceptual range' (Goffman, 1981, p. 3) of the interaction between V1 and S1.They see and hear how V1 and S1 experience the work of art in interaction with each other and experience the piece in the light of these observations.The interaction between V1 and S1 provides them with instructions for their own ways of looking at and seeing the artwork.
We, therefore, can see that although the participants differ in their respective participation status in the examination and discussion of the piece, i.e. the observing participants' experience of the artwork arises from their looking at the on-screen actions rather than from talk and gestures at the piece, their simultaneous participation in the session allows them to create, at least for the moment of the interaction, an intersubjective experience of the work of art, which Rosenthal and Bourgeois (2002, p. 119) describe as a 'community of meaning'.

Encouraging a change of perspective
In Fragment 1, the aspects of the piece mentioned by V1 (such as the cat, the birds and the bird bath) are largely discernible objects which are 'easy' to describe and 'easy' to recognise based on the vocal description.Some details of the artworks which are discussed in the sessions, however, are more abstract and are represented in less familiar shapes and patterns.Let us now turn to Fragment 2, in which a visitor (V2) and a museum staff member (S2) work to identify an aspect of a painting for all participants in the session to see.

Fragment 2: V2 (Visitor 2), S2 (Staff S2)
In this fragment, V2 provides a depiction of how she sees the painting.V2 begins her talk by locating a particular object in the painting (line 1-2) before identifying it as 'a rock or something' (line 3).V2's descriptions up until just before she describes the object as a 'rock' encourage the staff member S2 to move the cursor visibly on the screen, resting it near a small beige object near the top-right corner of the painting.On V2's 'something', S2 circles the cursor around the beige object as an attempt to visually identify the object mentioned by V2 (Figure 3).This action occasions V2 to interrupt her vocal depiction of the object, 'it has-' (line 3), and voice a correction, 'no (.) right (.) to the (.) left of tha:t' (line 3-4).V2's utterance occasions S2 to hold the movement of the cursor and noticeably stopping it in the brief pause after V2 says, 'right' (line 4).As soon as V2 finishes her utterance in line 4, S2 moves the cursor to the larger object to the left of the beige object, to which V2 confirms 'yeah' (line 6).While V2 now provides a depiction of the object (line 6-8), S2 uses the cursor to circle and thus visually locate the object in the artwork for all participants to see (Figure 3).
The analysis of Fragment 2 suggests that although, at times, the virtual participants' individual perspectives on the piece diverge, through their actions, they progressively enter the perspective of the other (Mead, 1926), and 'test' if each other's perspective is in alignment and correct the misalignment.V2's talk provides the staff member with the resource to move the cursor, which in return reflects S2's visual orientation and provides the basis on which V2 can tell whether S2 has aligned perspectives with her and can correct any misalignment that happens.V2 is seen to closely monitor and vocally attend to S2's movement of the cursor.In her attempt to correct the staff, 'right (.) to the (.) left of tha:t' (line 4), by using and emphasising the word 'tha:t', V2 turns the location of the cursor into an anchor point from which she provides further instructions so that the right object can be located, thereby gradually assimilating the staff's embodied conduct around the cursor.After V2's 'yeah', in response to S2's corrections, the intersubjective experience of the artwork is established between the two individuals.V2 and S2 thus progressively align their perspectives on the artwork, progressively constructing a way of looking at and seeing the piece while being observed by the participants.The other participants experience the work of art quasi 'second hand' as they see the piece in the light of the interaction of V2 and S2 through which the 'rock' depicted in the painting is identified and located.
Consider another fragment, Fragment 3, in which the participants, V3 and S3, also facilitate a change of perspectives for each other and for other participants.

