Assignments

Archive

February 11, 2012 by jeremy

Close Encounters of a Virtual Kind

 

Second Front - "The Last Supper" (2007)- A performance-art group in Second Life. My avatar is located in the middle of the table (pink hair)....

Click here to watch the video

This post deals with Reading Week’s assigned readings which include:

Andrea Bandelli.  Virtual Spaces and Museums.  Originally in Journal of Museum Education, Vol. 24, 1999. p. 20.

 Muller, Klaus.  Museums and Virtuality. Ch. 29.  Originally in Curator. Vol. 45, no. 1, 2002, pp. 21-33.

 Neil Silberman. Chasing the Unicorn? The Quest for “Essence” in Digital Heritage. New Heritage Ch. 6. pp. 81-91. 

The recurring theme throughout these readings is that virtuality is more of a museal sequence of experiential “encounters” (Muller 2002:296-297) that can be an acceptable surrogate for the (lack of) available “real” museum artifacts.  Since these artifacts are rarely really on display or available to the public anyway (as Muller notes in his Last Supper excursion in MIlan) (Muller 2002:295) and that scholars usually only have access to printed reproductions of artifacts (Bandelli 1999:140-150), the aura has already been sufficient virtualized to become a “real” museum experience.  Muller voices the general public frustration that museums often do not have the sought after artifact on display after advertising it (Muller 2002:295) – as most have gone into databases anyway.  None of these writers feel that this virtualization is a bad thing, per se. Since museums hardly show the original artifact due to physical safety reasons, the virtual surrogate is really all one has to refer to.  It just means that Walt Benjamin was right in forcing the visitor to re-evaluate the relative authenticity of the “original” since we only really have access to the reproduction which may as well be just as real or even more real experientially then original (Muller 2002:298).  I am surprised that none of these authors mentioned Baudrillard’s hyper-real notions of simulacra being more real than real.  The concept of the simulacra is clearly what all of these authors are tacitly referring to.  What I like is how Muller and others acknowledge that the digitization process that most museums engage in is more than a mere reproduction technique (Muller 2002:296). Muller seems to support Levy’s concept of the virtual as being a new synthetic reality rather than as a secondary one subordinate to the “authenticity” of the “real”.

Interestingly, many see museums as a very “real” (rather than synthetically real) civic and sacred space (Muller 2002:297) and so, the museum site in principle, has power as a physical presence. As a result, the museum seems to be the final resting place for the “authentic” (Ibid.). The reason that museums were “trusted cultural institutions” had to do with the myth that the artifacts were “material witnesses” (Ibid). And yet, over the decades, there has been a historical transition from museums being material repositories to becoming immersive story-telling environments (Ibid.).  I recall as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s that the Royal BC Museum was a fantastical story-telling space and the authenticity of the reproductions (such as in the 19th century “old-town”) seemed just as pedagogically potent – if not more so – than merely showing the genuine article in a hermetically sealed glass case. The pleasure of visiting this museum was more than social or a desire to connect with authenticity, it was to be immersed as an agent in a world that represented the past – independent of technological novelty (except for the “Water Wheel” exhibit) (Bandelli 1999:148). To experience the essence of the authentic past “[…] on reflection, seems a chimerical goal” as it always “eludes our grasp by changing its form” (Silberman in Kalay et al 2008:83) and so because of this, I place little value in a true connection with the past when going to a museum. It did not even matter that I had access to the museum’s own direct institutional resources and the benefit of such access (Bandelli 1999:149) would not matter to me in a cyberspace version of the museum either unless I had direct ambitions as a curator.  These spaces are inherently virtual spaces – at least the more successful ones are.  In my opinion and based on my close encounters with the synthetically authentic at the Royal BC Museum, the Disneyfication of museums in general is not an intrusion of museum culture (Muller 2002:303), it helps define the museum as a social space that is equivalent to the narrative and social affordances of pure cyberspace virtual environments (Bandelli 1999:150).

