I have just returned from the fantastic conference organised by the Museum Studies department at the University of Leicester, titled 'Museums Alive! - Exploring how museums behave like living beings'. It's the latest in a series of thematic conferences that have become somewhat of a regular yearly appointment for young and old museums practitioners alike (it is already in its sixth edition), and always offer a gamut of relevant and timely topics under the year's umbrella theme (see the title for hints). I have presented a snippet of my PhD research under the title 'Museums in the Organic Web', which seems to have been well received. Now that all is said and done, as a sort of 'welcome home' post I decided to write a few lines on the conference experience, highlighting some of the best ideas I have seen floating around and that merit some further thinking.
The conference, hosted in the beautiful Museum Studies buildings (a counterpoint to the not-so-beautiful Leicester), followed a special format this time around: aside the usual plenary sessions, half-hour presentations and workshops, it also featured the so called 'Rapid Fire' presentations: four young researchers (and I was one of them!) had only five minutes to communicate an idea, piece of research or question to the audience - we were timed, literally. A stressful but enjoyable experience, which remarked on brevity as the soul of wit (and clarity), and will hopefully be replicated next year, perhaps alongside other less seen models - the wide room we were in could have easily hosted a poster session, or artworks display.
These kinds of conferences, I have noticed, tend to attract mostly young academics and, consequently, naturally lend themselves to a kind of 'nimbleness' in tone and exchange that, at times, suffers from the necessary inclusion of heavier, more 'experienced' voices. While I surely enjoyed Susan Pearce's illustration of the many reasons for which museum professionals should be aware of advances in the neurological understanding of visual perception; or Simon Knell's survey of how museums thinking might have learned and still learn from the natural world; these kinds of longer sessions added little new or unheard to a conference that, being centered on young voices, made of its very novelty of thinking and approach its strong point. In the end, some of the sessiosn by expert academics ended up feeling uncomfortably akin to lectures, and I naturally gravitated toward snappier and more specific pieces of research that truly added something I had never heard of before.
A few highlights. Elena Tognoli's evocative video Yet Another Narrative is a multi-layered meditation that managed to approach with wit and imagination some of the big questions museums have to grapple today, such as the pervasive use of technology; and the relevance of the museum environment to personal experiences and life narratives. Alisa Maximova's 'Social organisation of experiments in museums' offered some very good hints on the kind of almost ethnological approach that we might assume, on the field, while researching user interaction with difficult and hard-to-understand science exhibits (though widely applicable also to artworks, minus all the touching...). Alex Woodall's amazing workshop Body, Mind and Spirit suffered from the typical academic reticence to engage in a healthy bit of insightful tomfoolery (which is to say, few among the public spoke and volunteered) but nonetheless constituted an occasion to do something our Wikipedia society rarely affords: discussing an object we knew nothing about. We even had a nice piece of interdisciplinarity, with criminology PhD candidate Jack Denham's presentation centered on some aspects of true crime museums' display of a glamourised and film-like vision of violence and crime.
I was expecting lots from Museums Alive! and I was not disappointed. My hope is that the strong points that have come to the surface in this year's 'experiments' will be further exploited in the conferences to come, playing even more on what oung researchers and alternative delivery channels have to offer. You can see the live Tweeting of the conference here.
