Museums and Web 2.0 – an illusion of access?

During my online search I found this interesting research proposal by Lena Maculan, PhD candidate at the department of Museum Studies of the University of Leicester (UK): Museums, Web 2.0 and the illusion of access: The divides and challenges of the new publishing and broadcasting models of communication for Europe’s digital culture.
http://www.impala.ac.uk/projects/museumstudies.html

In this abstract Lena Maculan reflects about how museums could make their collections more accessible. Her research aims to extend existing theories on interactivity, accessibility and user empowerment. Furthermore, she wants to theorise the shift from the traditional museum to a web 2.0 memory institution. In this context, the author questions the notion of access: “Over the last years many cultural heritage institutions have undergone extensive digitization projects. Every day more and more information from and about museums, is uploaded to the World Wide Web. Yet, it seems that the massive amount of digitized cultural content, produces an illusion of access.”

Maculan has a particular interest in podcasts as a new communication medium for cultural heritage institutions. In Web 2.0 times users have increasingly diverse options as to where they retrieve information from. In addition to that, information retrieval becomes increasingly mobile, as more and more services are offered on mobile phones and PDAs. This allows the audience to be more selective about when and how to access information.
This brings me to another interesting experiment about podcasts in museums: I came across the art mob project of a student group of the Marymount Manhattan College in the United States. They are creating, unofficially, audio guides for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“MoMA of course already offers audio guides (for a nominal fee), but we want to make our own, and to invite others to do so as well (…) we are democratizing the experience of touring an art museum; we are offering a way for anyone to “curate” their own little corner of MoMA. I’ll give you a taste: One of our audio guides captures the smart, irreverent banter between a student and an art history professor as they view works by Chagall and Picasso. Others offer music composed and performed by student musicians inspired by several art works.” (David Gilbert, member of the Art Mob group)
For more details check here: http://mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/
These podcast interventions are a way of “remixing” shows with different opinions, soundtracks or also critical questions. This opens a new perspective on the role of art history and the general theoretical approach towards artworks – and provides a genuine 2.0 experience.

MINERVA – Digitising Content Together

http://www.minervaeurope.org/home.htm

This website gives a good overview about cultural digitisation projects all over Europe and lists national competence centers as well as best practice examples. MINERVA aims at improving accessibility to and visibility of European digital cultural resources since 2003.
This EU-funded project (within the framework of IST) is a network of Member States’ Ministries to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content for creating an agreed European common platform, recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation.

What are the outcomes of this project so far?

Minerva has established an extensive editorial collection in order to supply the visibility to the results of its working groups and NRG activities along with a Good Practices handbook which can be inspiring for decisionmakers in the cultural field. Furthermore, they have set up national competence centers as key advisors for cultural digitisation projects in the respective EU member states. Those competence centers vary widely in each country – usually those centers are run by national libraries, museums, archives, universities or dedicated digitisation bodies. Another relevant outcome is the ongoing list of digitisation guidelines, which are interesting for any memory insitution which plans to extend their activities on the digital field. The selected guidelines, which are permanently updated, have been produced by public and private institutions. Some are for guiding the digitization projects, others are related to digitization programs where the Guidelines want to reach the strategy and mission of single institutions – the criteria followed for inclusion was that of general interest for professionals worldwide.

Weblog on virtual museums and metamuseums

http://www.virtual-museum.at

The Virtual Museums-weblog is aimed at communicating and discussing development concerning virtual museums and meta museums both on the net and elsewhere. They provide an interesting overview of web resources about digital museums and online museology, as well as information on museum ontologies and metadata in general.

However, it seems that this weblog has not been very active lately. Some of the articles are outdated in the meantime. But there are some interesting texts, like the reflections of Werner Schweibenz on the shift of traditional museums into memory institutions. He shows how digital media influences the curatorial practices in European museums. Furthermore, he compares a variety of definitions of museums and shows how much these concepts have changed over the last years. And I found this quote of Tomislav Sola, which I regard as essential concerning the future development of museums worldwide:
“When we are collecting objects we are collecting information” “The traditional museum piece, an item, a three-dimensional fact, is only a datum among a complex of museum information, of a message. We do not have museums because of the objects they contain but because of the concepts that these objects help to convey”.