I would like to wrap up this blog post by quickly mentioning how Bandelli believes that the social aspects of a museum experience is thwarted through the virtualization of audio-tours etc (Bendelli 1999:150).  I agree with him as I think one needs to explore an immersive world seamlessly as a free-agent in order to enhance the willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge 1817). Perhaps when intelligent agents truly become interactive guides and address a net-worked chat channel either with a headset or with ambient spatially-distributed speaker configurations with other participants via augmented overlays (holograms?), will the museum’s virtuality become more social in nature.

Archive

February 2, 2012 by kate

OpenMOV

I had a good chat with Bardia today about his final project. One of the resources that we discussed is the MOV’s OpenMOV archive, which lets you search the contents of the museum’s collection. If you are trying to imagine how to involve the MOV, neon signs, or other objects from the collection into your project proposal, this is a useful tool. I am looking forward to discussing the final project with you all next class.

Archive

January 31, 2012 by jeremy

Must-Have Narratives!: The Museum and Proprietary Cultural Heritage…

1980s - I felt I needed to buy this action figure to activate proprietary access into Dr. Fate's imaginary narrative...Here, the official narrative (the comic book) is included with the action-figure.

Finally, here is my chance to purchase access to direct narrative agency as Dr. Fate

This blog post is based on:

Malpas, J. 2008. “Cultural Heritage in the Age of New Media” in New Heritage.New York: Routledge, pp. 13-26.

Srinivasan, R. et al. 2010. “Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum. Science, Technology & Human Values 35(5), pp. 735-768 (pp. 1-36 on the PDF).

Using Walter Benjamin’s authorial aura again as inspiration for extending a treatment of cultural artifacts towards issues of  cultural heritage, we see more authors state that material objects are still valued but that we have a new heritage paradigm where the narrative context allows us to now magically transcend the fetish of the collected object (Malpas 2008:15). If we have access to the narrative (through agonizing negotiation at our local “contact zone”), then we feel that we can complicate the traces of ownership and be gained access into another culture’s proprietary heritage (Ibid).   But, this would depend on which cultural paradigm being referred to.  In our Western Consumer Capitalist society, we require the purchase and collection of the commodity representation just to get permission to include the collected entity into our imagined personal narratives.    In my opinion, this situation reinforces the fetish of collecting by making the narrative cultural experience fully contingent on the collected proprietary artifact.  As noted by Srinivasan et al (2010), museum collections until the mid-20th century “continuously discuss, study, and reorder the world in miniature” (Bennett 2005 in Srinivasan 2010:4) and I would say that such worlds are still being re-ordered in miniature through the purchasing and collection of fetish-representations of the desired narrative.

As a kid, my imagination was stifled by this paradigm.  I felt an ontological disconnection from relating to a specific super-hero or villain in my head unless I owned the action-figure representation of that character.  I could not even imagine a suitable narrative without purchasing and collecting the commodity fetish version first.  I would imagine that the museum works in a similar fashion.  They cannot embody their idea of someone else’s narrative without owning the fetish-object first.  Museums also need the object for ritual activation of cultural heritage as a proprietary narrative.

In fact, without gift-shop ready representations of each fetish object, museums may feel that these narratives are out of their grasp and truly located within the authoritative domains of other cultures.  If the museum had a certain reproduction of their mask in their gift-shop, is it then ok to have the mask repatriated back to the originating culture?

Being “neither distant nor close” (Malpas 2008:22), the non-material narrative (i.e. stories and rituals) blends in through the residual process of capitalist consumption (another incentive to visit the Museum’s gift shop).

Is it any surprise then to know that video game companies see the value in owning an end-user’s own emergent cultural heritage?  With Malpas’ “Virtualism” (17, 20), the company can restrict proprietary access to BOTH the “autonomous” artifact (including the user’s own self-representation) and the corresponding narrative or personal ritual.  This paradigm goes beyond Benjamin’s notions of mechanics implying digital reproduction – proprietary access consumes living cultural heritage as well – whether it be the private rituals of First Nations cultures or the public expressions of avatars and agents in video games and virtual worlds.