Fragment 3: V3 (Visitor 3), V3b (Visitor 3b), Staff 3 (S3)
The staff S3 shows a photograph that depicts a self-portrait of an artist.In the photograph, the artist looks into the camera while holding with his right hand a walking stick that has a top made of a small skull.Before turning to the skull, V3 describes more generally some of the visual features of the photograph.She, for example, highlights the softness of the artist's looks (line 1), refers to the softness of his hair (line 2) and skin (line 4) and then turns to talk about the walking stick.As she refers to the softness of the way in which the artist's hair is depicted in the photograph, V3 visibly lifts her left arm and gestures in front of and towards the screen (Figure 4(a)).Together with the talk, her gestures embody her experience of the photograph.
Subsequently, V3's turn to the design of the walking stick occasions S3 to manipulate how the participants can see the photograph.V3's suggestion that she is uncertain about the material of the walking stick, 'I don't know if that is wood or metal, (.) it=it's hard to tell erm' (line 5-6), encourages S3 to activate the cursor (Figure 4(b)), preparing to change how the artwork is displayed on the shared screen.First, the shared screen is changed to a view in which there is some text information besides the photograph (actually at this moment, the staff accidentally changes to the next slide, which is the information slide that the docent often uses to provide extra background information about the artwork after the discussion has ended).About a second later, the staff changes to the previous slide again and zooms in to show more detail of the top of the walking stick (Figure 4(b)).The zooming in on the top of the walking stick begins just when V3 says 'definitely'  (Figure 4(b), line 7).The staff's action, which is visible on the shared screen, occasions a brief perturbation in V3's talk, 'okay that is (.2) s-so:ft (.2) you wouldn't expect that to be soft to the touch' (Figure 4(b), line 7-8), through which she displays her surprise about the look of the skull before bringing her talk to a close (line 8).
In Fragment 3, through her talk, which displays her difficulty in seeing/understanding an aspect of the artwork, V3 encourages S3 to change how the artwork is shown on the shared screen.The zoomed-in display allows V3 to better examine the detail of her interest, find an answer to her initial puzzlement, and have a change of perspective.This action of S3 also provides other participants with a different view of the piece that enables them to align with V3's discovery about the design of this particular exhibit feature.
We can also begin to see that save for the visitor's talk and the staff member's movement of the cursor, the actions which are visible in the video windows are relevant to the ways in which participants in the virtual art event experience the works of art.We can see that other participants occasionally produce minimal vocal responses, such as V3b's brief utterance of 'yah' (line 3), which displays his alignment with V3's description of the softness of the artist's hair.Save for V3b's utterances, we can see that the other visitors move their heads and bodies in front of their cameras, but otherwise display little, if any, response to V3's talk.It might be noteworthy though that when another visitor in the session, V3c, who seems to have been engaged in a different activity (perhaps reading) while V3 talks about the photograph, notices that the focus of the image has been changed, she turns to the screen and then leans forwards to inspect the image.
By examining Fragment 3, we can begin to see how the participants in the virtual arts programme display and share their experience of aspects of the work with others.The analysis suggests that the participants do not use a 'disembodied gaze', as Murray and Sixsmith (1999) argue, but that they employ their body to produce talk and gestures, allowing them to provide others with a way of looking at and seeing the photograph.Other participants in the programme orient to their description and display an alignment with the 'way of seeing' (Berger, 1972) offered by the talking participants and the actions of the museum staff on the shared screen.In fact, we see how the talking participants can extend beyond their own bodies through their interaction with the staff and this then presents certain visual orientations and perspectives to the other participants.Thus, we see how the participants in the programme are involved in each other's orientation to the work of art, and how their actions 'routinely spill over into the bodily experience of others' (Stuart 2012, p. 170).

Embodying the experience of a virtual artwork
In the discussion of Fragment 3, we have begun to see how other participants display their alignment with the ways of seeing offered by the interaction between the staff and the talking visitor.The analysis of Fragment 3 suggests that in the virtual workshop, participants' actions in front of their cameras are not only visible to the staff and the talking visitor but also make visible how those not talking orient to the piece.Let us turn to the final fragment, Fragment 4 and explore further the participation in the virtual art workshop.Figure 5a shows the participants and their visual orientation before the fragment begins.Prior to the beginning of this fragment, there has been some discussion on different horizontal lines that can be seen in the artwork.Fragment 4 begins when the docent D4 adds to the discussion by saying 'Yes (.) isn't it sort of parallel?' (line 1).As the docent voices her description of the design of the picture, she raises her right hand in front of the camera of her computer and forms a kind of bracket with her fingers as her thumb and index finger are stretched out, while the three fingers in the middle are folded in.During her utterance in line 1 and the pause after that (line 2), D4 successively embodies and reembodies the parallel structure of the photograph with by moving her hand horizontally across the screen twice (Figure 5(b)).This talk and the accompanied hand gesture of D4 are clearly visible and oriented to by other participants.They occasion V4b, V4c and S4 to nod several times and V4a to visibly nod and say 'yes'.
The docent D4 then suggests with a smirk that the use of parallel lines in artworks might have been a noted topic in the participants' art education in high school and college (line 3), encouraging the staff S4 to move the cursor along the pavement at the bottom of the picture (Figure 5(b)).This talk also encourages V4b to smile and 're-enact' (Tutt & Hindmarsh, 2011) the parallelism of the structure of the picture, with both her hands moving across her face (Figure 5  The analysis suggests that the participants in the session, the visitors as well as the museum staff/docent, monitor and attend to each other's actions which are visible on the screen and audible through the loudspeakers of their computers.They not only vocally describe how they look at and experience the piece, but through their actions, display their experience of the artwork.In the case at hand, the docent uses her talk and gesture to embody the parallel lines in the work that she considers noteworthy.The staff as well as some of the visitors visibly attend to the docent's actions by moving the cursor (S4) and producing actions that display an alignment with the docent's way of seeing the work of  art -the nodding (V4a, V4b, V4c and S4) and the re-enactment of the gesturing (V4b).Thus, the participants in the session actively engage with the world presented to them on screen, i.e. the work of art, the cursor moved by staff, the images of the participants and their visible actions, and the talk and audible comments and assessments.By engaging with this world, vocally and bodily, the participants display how they interpret the artwork and find out about each other's interpretation of the piece.Thus, they momentarily create a 'community of meaning' (Rosenthal and Bourgeois 2002, p. 119) and shared experience of the work of art.