Unlocking the Value of Cultural Memory – The DigiCult Report 2002

http://digicult.salzburgresearch.at/

The DigiCult report by Salzburg Research provides recommendations for decision makers of European archives, museums and policy makers.
This paper presents the results of the strategic study “Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy – DigiCULT” completed at the beginning of 2002. The report covers the topics: national policies & initiatives, organisational change, exploitation, and technologies for cultural heritage institutions. Furthermore, it addresses the key issues that were selected on the basis of input from over 180 experts and provides recommendations for policy and decision makers in the cultural heritage sector.

The Role of Museums in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage

http://www.mincultura.gov.co/patrimonio/patrimonioInmaterial/secciones/descargas/documentos_unesco/roles_of_museum_in_safeguarding_pci.pdf

This UNESCO position paper for the Expert Meeting April 5-7 2004 gives a good overview on how UNESCO and ICOM envision the future roles of museums when it comes to safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage. It focuses on two questions:

1. How can museums contribute to safeguarding living heritage, especially on the level of local communities?

2. How can museums contribute to the visibility of forms of living heritage, in accordance with the aims of the UNESCO Convention 2003?

The Mobile Museums – Interview with Hans J. Wiegner

Interview with the Berlin-based artist Hans J. Wiegner, initiator of the Mobile Museums, a travelling artists museum, together with Susa Pop, cultural manager in Berlin.

A Travelling Artists Museum
The Mobile Museums, supported by the European Commission / Culture 2000 programme, challenged the traditional notion of a museum as a continuous memory institution with a permanent residence.
The Mobile Museums tour from Berlin over Vienna to Barcelona was conceived as a Travelling Artists Museum. Public Art Lab Berlin, an interdisciplinary platform for intercultural exchange, invited artists to design their individual museum.

Modular Space Structure
Each artist received a construction kit consisting of modular recycled sheets with which to build an individual museum whose floor area could measure a maximum of 10 square meters. The three Mobile Museums were designed by German artists Hans J. Wiegner and Franka Hoernschemeyer, together with Austrian artists Gilbert Bretterbauer and Hans Joachim Roedelius. The three individually designed museums were accompanied by the Mobile Museum Studio.

Mobile Museum Studio
The Mobile Museum Studio’s programme was curated by the cooperation partners in each city, and were located centrally due to the programme, which included artists living in each city. These urban interventions have so far been characterized by an inclusive, open art process that allows for an intense dialogue between local visitors, the artists and the adjacent institutions.

When I asked Hans J. Wiegner how the concept of the Mobile Studios evolved he refered to Mark Rothko first. „He did not like big museums“ explains Wiegner, “he would have rather prefered a number of small museums, spread all over the country, each of them devoted to one particular artist.“
Wiegner also likes the idea of the museum as a small, accessible cultural space where people quickly check in and out while roaming the streets of a city. „I think that our cities need more museums as perception cells, which are placed in the middle of the streets. You just enter them and you experience a different atmosphere from the world outside. This is an instant way to mediate art and culture – and it happens right there where the people are: in the streets.”
Usually, people visit museums on Sundays or during vacation. Those small Mobile Museums provide immediate access to culture in the midst of the urban sprawl. The Mobile Museums are also a site for artistic interventions in the public space, thus enabling manyfold experiences about the living culture of a particular place. And it seems to be a good instrument to showcase what you call intangible cultural heritage also. A mobile structure definitely offers a broader array of opportunities than a permanent residence, because you can always keep track with developments in a city and go to where the people are.

Heritage Troubles – extracts from an interview

On Saturday, June 30th 2007, I met Mr. Rudolf W. for an interview in Munich / Germany. We talked about his work at the association of non-governmental museums in Bavaria and his private collection of luxury paper, which can be regarded as very substantial.

I will upload the audio file of the interview as soon as I will have edited it. In the meantime, I will try to give an overview of the most significant things that have been said during the interview.

One of the most interesting issues for me was Mr. W’s outlook for the regional museums in the South of Germany. There are many voices in international museum & cultural studies research who prognose a growing interest in regional museums and regional cultural events. A broad diversity of festivals, from historical events up to local fairs and market days, are being arranged. In Castells’ second volume of his trilogy about the network society, The Power of Identity, he describes the growing interest in “local identity” as the chance and the power of local culture, as it offers “resistance to the centrifugal force of capitalist globalization”.