As Malpas notes,  the current notion of “heritage interpretation” (20) helps determine one’s own heritage manifestation.  And now, we not only hold up a mirror of culture to see ourselves in it, we have social networking sites like Facebook beginning to shape how we access and mediate our reflected image.

I would say that the Consumer-Capitalist paradigm works as a counter-balance to those “multiple-ontologies” offered by an object or fact (i.e. Bruno Latour’s “immutable mobiles”, Srinivasan 2010:5). With the Zuni example (Srinivasan 2010:7), narratives were shared but were not included in the museum’s catalog.  This omission reverses consumer capitalism’s collection drive. Without the Zuni narrative, there is no permission to access the fetishistic power of the object.  In consumer capitalism, without first possessing the fetish-object, there is no permission to access the narrative. This re-contextualizes Appadurai’s assumption (1986 in Srinivasan 2010:9)  that an object is “inert and mute” without narrative as the activation agent.  In our culture, possession of such an object becomes the key to activating the narrative.  How much of this activation is attributed to human agency or narrative is in the mind of the beholder.

One final thought…here was what was going through my head when Malpas considered language itself to be an artifact…

“The Weirding Way” – Dune (David Lynch, 1984 based on Frank Herbert’s book)

 

Archive

January 24, 2012 by kristin

An Experiential Thought with a Touch of Dance

Because I don’t have the Critical Theory background that is supporting a lot of the discussion here, I’m focusing on my own experiential knowledge:

Though we are dealing with databases of objects (Manovich), and hence the stories, memories and experiences with these objects that reflect cultural lives (Clifford), we also engage in the political debate that cultures are caught in (Brown).
Presentation of objects is not only tied to their ‘being’, it is tied very personally to an entire culture (and the whole world, depending on how we decide to discuss culture).

This discussion is prompting me to try and think about these topics in a more personal way:
How do I/we interact with people on their individually-sensitive topics while being sensitive ourselves?
How do I/we manage sensitivity in regards to ownership?
What happens when I/we find a point of contact, and begin to interact?

Is it even possible to make connections between simple person-to-person interaction and broad culturally and politically based interaction?

There is a form of dance called Contact Improvisation that explores the experience of taking personal risks to develop awareness of the transformational experience that takes place when practiced. Performed between 2 or more dancers, performers explore how to share the roles of leader and follower by communicating only through touch. Touch can be as simple as skin touching skin or more complex with weight bearing, jumping and tossing. Dancers learn how to manage, challenge and resolve conflict from both their own individual perspective and their partner’s, but the experience revolves around the interaction and communication that is happening in the moment, transforming both sides’ perspectives of the content at hand. However you have to have willing consent from both parties to engage in the risk that comes out of the contact. There have to be similar interests, goals and desires otherwise misunderstandings lead both parties to simply realize they can’t connect, and they search for other partners, or they realize the need to further understand each other better. But there is no risk taken by one partner when they decide they cannot work with the other – nothing material is lost. Only imagined interactions.

One last thought:
I have been thinking about the reflection on dialogue in both Museums and the making of Art.
The process of making art often reflects a desire to begin dialogue, to challenge and prompt discussion around ideas. While this practice is often viewed as exploring ways to take a risk, the perception of what the risk is differs between the individual practitioner’s process and the gallery’s interest in showing and supporting the product.

What I understand of museums through the readings, is that while they want to illustrate the dialogue that has happened (or is happening), there is more risk involved. This risk is largely based on reputation, funding and the audiences they wish to reach.

I’m becoming very interested in risk – both material and imaginary.

 

Archive

January 24, 2012 by tyler

The Difficulties of Hybridity

James Clifford’s “Museums as Contact Zones” provides fantastic contextualization of the museum:  caught up in ongoing and active process of “imagining” culture (to borrow from Benedict Anderson) and all the messy issues that go along with such a process.  Two of the most salient points from this reading for me are the ways in which objects transform in the process of contact, and Clifford’s call for a move beyond binary notions of culture.

