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. “