ICOFOM 2014

This just in: I will present at the annual ICOFOM symposium in Paris, 5-9 June 2014. I will discuss crowdsourcing as labour, touching also on crowdsourcing as gaming and game-like activity, as well as ethics on the digital museum. More info coming soon...

Representing in the museum, representing the museum

Another article I have recently read with great interest is Marianne Achiam and Martha Marandino's "A framework for understanding the conditions of science representation and dissemination in museums", published in vol.29 of Museum Management and Curatorship. While the article mainly addresses science museums, I feel that it confronts an issue that art museums has well should come to terms with: namely, what are, at all levels, the preconditions that constrain the generation and presentation of knowledge with the museum context? While often nebulous terms such as 'visitors', 'public' and 'institution' are used in order to vaguely address a variety of agencies, there is generally no clear and replicable framework existing on who, or what, actually has a hand in shaping museum knowledge - especially when it comes to the way in which such knowledge is usually disseminated, the exhibition.

Achiam and Marandino focus on the 'exhibition' as a chief museum activity, but with a twist. Rather than adopting the traditional strategy of exploring the exhibition as a finished product, analysed and assessed in its effectiveness and reception, they seek a framework that discusses the process of putting together the exhibition as a conceptual and performative act. In other words, the accent is put not on the exhibition as a product, but rather as a process.

A process that, according to the authors, is far more complex, layered, and politically ambiguous than one would think. They note the 'diversity of the agents that are involved in the occasionally disorganised and sometimes opportunistic process of exhibition development'; additionally, being the creation of an exhibition a performative process, 'the science that goes into an exhibition undergoes a transformation process as it is appropriated from its origin, adapted to a museum context, and embodied in an exhibition'. Essentially, the exhibition is a medium - and, therefore, in its perfomativity it carries a message embedded and independent of its content. This morphing of the knowledge material through the exhibition medium is necessary and unavoidable: taking the cue from education studies, Achiam and Marandino argue that the transposition of knowledge from its disciplines to the local setting of delivery (such as th exhibition) is needed in order to make the material 'teachable'.

The question is, what are the agent that have a 'hand', so to speak, in such a process? In the context of the museum, they adopt a diagram that shows, in a vertical hierarchy, the chief agencies that either internally or externally, have a say in the form that knowledge takes within an exhibition. These go from rather wide external forces such as 'civilisation' and 'pedagogy' to others that are narrower in scope and internal to the museum, such as the 'cluster', the 'exhibit' and the 'task' that is performed within. Collectively, and negotiating agency from above and from below, these 'levels of didactic co-determination' essentially decide the form that knowledge will take within an exhibition.

The two authors, right at the outset, are very precise in defining their scope: within the article, by 'museum' the strictly mean 'science centres, natural history museums, zoos and aquaria', essentially confining their insights within a science education context. What strikes me, on the other hand, is that the very same levels of determination can and should be applied to the construction an art exhibit, be it historical or contemporary, albeit with a host of idiosyncratic issues.

The 'higher' four, more external and wider levels of civilisation, society, museum and pedagogy I would see as universals of any kind of educational enterprise, and are not difficult to see as key determinants in the creation of an art exhibit.
Things get, I would say, more complicated once we move into the internal levels of determination - exhibition, cluster, exhibit and task. These four entities are well defined in the context of a science exhibition, far less in the context of an art one: should each art work, each room, each group of rooms be considered an 'exhibit', a basic material unit the same way that a specimen or a science toy is? Can we really consider 'tasks' as a meaningful level of didactic co-determination, even if in art exhibitions usually all that's afforded the visitor is label reading? perhaps an audio tour is a task as well, even though it's likely to spawn the whole exhibition, which is to say multiple clusters and exhibits... The way in which these parts are conceptualised as agencies is likely to have an impact on the exhibition's overall structure and reception. One example: if, in a science exhibit, I play with and read about a device that  generates static electricity, I have directly confronted an understandable chunk of scientific knowledge: actions that generate static electricity. Is it the same with a painting? have I learnt any chunk of art historical knowledge if I looked at a single painting? or, in an art context, is the collectivity of the exhibition experience that makes an identifiable increase to my knowledge of the discipline?

These ambiguities are, perhaps, symptoms of the difficulty that art, as a body of knowledge, has in 'sectioning itself' in discrete chunks of data, perhaps due to the lack of the strong organising force that 'tasks' bring into a science exhibit (where, widely generalising, one apparatus shows a specific set of phenomena or characteristics once the task upon it is completed). It is an interesting problem, that deserves more thought.