Writing about the Rasumssen Collection, he states “[the objects] could never be entirely possessed by the museum. They were sites of historical negotiation, occasions for an ongoing contact” (194). I find this interesting, that the object becomes a site of negotiation, and in some ways I wish we had read this article before Fiona Cameron’s, last week. Her call for a postmodernist/structuralist approach to museum interpretation is revealed as much more complex when read through Clifford’s article.  Clifford does an excellent job of muddying the waters of cultural negotiation that unfolds within the collection of a museum, and his point that objects, or collections, becoming the location of contesting media sheds light on the need for some kind way to represent all of the available stories of an object. It is not, he points out, just a process of threading meaning together from two different sides, one colonial and one indigenous (usually), but much more mixed, or hybrid. This is the second point I pulled from this reading: Clifford’s attempt to move away from binaries.

Clifford critiques authors such as Walsh and Harvey for offering a postmodern understanding that is still too binary. Instead he argues that the idea of the contact zone “complicates diffusionist models, whether they be celebratory…or critical” (216). Far from being an easy glorification of multiculturalism, museums must work hard to fully “express the interests of nation-states, of local and tribal communities, of transnational capital” (216). If Fiona Cameron’s call for new media, or technology, is to offer an audience multiple meanings of a collection or object, how can this be done in a museum setting that avoids the easy (or easier) method of depicting two sides, such as colonizer and colonized? How, technology aside, does an institution represent the multiple levels of cultural, contemporary hybridity that a collection of objects might suggest, but surely will not convey without contextualization? How is this done in a museum setting, where passersby may only spend a few minutes (at best) looking at an object and supporting material?

Michael Brown’s article, “Exhibiting Indigenous Heritage in the Age of Cultural Property,” serves us with a number of examples that suggest that this work is still quite difficult. We, in the universal “We” that Brown seems to advocate for, have yet to learn how to become comfortable with our own hybridity.  Cultural exchange happens, and the process of sorting out power imbalances inherent to cultural contact while appealing to the ethics of appropriate representation is still in process, and it is a process very prone to critique.  I would question, however, whether or not this cultural process is going to work out in the museum space, but not other spaces. In response to my post last week, Claude pointed out

that real adoption of cultural hybridity, or postmodern narratives, must begin in the education system. I agree with this, but I think education systems are just as fraught with the same, and potentially more, hazards of cultural appropriation and appropriate representation of other cultures as any museum. Perhaps it is the recognition of cultural exchange in popular culture, the free exchange of culture, that can be witnessed in action.  As example, I’ll part with this image, a new shirt offered by Disney using the motif from Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” album, no doubt a rich source to mine for discussions of cultural exchange.

Archive

January 23, 2012 by jeremy

Posthuman Museum Rant

Based on:

Brown, Michael F. (2009) Exhibiting Indigenous Heritage in the Age of Cultural Property. In Whose Culture? The Promise  of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities. J. Cuno, ed. Pp. 145-164. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ok, admittedly, this is quite the over-the-top Utopian rant but I figure Brown’s article gave me the perfect opportunity to go off the handle a bit and raise some ideas for (optional) discussion…

Here we go (this opinion is subject to change)…

Brown discusses the etymological conflation of the loaded words “property” and “heritage” within the context of the Museum that has morphed from an encyclopedic Enlightenment-era venture to being a “site of conflict” (145). In contemporary times, this conflict-site perpetually deals with the competing forces of “controversial provenance” (145). Consequently, Brown discusses how the authority is diluted when collecting intangible heritage as if it was property (145).

Brown also reminds us that proprietary culture is not unique to Westerners/Europeans as protecting sacred knowledge happens in all cultures. In Western culture for example, there was once a living tradition that dealt with the occult and we had even once shared oral traditions similar to that of indigenous people. Having said this, in our own regions of ancestry, we (i.e. the culture of the blog-author) were once indigenous people.
Brown is essentially asking what the role of proprietary culture/property/sacredness is in the age of public social media (146). Social media as it currently stands, extends its narrative meme-space beyond cultural community boundaries.