Theoretical implications: embodied vision
This article contributes directly to the field of arts marketing and museum studies by examining arts consumption in a virtual museum programme.Despite both conceptual and empirical work examining people's accompanied encounters with cultural offerings, the literature has all but ignored virtual forms of cultural consumption.The predominant focus remains on encounters that happen on-site, in traditional and physical cultural settings where people have physical access to cultural objects and face-to-face encounters with one another.Although some attempts have been made to understand visitors' personal and individual engagements with museums' virtual offerings as well as asynchronous interactions among art consumers on text and image-based platforms (see O'Sullivan, 2010 for example), current research exploring virtual arts experiences has been slow to catch on to the burgeoning emergence of video-mediated and real-time interactions among arts consumers.This article seeks to extend the current arts consumption literature to understand how the museum experience translates to the virtual world, taking an approach that focuses on the interactional production of the embodied experience of works of art.Thus, this article pursues an interest in understanding how live social interactions emerge and underpin the co-creation of aesthetic experiences on online platforms resulting in new ways of seeing, or at least, new interpretations of artwork.
Despite the work of Joy and Sherry (2003) on the significance of the body in art consumption, there remains relatively little knowledge of the processes of action and interaction, both spoken and embodied, through which people collaboratively examine artworks.In taking an 'enactive lived embodiment' (Gärtner, 2013) perspective and drawing on Merleau-Ponty's (1948/2004) theorisations of the artist's body, we focus on how new modes of visibility emerge when we consider the embodiment of arts consumers.We see that the 'creativity of perception' is not just embodied into art but also out of it.Therefore, we echo Joy and Sherry (2003) in arguing that understanding and interpreting a work of art is much more than a cognitive process.Although virtual viewers have been considered to have a 'disembodied gaze' (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999), our analysis shows that this is not the case and in fact, the consumption of art online also results in a 'sensuous interpretation' (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/2004).Meanings and interpretations are encountered physically, even when non-situated and the object is at a (virtual) distance.We see this in the ways in which our participants guide each other through their reactions and understandings of the paintings by trying to demonstrate and share their individual orientation to the artwork.Through their talk, the participants inform others of their orientations, and through the use of the cursor, the members of staff make these orientations visually accessible to the other participants through the shared screen.The cursor acts as an extension of the hand, a bodily auxiliary which transmits the embodied vision the artist (within the artwork) to the participants.Much like an artist learns new techniques and changes their embodied relationship with the medium, online viewers can extend themselves via a range of interactive practices through which they change their own embodied relationships with the artwork resulting in new and collective ways of seeing.Our analysis focuses primarily on how a visitor's interpretation can impact the actions and experience of other participants and how an intersubjective experience arises from this process, so each of our data fragments centres on the moment one visitor shares their interpretation with the group.However, it is clear that more complex group conversations arise within these 'communities of meaning', and further research could build on our findings, drawing these out in more depth.
Our findings serve to highlight how important the individual viewer's orientation and embodiment are to the way in which they see, and how this needs to be aligned to the orientation of others in order to become 'collective'.Indeed, it is in cases of misalignment (e.g. when the staff points to the wrong part of the painting) that we understand the complexities of seeing.Merleau-Ponty (1960) argues that perception is creative, calling meaning into existence through the senses, and we see this in practice in our data.The 'further possibilities', which Merleau-Ponty suggests artists can see and then embody in their art, do not end with the artwork, rather they are carried through to the consumer.Due to what Merleau-Ponty coins our 'intentional arc', whereby the skills and techniques we pick up inform future perceptions, novice and expert art consumers will have varying interpretations of the artwork depending on their familiarity with the artist, genre and style (Stavraki, et al., 2018).Over time, we would expect the perceptual style of the artist to become integrated into that of the consumer as they gain an understanding of it.
It is also important to consider how the artwork makes visible certain perceptual meanings at the expense of others, bringing to light what was previously invisible.Indeed, in our virtual context, due to the way in which the art -and the consumer -is 'reframed' on screen, we see how an absence of physicality impresses on the ways in which the art can be viewed and therefore interpreted.There is a greater need to rely on the verbal which allows for more detailed discussions, focusing on the micro rather than the macro, so it is the details that stand out, details that may not have been easily visible on the museum wall.Through the use of the zoom function, participants can view the work up-close (closer to how the artist saw the work), something which is not possible in the traditional museum setting but at the same time at a digital remove, away from the usual hustle and bustle of the museum.It makes it easier to see the artist's embodiment, that is, the physicality of the painting process, the brushstrokes (one participant, for example, notes the textures of the mountain being similar to those of the trees in the painting discussed in Fragment 2).In turn, that becomes incorporated into the viewer's own body, and this suggests a change in the relationship between the artist, the artwork and the viewer.Of course, our ways of seeing (just like our forms of embodiment) are culturally learned, and there is significant scope for further research to draw out different ways in which vision is embodied across various contexts.Ultimately, these new modes of seeing (online) deserve further attention in marketing as they are central to consumption in consumer culture.While there has been much interest in how the virtual has reframed marketing practice, the implications of this at a more micro-level have not yet been unpacked.This article starts to do so by focusing on the visual in particular.
Furthermore, this article also adds to recent studies in the field of marketing that have for the use of video data as an insightful means to explore consumers' consumption experiences (Belk et al., 2005;Rokka et al., 2018).More specifically, this study demonstrates that video data, when used along with the analytical orientations from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, offer a reliable and effective way of capturing and analysing individuals' bodily conduct as well as visible and embodied aspects of social interaction.This methodological and analytical framework prioritises the participants' perspectives as well as the situated and sequential characters of social actions, and it is therefore particularly suitable when portraying the active role of consumers' bodies in creating their consumption experience, as well as when exploring the collaborative aspects of this embodied experience.In this particular context, it was significant in picking up on the micro-responses to the specific artwork that would have been lost with other methodologies.However, it is worth noting some limitations.For example, in some cases, the intersubjective responses of certain participants who were not talking were difficult to observe, or impossible if they chose not to switch on their videos.