So far, what is clear to me is that Achiam and Marandino's insights into the agencies that shape science exhibitions can be translated into an art exhibition context on a macro-level only. At the micro-level of the inner workings of the respective museums, irreconciliable differences in the ways that knowledge is performed and absorbed by visitors in the two different contexts; and the radical difference in intercohesion between 'items' or 'exhibits' that art objects and science exhibits display, make a perfect coincidence impossible.

All quotes from:

 

Achiam, Marianne, and Martha Marandino. "A framework for understanding the conditions of science representation and dissemination in museums." Museum Management and Curatorship 29.1 (2014): 66-82.

Fictional Museum 1: Yume 2kki

One aspect that I find fascinating, and that has definitely been underresearched, is the representation of museums in popular media. I am not referring to reports on museums by newspapers, magazines or blogs; rather, museums as fictional (or fictions of real) places within literature, film, animation and, especially, video games.

                                                        Heritage has never been this cool.

The case of video games is particularly interesting for a few reasons. First of all, and the obvious one, is the recent interest by museums in games and game-like activities: while there is literature on the museum as it reflects on games and gaming, why isn't there discussion of how games construct and reconstruct the museum as a location for plot, narrative and gameplay?
In second instance, the museum has always been, and even more so in recent years, a (supposed) place of encounter with The Other: it is the place where different ideas, cultures and worldviews - in a best case scenario, of course - meet and interact. As games become less about pure entertainment and more about ideas and ideologies, in other words a 'serious leisure', will the museum be seen more and more often as an ideal setting for action that also explores cultural spaces?
Finally, I personally find museums to be the kind of labyrinth in which one could, and often does, get lost very easily - not only metaphorically, but physically as well. A perfect location for exploration if there ever was one.

In light of all this, I decided to intersperse the dour, academic commentary that this blog will be mostly about with an occasional sprinkle of escapism, looking at interesting takes on museum spaces in entertainment and games. This time around I will talk about a little known fangame of an amateur game - the collaborative effort Yume2kki.

Brief historical summary: in 2004 a little freeware game called Yume Nikki (Dream Diary), made in RPGMaker 2003 by a semi-anonymous nobody who calls himself Kikiyama, hit the freeware game scene and became a minor cult classic, mostly in force of its lack of dialogue or most language cues; its cryptic non-storyline; its bizarre mute characters and locales; and, for bonus nostalgia, a ridiculously obsolete blocky graphic style. This little thing became so well known in the underground games scene that it inspired a slew of fangames, including an effort among fangames makers dubbed Yume 2kki (an obvious play on the original title). This fangame largely follows the formula of its grandaddy: exploration of surreal location, some populated by bizarre silent characters but more often than not completely uninhabited; most of the reward being not in gameplay, but in the encounter with the absurdist, surreal aesthetic that is the mark of Yume2kki just as much as its predecessor.

Among the many areas that players can explore through their little avatar Urotsuki, is a museum, conveniently split in two parts: the awesomely named Revenge Museum (博物館リベンジ); and a more standard Museum proper (博物館).

                                  The new frontier of museum cafès and shops. Not designed by Zaha Hadid


The Revenge Museum, in spite of being enveloped in the kind of darkness one imagines most museums would be after closing time, shares little with the 'museum-as-toy-shop' of Lewy's Night at the Museum. It is instead an eerie labyrinth, barren of all artifacts, whose rooms are filled with a perverse mockery of... museum cafès. Row after row of coffee tables and chairs, and no one in sight to take an order. It could also be a postapocalyptic museum, or a museum of the future in which consumption of accessory experiences (or, in the face of our future annihilation, lack thereof) has become the museum experience itself. Indeed, a Phyrric revenge for those who think that a museum should be about culture rather than red velvet cakes.

 

Spot the (futuristic) intruder.

 

 

It is, however, through the meanders of the Revenge Museum that we reach the actual Museum, a place far more familiar to those used to prowl ancient collections and relics of 1940s technology. Riding our little motorized bike (fictional museums have, fortunately, no use for rules) we can browse in luscious blue light a little, idiosyncratic collection of artifacts, including but not limited to: a hip Buddha sporting sunglasses; an assortment of Japanese ceramics and dogu clay figures; a Celtic cross standing side by side with tiny reconstructions of pagodas (only in fictional museums, apparently, we can get right the 'themes over chronology thing); and, last but not least, a display of communication technologies that features the past, the present, and the future in one, convenient package.