Brown suggests that in a Postcolonial-era, such stewardship should be left to the artefact creators their descendants…
If this is going to be the Museum collection-negotiation paradigm from now on, then I am guessing that it will not be until the advent of embodied virtualizion of our own bodies and minds (body-schemas) through technological means when Westernized museum bureaucracies will finally become sympathetic towards the Post-colonial discourse.  I am claiming that we must merge with our surrounding artifacts in order to transcend them as commodity-fetishes. For example, when we eventually live-out our artifacts both as “property” and “heritage”, we become post-virtual beings (Bainbridge calls these “cy-clones”) – each totally unique yet entirely conservable and publically remediated/emulated/propagated – that can finally embrace ritual as “living art” – without the need to distinguish the two. At this point in history, we might understand that our interest in residual artefacts goes beyond a mere collection-fetish and see them as an integral part to our identity as individuals belonging to a completely networked community.

If this happens, we will jettison the revenue imperative to guide visitors to the gift-shop (158) and share our own artifact/mentefact stories with members of indigenous communities and work post-buraucratically together towards forging something more than a garage-sale of metaphysically charged ritual artifacts.

The post-museum could transcend beyond being an observation and regularatory space (148) and become a space of participation and embodied story-telling. Of course, my vision here is utopian…We must start somewhere if we are to get past this increasing cultural alienation with other cultures. Having said this, such a post-virtual, post-internet, post-commodity culture would be open to all communities and not limited to Westeners.

According to Brown’s testimony, our conventional museum paradigm seems to have caused spiritual harm to others and we should no longer contribute to this harm (152). It is foolish to harness the “Aura” (152) of others. We can better understand this aura by making our own from scratch and then we can better understand how to share it with others in an open a manner as Facebook or Second Life. Perhaps then we can finally be worthy of entering into dialogue with First Nations communities, for example.
Only if we continue to turn the living and “supernatural” aura into a residual artefact stored in a dusty basement will we still compel others to tell us “more and more about less and less”  (159) of the artifact we ignorantly extracted from them. If we really wish to see ourselves as the arbiters of taste and feel genuinely enlightened, we really need to experience this type of “magical” phenomenon for ourselves so we can be in direct communion with this “aesthetic genius” (148) we so revere as a novelty obsessed culture inspired by second-hand fetishes.

Archive

January 23, 2012 by jeremy

21st Century Nationhood and the Museum…

This response is based on:

Benedict Anderson.
Introduction In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso. 1991); Census, Map, Museum In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso. 1991), pp. 163-85.

Suitable for a document made from the end-times of Communism’s original Empire, Anderson points out that the Internationalist ideal of Marxism did not translate neatly into the peculiar regional politics of each nation-state. Certainly, Anderson also notes that the Nationalist ideal once again reigns supreme. He then goes on to say that Nation-hood itself is somewhat imaginary…perhaps even a kind of meme-space that unities community members across geopolitical or ideological lines.

I am guessing that the class discussion will begin to address repatriation challenges with First Nations communities since their own nationhood crosses the colonial border-lines of our current nation-states (i.e. Canada and the USA). As such, the “collections” of each First Nations Community, has their own very narrativized concept of “provenance”.

I am hoping our class discussion will be expanded to included similar repatriation challenges to virtual nations such as: Ladonia and The Kingdom of Elga-Land Vargland as well Second Life’s Odyssey Island.  In those virtual communities: remediation is just as important as repatriation for the continuation of their “nationhood”. Such nations go beyond continental boundaries and envelop global citizenship. Also, narrativized rituals are a big component of a “national” identity for these communities. Finally, the proprietary aspects of the internet further complicate the nature of this remediation and repatriation. Perhaps virtual communities are unique in that open-ness (open source, open sharing and public secrets) becomes a virtue and explicit publicizing of their most private narratives is imperative and desirable for their communities to survive over time.

