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.

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”.

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.

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?

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. “