However, Mr. W has a different opinion on that. He stressed the fact that it is getting increasingly difficult for regional museums to a) cope with enormous bureaucratic demands, b) raise money for the acquisition of new artefacts, but also for the maintenance of what is already in storage and c) develop strategies to get people’s attention within a “museumisationalised society.”

(remark by the author: In Germany we use the word “Musealisierung” to describe the contemporary vogue for the institutionalisation of cultural memory – I know that there is the English term “museumisation” – but I don’t know if it is grammatically correct to speak of a museumisationalised society – well, dear commenters, feel free to correct me.)

“We have more than 1.100 non-governmental museums all over Bavaria”, Rudolf W points out. “and still they are growing in numbers. This means also that they really have to compete for people’ s attention.”
Mr. W is not the only one to raise these issues. Eva Sturm, author of the book “Konservierte Welt – Museen und Musealisierung” suggests that museumisation is more and more becoming a lifestyle or a social movement.
Indeed, there has never been such a multitude of museums worldwide. According to that we are witnessing a shift from the preservation responsibilities from memory institutions, which are traditionally assigned with the preservation of cultural heritage, to institutions and private persons outside of the museum domain.
Mr. W is a good example for that, too. He has been collecting luxury paper for many decades now and meanwhile has created a large private collection. When I asked him what he wishes to do with this collection, he replied: “the best thing that could happen is that one of my sons would continue the collection. However, they do not have this interest and a collection which is not actively taken care of is not really a collection any longer.” When I pointed out the possibility to donate the collection to a museum, he immediately refused that. “No way”, said Mr. W, “I know where the collection would end up – in the storage. And that’s not the place where I want to see it.”
Here we touched upon a really interesting issue: there is so much to inherit these days. Not only money, but also an incredible amount of cultural goods, both tangible and intangible. But if the heirs are not ready to accept the legacy (and the reasons can be manifold: not enough time, not enough expertise on the respective field, a lack of interest…) – what is going to happen with the cultural heritage?
Mr. W told about a collector’s meeting he recently attended. Many of the participants have been in their Seventies and talked about what might happen to their collections after their passing. And nearly everybody had the problem that they had sons and daughters, but no heirs who deliberately wished to safeguard what has been established by their fathers. “And here I see a major cultural change” said Mr. W. “Whereas in the old days Germany has been the land of private collectors and hobby historians, those collectors and safeguarders are about to disappear from our society.”

That’s a clear contradiction to what I have stated above: that the safeguarding of cultural heritage shifts more and more to places and people outside of museums.
But probably Mr. W represents a more traditional kind of cultural bearer: a collector, who has his main interest in the retrospective quality of the cultural heritage. As the word’s immanent implication suggests: heritage evokes a retrospective view on cultural goods. Opposite to that, there are bearers of culture who focus more on contemporary aspects. A good example for that is the upcoming trend of regional crafts fairs – a combination of regional cultural heritage practices and future-focused ways of capitalising these practices not only for regional, but global markets.
We can also see that in the importance of the internet for these two types of cultural bearers. For Mr. W, the internet is almost irrelevant. He is travelling to fairs, auctions and fleamarkets all over Europe and communicates with traders and collectors personally or over the phone. Having said that, the more contemporary promoter of regional cultural services is much more connected to the web, using it as a dissemination platform for a worldwide audience.
This fits quite well to the trend which Jeremy Rifkin, chair of the Foundation on Economic Trends, foresees in his book “The Age of Access”: Here he describes the absorption of the cultural into the commercial sphere, which signals a fundamental change in human relationship. Rifkin shows how museums, festivals and parks turn into “experience industries”. He states: “More and more of the global cultural sphere – its natural wonders, cathedrals, museums, palaces, rituals, festivals – is being siphoned off into the marketplace.” Thus the cultural sphere increasingly serves as a backdrop for enacting “paid-for cultural experiences”, very often separated from their historical context.
I have to say that the interview with Rudolf W. has been very fruitful for me: Not only did it provide some new insight into the cultural roots of my country, but also in the philosophical approach of a private collector and his own heritage troubles.

Museum Metadata – provided by everybody

Please note that this post was originally published in the netart curating blog I am writing together with NY-based media artist Ursula Endlicher. The netart curating blog has the form of an ongoing dialogue about the challenges of curating digital artworks…However, I felt that the topic of my last entry fits very well in this research platform.