 

Archive

January 17, 2012 by tyler

Fostering Dialogue and Discussion

Peter Walsh’s “The Web and the Unassailable Voice” presents an interesting forward-looking view of the web, considering it was written close to 15 years ago.  Walsh describes a plan to encourage discussion about a newly acquired Ashanti seat for the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College across the campus network. “Through the network, students, scholars, and curators will discuss the meaning of the object and the extent to which it was shaped or reinterpreted by European imperialism in Africa” (234). The discussion would then result in a web page detailing the discussion as well as “how best to display the work and explain its meaning” (ibid). Walsh explains that the discussion was in some way inspired by the initial reaction of the African American student community when the Davis Museum was built. The African collection was placed in a smaller gallery, which the students interpreted as a “judgement on the importance of African art relative to Western art….another racially based narrative of exclusion and implied inferiority…a message the museum never intended to communicate” (ibid). Here is the crux of the museum’s problem, in Walsh’s view, that the “unassailable voice” of the museum—typified by the text we encounter on the wall next to an object or artwork—too often misses the mark, and the web offers new ways for the museum to move away from this disembodied voice.

Such a move is, I believe, in accord with Fiona Cameron’s call for better integration of post-structuralist/modernist approaches in museum interpretation. In “Museum Collections, Documentation and Shifting Knowledge Paradigms”, Cameron notes that technology can play a role in presenting multiple interpretations of an object, even though there is still a need, and desire, for interpretation based on “scholarly research” (85). She suggest that a mind map is one way to present different interpretations of an object, allowing for both a scholarly and indigenous description of an object, for instance. I find this compelling, as Cameron notes that most visitors “do not want to take full responsibility for the interpretive process” (85).  That a museum representative would call for polysemic interpretations even when many of her patrons don’t necessarily desire such a move is commendable, but it also presents a challenge. It’s the same challenge Walsh begins with in the opening of his essay. How can the museum move away from the “Unassailable Voice”? Supposedly, in 1997, Walsh was on the way to implement a new use of the web in opening up the interpretive process of cultural objects, by bringing together both scholars and community members to discuss the importance of an object.

A brief search on the Davis Museum’s website and www.archive.org did not turn up any artifacts of such a discussion, which is unfortunate, as I am rather curious to see how sit worked out. With the explosion of social media over recent years and a plethora of media outlets capitalizing on “user generated content” it is sometimes difficult to remind ourselves how novel such an approach was, and still is.  I could not find much community engagement on the Davis Museum’s current website, except for the obligatory Facebook link. Following this, I found mostly announcements about openings and individual pieces of art, as opposed to attempts at fostering dialogue and discussion.

So, in some ways, I think we are still back in 1997. Not technologically, for sure, as it is much easier to integrate discussions across the web due to recent technological transformations. However, I am not so certain that, we, the public, have learned to really engage with museum objects as a site of meaning making—a place where we can all weigh in on an object’s significance alongside of experts and cultural representatives. This is not a technological role, but a cultural role, which as Walsh and Cameron point out, must in some way begin at the museum.

Archive

January 17, 2012 by kristin

Text Beyond Description with a Connection to the Unassailable Voice

One place of thought is in Cameron’s quote on pg. 87 ‘Curators need to consider the writing of text in the context of constructivist approaches to learning and to engage users in the cycle of knowledge making’ (2005). Though this comment refers to the textual documentation of objects and collections, it seems relevant to explore in connection to the new media conversation we are joining. By referring to Vgotsky (1997) on Constructivist learning, the process of heightening awareness of an experience provides more opportunities to understand content through personal deductions (based on how the individual experiences their awareness). Does Cameron mean that creative and novel written descriptions will better engage audiences? How does text compare or compete with the availability of media in the descriptive and narrative experience? Can the concreteness of factual information be conveyed without text, but through a media experience? How important is the text, aside from the Unassailable Voice? And a further tangent, could media replace the Unassailable Voice with an Unassailable View? Or Unassailable Touch?
It seems to me that its great for the public to engage in ‘knowledge making’, and to consider the place of text in that process. Especially the use of text to heighten awareness of the current experience and the experiences of the object in question. The combination of text with visuals to develop an experience has vast possibilities to construct perspectives, narratives and knowledge. However I’m still confused if it is a call to explore how traditional uses of text can be sustained in the face of media, in the place of media or in the connecting of media, narrative, facts and perspectives.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). Educational psychology. Boca Raton, FL:, St. Lucie Press. (Original work published 1926)

← Older posts
Newer posts →