Each item has a little label attached - insignificant to gameplay, as it can't be read. The museum is barren of other people, perhaps offering through fiction the experience of a 'museum just for me' that many (including, I suspect, most museum constructivists) secretly hope for. Most curious of all, is the strange effect that this tiny collection of pixelated reproductions of (mostly) real-world artifacts had on me: I felt spurred to go 'aha!' and identify them, far more than I ever did in the case of a visit to a physical museum. The smaller the sprite for that raku pot was, the more fervent my Google searches got. My lesson from this, I would guess, is that immersiveness, depth and flashiness are not necessarily the only avenue for spurring curiosity, in games and in the museum; sometimes, all that is needed is a curious little thing just out of focus enough to set the imagination in motion. More than reanimated T-rex skeletons and infodumps disguised as museum edutainment, to me this tiny 8-bit museum felt, for a split second, almost like a real museum ought to.

 

 

The Yume2kki Team web site. Zaha Hadid's web site.

 

Social Dynamics, Web 2.0 and the Collaborative Museum

I have recently read with great interest the edited volume "The Social Dynamics of Web 2.0: Interdisciplinary Perspectives", edited by Charalambos Tsekeris and Ioannis Katerelos, and originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences.

The volume seeks to put into perspective recent paradigms on the social dynamics that are, allegedly, encouraged by Web 2.0 as a social arena for contact and exchange: among them, networking above and beyond one's physical surroundings; grassroots initiative as the dominant creative paradigm; the empowering of claims to democracy and social justice that actors can strategically coordinate through social networking.

Overall, the volume can be said to cover exhaustively, and very well, ground that has already been threaded in a myriad publications, and upon which little remains to be said - at least from the vantage point of the advocative perspective that most contributors to the volume implicitly adopt. Scholarly audiences, the likely recipients of this edited volume, hardly need an introduction reminding them time after time that Web 2.0 is, for better or for worse, a revolutionary paradigm in online networking, and social interaction in general; neither needs reinforcing the, by now one should hope, well ingrained idea that Web 2.0 itself, like most paradigms, should not be argued for in messianic terms (at least within serious academic enquiry).

The real strength of this collection, its tangible contribution to knowledge is found, rather than in by now familiar content, in the relevant and fresh methodological approaches some of the contributors bring to the table. The one that impressed me most positively, and that I see as easily replicable within a museum studies context, is Martin Berg's "Social intermediaries and the location
of agency: a conceptual reconfiguration of social network sites": a way of framing system oriented and user oriented research that could just as well apply to 'museum studies' versus 'visitor studies'.

Berg argues that current research into SNS (Social Network Sites) is somewhat polarised in approach and understanding of perspectives when it comes to discussing sociality in networks. On one hand, sometimes the user is put at the centre of the equation, so that an 'instrumental view of Web 2.0', one that focuses on how 'agency is located at the level of individual users'; but another, more pessimistic strand of research focuses instead on an 'institutional view', according to which 'Web 2.0 applications... are assumed to commercially deploy their users as objects of inquiry and sources of information', often exploiting users in the process (Berg, 2012).

What Berg seems to take issue with, is the low degree of compenetration that these two lines of inquiry display: they are usually explored independently, assuming an either/or bias in which the user is either master of the universe, or a slave to corporate/institutional ends. He then suggests that we should rather talk of 'social intermediaries': a conceptualisation that 'while it is important to recognise that SNS allow for a certain amount of interactivity along with certain exploitative practices, neither of these divergent approaches account for how SNS assume a functional position within the social realm' (Berg, 2012). Thinking of the social network experience as based upon intermediarity, and the competing yet mutually necessary interests of the user and the institution, leads to a more holistic paradigm; rationalising the existence, in the same loci, of the user's Web 2.0-empowered agency, and the institution's regulatory and structuring efforts. Additionally a new subject of research is created. the 'relationship itself' as the meeting point, the agora of users and institution within true networking, which can then be explored according to whichever quantitative or qualitative parameter seems appropriate.

Martin Berg's chapter interests me as a museologist because I see, more often than not, the same divide within research in museum studies. Scholarship either takes the 2.0 visitor, be her physical or online, as the exclusive shaper of the museum experience, to which collection, education, and 'the museum' in general are accessory and subservient, if not supine; or, more rarely, the museum lingers as the 'institutional machine' looming over the visitor, busily enforcing its own authority and expertise. What museum scholarship should learn from Berg's framework is that them museum, while not a social networking site, at its interactive best functions as a 'site of networking'; rather than focusing on the visitor over the institution, or the institution over the visitor, it is the meeting point, the 'intermediarity' between the two that should be more often, and more fully explored.

- Berg, Martin. "Social intermediaries and the location of agency: a conceptual reconfiguration of social network sites." Contemporary Social Science 7.3 (2012): 321-333.