Practical implications: the significance of the social
The findings suggest that in the online consumption context under study, the social, through intercorporeal interactions, enhances individual consumers' embodied and sensory experiences in two significant ways.Firstly, social interaction enhances and enriches individuals' embodied experience of the objects, largely by allowing individuals momentary access to resources that are needed for enhanced embodied experiences but are initially, and typically, unavailable to them.Secondly, social interaction allows individuals access to one another's embodied experience, which consequently enhances each individual's experience.Via social interaction and a wide range of talk and visual conduct, participants participate in a process of displaying, discovering, comparing and aligning one another's embodied experience.They not only develop their own embodied experience but also display it via verbalising and embodying their experience so that others can see, which enhances and alters their own but also others' virtual embodied experience.
Current research on embodiment and sensory marketing, especially in virtual environments, focuses largely on controlling sensory aspects of products and retail and service environments to enhance customers' embodied experience (Petit et al., 2019).This article shows that interactions with others, including both staff and other customers, should be regarded as a key way to enrich consumers' embodied and sensory experiences.The article therefore highlights the importance of facilitating intercorporeal interactions in virtual and collaborative retail and service encounters.Rather than relying solely on developing and introducing sensory-enabling technologies and resources, marketers should further consider the interactional and collaborative aspects of the online experience.Providing consumers with real-time and video interactions with staff and other consumers could also be highly relevant to small and medium businesses and organisations who do not have the financial resources required for the latest cutting-edge sensoryenabling technologies or those whose consumers who are not technically savvy.
The analysis also reveals some problems participants have when trying to display, compare and align their perspectives in the virtual environment.The observations and insights from this research may have a bearing on the evaluation and redesign of current online platforms in this specific case, for example, collaborative arts encounters.This is particularly significant given the emergence of a virtual art world and its monetisation, as signalled by the recent rise of non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) and significant interest in the aesthetic experience of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.Indeed, we highlight the affordances (or limits) of the interface used.For example, although our participants join a shared common 'room' on Zoom intended for collaborative art consumption, many aspects of their experience remain personalised and inaccessible to others and, in many cases, cannot be made visible to others.In designing a virtual space and system for people to collaboratively engage with artworks, it is important to provide participants with the resources to better access each other's experience and transpose actions to the mutually examined cultural objects.For example, while the online interface now allows access to the face and upper body of participants, perhaps running the workshop in a virtual 3Denvironment and using digital avatars could allow for participants to better orient their embodied visions towards the artwork and each other; a lower-tech solution might be to allow selected participants to highlight aspects of the artwork using their mouse.The use of the cursor and the zoom-in and zoom-out functions remains a very simple and crude representation of participants' embodied conduct, which emerges as a possible area for further improvement.More customised interfaces are needed, allowing for instances of intercorporeal interactions for remote consumers to discover the product/services in a more social way, turning an individual 'way of seeing' into a collective one.Further research and practice can also consider other functions of Zoom such as reactions symbols (i.e., thumbs-up, clap, heart, joy, open mouth, and their equivalents, which despite not being used by the participants in this research, and as such not being interwoven with the analysis, prove to be interesting resources for exchanging opinions and establishing communal experiences).
Examining people's interaction with computer-based exhibits or 'interactives', Heath and vom Lehn (2008) and Heath et al. (2005) have pointed out the dilemma between 'interactivity' and social interaction.To be more specific, these studies suggest that that many interactive exhibits and technologies, despite enhancing 'interactivity' and individual engagement with objects, might do so at the cost of social interaction and coparticipation.The findings from this article contribute further to this dilemma, arguing that a pervasive practice by museums is relying on available platforms provided by third parties such as Zoom to host their collaborative arts consumption event.However, these online platforms are designed with a focus on social interaction rather than 'interactivity' and, more specifically, the ability for individual participants to freely interact with the artworks discussed.The article suggests that attention should be paid to facilitating both 'interactivity' and social interaction in the virtual platforms.

