Per our presentation in class this past Thursday, the following is a list of questions to spark further discussion:
- Should institutions place their entire collections online and make the experience digital? How would that entice visitors to attend the institution and have a multileveled experience?
- Are visitors capable of ‘self-directed learning” with little to no direction? How does a museum know the visitor’s learning starter point?
- What is the balance between individual agency and curatorial authority? Is it possible for visitors and curators to truly co-author/co-create?
- Is a museum truly able to offer a personalized, adaptive experience? Why is democratization of remediation desirable/undesirable?
- Is a cultural product inherently meaningful due to that interaction with and creation by the visitor?
- Is communication between museums and visitors essential?
- Susan Hazan’s article “A Crisis of Authority: New Lamps For Old” states that a common criticism museums receive as they shift to more technologically based exhibits is a privileging of “information over the object.” Is this a fair criticism? Do museums have a responsibility to privilege one over the other? Is it possible for new media to work in tandem with tangible objects without usurping them?
I volunteer at the International Museum for Surgical Science. Recently a group of artists viewed the objects in the collection and created pieces inspired by those objects. One artist chose the Napoleon death mask replica – one of the most popular items in the museum. The artist created a digital life mask of her own face that rotated; she tried to mimic the experience of walking around the death mask. Visitors were disinterested in the digital life mask. Compared to an actual object, the pixels were boring. Visitors’ conceptions of the death mask were unchallenged by the art piece. In this unscientific experiment, the object wins.
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Lots of questions – maybe we could pick one or two and start a separate thread on them?
Regarding your first two questions, I wonder if digitizing aspects of a museum’s collections could help solve the issue of knowing where the public starts from when they attend a museum. Couldn’t a range of items be digitized, a curator could help design what information is displayed alongside those images, and then use that as a starting point? Then the public has an option of attending the museum, where they can see exhibits firsthand that delve into greater detail? The digital portion serves as a general introduction to what they find at the museum.
Isn’t the physical museum, though, already a “starting point”? I mean, in terms of visible collections, visitors can only see a fraction of material owned and archived by museums. I think, given that, I’d argue for the reverse of what you suggested. Let the physical museum entice visitors who could go home and explore a more complete collection online. That’s the beauty of the digital- it doesn’t have to be packed up and put away to make room for the next exhibit.
About the co-authorship. In any kind of exhibit scenario, audiences may develop a very different discourse of their own that the one somewhat presented. However, the difference would be if the exhibit purposely wants to create different discourses according to the personal preferences of each individual. And this can be more easily done in a virtual environment by “cherry-picking” what interest the user. Therefore, the exhibit works as medium to create an unique discourse.
The problem with digital experiences is that they can’t replicate tangible responses that analog objects achieve. Looking at a 3-d render of a concentration camp furnace is not the same experience as physically looking at one, smelling flesh that was burnt decades ago, and getting a chill down your spine. Digitized exhibits grant greater accessibility to the public, but authenticity is difficult to artificially replicate.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to have museum visitors become co-authors to exhibits. Not everyone is a history enthusiast or an amateur historian. Exhibits could devolve into a popularity contest, where “boring” exhibits are voted out of the digital gallery. It’s bad enough that professional historians disagree over interpretations of facts and events; just imagine everyone else trying to debate over interpretations.