For our second seminar of the semester, we visited the Museum of Vancouver for a discussion and tour of the Neon Vancouver | Ugly Vancouver exhibit, with Curator Joan Seidl, and Curator of Public Engagement and Dialogue, Hanna Cho, who is leading the production of the museum’s virtual exhibit and mobile walking tour ‘The Visible City: Illuminating Vancouver’s Neon’. I want to thank Joan and Hanna for taking the time to give us a very detailed and inspiring introduction to their work at the museum and for raising many intriguing questions about the role of new media in the museum’s everyday practices and exhibitions.
We also had the opportunity to walk with Joan through the collections storage facility, which was very helpful for us in better understanding the scope of the museum’s collections and its current goals as Vancouver’s memory institution. After a week of reading Fiona Cameron’s work on the socially constructed nature of museum databases and Peter Walsh’s essay on “The Unassailable Voice”, it was very productive to be able to see for ourselves the challenges inherent in managing such an extensive collection and to think about the role of digital media in organizing, classifying, and locating collections and objects in this particular institution. I am looking forward to seeing where this initial visit and the questions that it raised take us as the term moves along…