Conclusion
Grounded in a virtual consumption setting, our findings contribute directly to the existing body of knowledge on embodiment in marketing and consumer research, which has yet to properly analyse new forms of embodied experiences that have emerged, along with the increasing prevalence of virtual retail settings and servicescapes (Stevens et al., 2019).In the context of these online experiences, the visual experience and the vision, which have been most privileged in sensory marketing, become even more important.Our analysis has explored the role of embodiment in consumers' 'ways of seeing' and sense-making and demonstrated that geographical separation no longer undermines possibilities of intersubjective experience; however, this experience takes significant work and is dependent on expert facilitators as well as virtual tools.We show that art institutions such as museums can complement their on-site offerings through virtual offerings, which present a different form of 'sensuous' and 'visceral' insight into an artwork.While our findings recall Hindmarsh et al. (2000Hindmarsh et al. ( , 2006)), identification of 'fragmenting interaction' and 'hidden perspectives', which are the problems participants encounter when exchanging object-focused interaction in collaborative virtual environments which the authors call the 'immaterial world', they also show how through their vocal and bodily actions participants actively overcome these constraints.This article deepens our understanding of the ways in which initially unrelated bodies come into contact, directly shape their experience of one another, and establish a collective meaning and visual experience despite being at a distance.We therefore call for further research in marketing, which moves from a 'physiological embodied' approach to an 'enactive lived embodied' approach (Gärtner, 2013), giving fuller attention to consumers as embodied, social agents, who even when they are physically alone are part of 'communities of meaning'.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The cursor movement performed by S1 on the shared screen.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.The cursor movement performed by S2 on the shared screen.

Figure 4a .
Figure 4a.V3 embodying her experience of the photograph.

Figure 4b .
Figure 4b.The Zoom-in performed by S3 on the shared screen.

Fragment 4 :
D4 (Docent 4), V4a (Visitor 4a) (c)).A moment later, D4 continues her talk by describing the parallel lines (line 5), both vocally and gesturally (Figure 5(b)), occasioning V4a to again confirm that she has recognised the line by nodding three times, while S4 moves the cursor along the bottom of the building and then moves it up and along the line of the building's roof (Figure 5(b)).