On March 5th I have given a hour and a half presentation at Ca'Foscari University, for the Museology class of prof. Luca Baldin, on the topic of the digital museum within the framework of global capital. Slides can be found here. An overall very positive experience, the students being particularly reactive (for a class of 150!) and willing to delve into slightly more politically invested theory than the usual italian university fare.
One surprise that I had was the unfamiliarity of most students with crowdsourcing, both as a concept and as a platform. Most of them did not seem to know what crowdsourcing was, and more or less all of them did not have any sense of its relevance as a cultural platform, as a a museum tool of any significance. I wonder it that's due to their lack of exposure to museum crowdsourcing from institutions outside Italy, given the fact - well bemoaned throughout the lecture - that there are no examples of such practice in Italy that can stand toe to toe with the kind of enterprises that, for example, the Brooklyn museum routinely deploys. Aside from a few initiatives by the Palazzo Madama staff, and vague promises from Rovereto's MART, there is essentially no museum crowdsourcing in Italy to speak of.
The students seemed to be even less familiar with other kinds of social tools routinely used by European and overseas museums, such as crowdfunding; but also museum gaming - whose existence seemed to come as quite a surprise to them (even the first-liners gave me strange looks when I mentioned the Smithsonian's Ghost of a Chance)! Hoping to give some food for thought, I concluded the presentation with a necessarily brief discussion of a new initiative, unveiled merely days ago: TuoMuseo. The project, still mostly veiled in mystery, seems to present itself as a sort of meta-museum AR game, born from a Hackathon session (some information can be gleaned by the slides of this presentation given on Feb.27 2015). TuoMuseo will offer a free platform that will allow users to plan visits, discuss artwork and engage museums 'thanks to the deployment of practises and design culled from the world of video games' (TuoMuseum, 2015): through the museum 'missions' that the app will propose to its users, the latter will be involved into a bona fide AR game, where completing the missions will reward both a score and, in some cases, actual prizes (discounted tickets, museum parking and so on). The development of the platform is undertaken by a remote team that, among others, also includes the first 'gamification designer' I have come across, Fabio Viola. A new qualification I was not aware of, yet one that makes sense considering how much closer to a game, and in what danger of 'pointsification' (Ridge, 2011) a platform like TuoMuseo is.
The project seems to still be in its crowdfunding
phase: hopefully it will manage to break through, and students in
museology courses will finally have something significant and Italian
that they can discuss, without necessarily having to resort to the
'usual suspects'.
- TuoMuseo team. 'TuoMuseo: la Nuova Piattaforma del
Patrimonio Culturale'. 2015.
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