Dear Ursula,

thanks so much for your remarks and thoughts about the terminological struggles surrounding media art, netart, digital art, digital culture, networked art…(ok, I’ll stop here
I especially appreciated your remark about Rhizome’s ArtBase, which allows people to create an individual terminology for their respective artworks.
This brings me to a related article I currently read in the Infotangle blog:
Ellyssa Kroski writes about the “Hive Mind: Folksonomies and user-based tagging.” In this article she examines users, who “are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems.” She has found an interesting conclusion for the evolving folksonomy platforms worldwide, I quote: “Metadata is now the realm of the everyman.”
I think this observation is worthwile to place against the backdrop of the shifting roles of curators. Given the fact, that art institutions increasingly have to deal with digital or other types of intangible or ephemeral artworks these days, we can already witness a change of paradigms from the object towards the process surrounding an object. Furthermore, there are growing numbers of artworks which invite their audience to interact with them, edit them or even add new contents to them.
This development poses a fresh set of challenges to curators and apparently it triggers an additional, new notion of curatorial work, which I would describe as “enabling feedback processes”. Does that make sense? I am especially refering to new initiatives such as the tagging prototype tests led by the “>Metropolitan Museum of Art: They invited their online audience to provide keywords and tags for their art collection. The New York Times reports of “staggering results” and quotes Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.” The Archives and Museums Informatics Group supports initiatives like that and points out that contents are often hidden away from nonspecialists. “We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.” says Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto.
There is apparently a growing number of museums which start to rethink their online collections. Have you heard for example of the steve.museum tagging project? They call their project “the first experiment in social tagging of art museum collections.” I was really striked when I read about their endeavour. The participants of this project (= everybody who is interested) are “building a tagging tool, collecting tags, analyzing data, and engaging in discussion.” Their overall aim is to find new ways of improving access to works of art. Wow, I think this is quite an interesting approach.
Well, but it’s not only the collections which tend to involve user-generated contents, tags and taxonomies. There is also a new trend to publish books as open-source wiki books, which invite everybody to add and comment on them. As an example, I want to mention the book “New Media Art” by Mike Tribe and Reena Jana. This Wiki book is published under the “Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5″ Creative Commons License.
I think this is an extraordinary interesting development. In my opinion, that’s exactly what Manuel Castells describes as a process which “shapes culture and gets shaped by it at the same time.”
And, last but not least, your latest work, the HTML-butoh fits perfectly in this framework. It encourages a worldwide audience to submit their visual vocabulary of the HTML-language. This user-generated library is actually the basis of the artwork. It would be great, by the way, if you could tell us a bit about the reactions of your audience to this project.
So, that was it from Berlin for today.
We will have an Upgrade! field trip later that day and visit the NewYorkRioTokyo gallery.
All the best,
Ela

The California Files – Side Effects of Cultural Memory

http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2007/californiafiles/

This exhibition, curated by Ariane Beyn, examines the reassembling of artefacts out of cultural storage systems and archives – with an eye towards the side effects of cultural memory.

The curator presents a variety of artistic works which are all based on an archival approach, be it a collection of print ephemera or an archive of African American culture.

The starting point for this exhibition is a group of California-based, self-organized archives that assemble collections of uncommon materials and process them in inventive ways. Why am I presenting this exhibition on the museum & intangible cultural heritage research platform?
Because I think it is an excellent example of sampling practices which are already existing on the internet, thus increasingly influencing the way how culture is produced and presented these days. In my opinion, museums are facing a shift not only from object to process, from the tangible to the intangible, but also from display to re-use. This is due to an ever-growing number of source materials which are stored in museums and the need to re-contextualise them. The vast storages of museums contain not only artfecats, but also stories, interviews, links and so on. I believe that in the years to come, more and more museums will have to think of ways of how to re-use what they have been storing over the course of many decades. This approach would “resist a continuous narrative or a comprehensive representation”, as Ariane Beyn writes in the introduction of the California Files catalogue.

It might be an interesting task to open museums storages to young curators and let them compile what they find in there. Maybe this would bring up interesting new approaches of how to sample tangible and intangible expressions of culture? Why is the concept of found footage mainly known in the film/video domain? I would be curious to see the results of a curatorial call for storage & archive compilations of museums worldwide.

Or has this been done already? My web search on this topic led me to the sites of found footage filmmakers, such as Craig Baldwin or Joseph Cornell. And I found an interesting blog which deals with the Recycled Cinema: http://recycledcinema.blogspot.com/

Is it true what Michael Zryd claims, that found footage filmmakers mine the unconsciuos of film? And if so, is it possible to take this approach into museums? What could we learn about our relation to the past? About the things we have inherited, about things we want to maintain and safeguard and others which we deliberately let sink into oblivion?

ICOM – International Council of Museums

ICOM News 06

ICOM (International Council of Museums) is regularly publishing strategy papers regarding the future roles and positions of museums worldwide. Their latest issue deals with the question of intellectual & cultural property. Like many other institutions, not only those which are closely connected to the internet, they are struggling to find recommendations of how to face the changing intellectual property perspectives. ICOM sees this task framed into three major developments:

1. a transformation in the global knowledge economy: museums are digitising their intangible cultural heritage, thus creating access to new and remote audiences,

2. the increasing autonomy of indigenous communities in preserving, safeguarding and disseminating their cultural expressions,

3. calls of these communities to create standard-setting instruments to ensure the protection of intellectual property rights – especially in the field of the intangible cultural heritage.

Following up on this, please have a look at the very inspiring debate between Michael F. Brown, Professor of Anthroposophy, and Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Institute of Folkife and Cultural Heritage, concerning exactly this topic:

http://www.culturalcommons.org/comment-print.cfm?ID=12

New Paradigms of Curating Artworks

No matter what kind of cultural expressions evolve within our transient society, they won’t keep their shape for long. For the first time in our history we are confronted with change as a permanent condition of human life. This evokes another major shift: the material starts to give way to the immaterial, thus facilitating constant cultural flows.

In the following, I am presenting three scenarios of how these developments might influence traditional cultural forms in the near future: The final fullstop has disappeared from books. The author is not any more the prime authority of the editing of a written work. The notion of the book shifts from an object into an open editing platform, with the author as the “host” or provider of this platform. Editing, revising and updating the book is a shared endeavour by the author and his/ her readers. The readers also comment on what they read and compare it to similar works, thus creating new reference systems.
Also artworks shift from object to process. The gap between museums as institutions and museum-goers as individuals is getting increasingly smaller. Curators create new concepts to provide access to artworks. Users are interacting with completed and ongoing artwork, using their individual tags to curate/create private collections which can be taken home or accessed through the Internet. Art can be tagged the moment people see it, and they have the chance to move through linear and non-linear narratives to get to related works.
Communities produce multi-dimensional cultural expressions: while living culture is enacted by an individual or a group of people, it is communicated, preserved and disseminated at the same time. Communities are the curators of their own identity. Those identities are cultivated through a continuous flow of learning and forgetting, of storing and deleting, of interacting and neglecting. Thus, living cultural heritage will have become an integral part of digital culture – and vice versa.
This “vision” is about to shape our present life, as I have shown in the aforementioned examples. Isn’t this development exactly what Manuel Castells describes as a process which “shapes culture and gets shaped by it at the same time”?

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Museums and Web 2.0

http://www.museumtwo.com/2006_12_01_archive.html

I recently came across the very interesting blog of Nina Simon who started her Museums & Web 2.0 blog to “explore the ways that the philosophies of Web 2.0 can be applied in museums to make them more engaging, community-based, vital elements of society.”

What does she have to say about museums and the newly evolving paradigm of the architecture of participation?

“What do I mean by 2.0? “Web 2.0” is not just a buzzword; it’s a definition of web-based applications with an “architecture of participation,” that is, one in which users generate, share, and curate the content. The web started with sites (1.0) that are authoritative content distributors–like traditional museums. The user experience with web 1.0 is passive; you are a viewer, a consumer. Web 2.0 removes the authority from the content provider and places it in the hands of the user. Now, you are a participant. You determine what’s on the site, and you judge which content is most valuable.

I believe that museums have the potential to undergo a similar (r)evolution as that on the web, to transform from static content authorities to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing. I believe that visitors can become users, and museums central to social interactions. Web 2.0 opens up opportunity, but it also demonstrates where museums are lacking. The intention of this blog is to explore these opportunities and shortcomings with regard to museums and interactive design. I hope you will join the discussion, and help frame the future of museums–Museum 2.0. “