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January 24, 2012 by claude

Publicity and the museum

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

I align myself with most of Brown’s positions in this essay. In particular, Brown remarks that vested interest or conflicts can exist within native communities themselves or across different native communities whose artefacts are represented in a single exhibition event. It is always useful to remind oneself that human nature is human nature is human nature…and that it exists in every group (p. 158). Conversely, power differentials can only be resolved when they are negotiated through relationships and robust communication, where each side is permitted to push back. It has been a great achievement that this is now possible than it ever was in the Western world in the context of museum curation, discourse and ethics. But in the nitty gritty of the everyday, it is important not to forget that in each institution, it is the people (and their ability to listen to each other) that enable boundaries and rights to be negotiated. Very big museum institutions are often bureaucracy-heavy and this can often impede the process. For this reason, I think that the best strategy to ensure balanced views and an equilibrium of power is to have smaller “community-based” museums (shall we say ecomuseums?) forming constellations with larger ones. And if controversy should arise on the political correctness of an exhibit, then it is useful not to forget that whether it’s good publicity or bad publicity, it’s publicity (or as we say in journalism, “any press is good press”)…for after all, the 19th century definition of publicity was the exposure of political domination before public reasoning through organs of free speech such as the press. Or to put it simply, publicity is what makes the public talk to negotiate power differentials.

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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.

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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.

 

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January 23, 2012 by kate

Week 3: Digital Return

I just came home from an excellent workshop at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History called “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge“. In our seminar this week I will be talking about some of the themes and debates that emerged as we explored a spectrum of digital projects that have, at their core, a deep social and technological interest in using digital media to “return” heritage to originating communities. Some of these include:

  • the status and significance of the “digital” heritage object: replicas, reproductions, copies, and control
  • ownership of cultural heritage in the digital age, and Indigenous claims for intellectual property and copyright
  • the role of intangible cultural heritage in the museum and its representation with digital technologies in real and virtual/cyber museum environments
  • cultural protocols and Indigenous ontologies, and their translations into digital databases
  • opportunities for re-mediation of cultural heritage facilitated by digitization
  • participatory research methodologies and research ethics
  • the shifting role of the museum as a public institution

I will talk about some of the projects that were presented in the course of the workshop; in advance of the class you may want to look at a few of them–all listed on the Digital Return Website. I will talk in particular about the Reciprocal Research Network, and you will be reading Rowley et. al’s 2010 paper about the RRN (I encourage you to sign up for an account at http://www.rrnpilot.org). Our discussions will be undercut with our attempt to understand Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” and the role of museum (along with the census, and the map) as an instrument through which “the colonial state imagined its dominion––the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry” (Anderson 1991:243). Building on last week’s discussion of shifting curatorial authority in the museum and public expectations of access to cultural knowledge, I’ll suggest that projects like those featured in the Digital Return workshop provide us with insight into cultural, political, and institutional contexts where national ideologies (including First Nations, Aboriginal and Tribal nationalisms) and relations of power are being contested and reinscribed.

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January 22, 2012 by kate

Seminar and Tour at Museum of Vancouver

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…

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January 17, 2012 by diana

(In)finite possibilities of polysemy in the digital age . . .

“The larger task is to bridge the gap between documentation practices and information needs that require the inclusion of a modernist, post-structural, and postmodernist paradigms, and the particular social and cultural ideas posited by a diverse community of users. They need to provide authoritative information but also acknowledge the fragmentary, arbitrary, and plural nature of object interpretation” (Cameron 2005).

All three of this week’s readings from the collection Museums in a Digital Age (Parry 2011) made mention of tensions between modernist and postmodernist paradigms—polysemy and curatorial intent, fluidity and fixity, chaos and structure. Marc Pachter’s (2002) article, for instance, argues that the structure and fixity of physical spaces and objects have become an antidote to an increasingly fluid, chaotic and virtual world. In a similar vein, Peter Walsh’s (1997) article shows that the Unassailable Voice (while appearing to be a unitary didactic voice) is a compromise among experts between fixed, simple explanation and complex accounts of ever-changing reality. Likewise the overall comparison Walsh makes between the Unassailable Voice and the chaotic, fluid, open access nature of the Web echoes this dualism. Fiona Cameron’s article also notes the importance of a balance between openness of meaning and establishing frameworks for understanding; while it is important to allow for a multiplicity of meanings (or “polysemic interpretive models”), some knowable contexts or systems are necessary to avoid complete misreadings. Curators, by acting as “knowledge brokers”, rather than all-knowing disseminators of knowledge, might usefully create effective avenues for allowing fluid meanings within understandable contexts.

In Pachter’s case, I found the argument a bit paranoiac about the state of the contemporary world (the age of artifice and bastardization!). In each of these cases, though, what I found interesting was the way that the seemingly unlimited and fluid possibilities inherent in digital technologies confronted structural or practical limitations.

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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)

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January 17, 2012 by jeremy

Replicating “Liveness”…

Marc Pachter (2002). Ross Parry [Ed.] Museums in a Digital Age.Ch. 32. Pp. 232-235. London: Routledge, 2010.

Pachter appeals to sentimentality to attempt to elevate the transcendence of the “authentic” Art-Masterpiece beyond that of a perfectly replicated copy (though nanotech-assembly).  However, this argument makes authenticity seem superficial and little more than a generation’s mourning for the loss of the “authentic original” in the age of the perfect copy.  No materiality can lay claim to an empirical source of authenticity nor originality unless – according to Pachter – the object/entity is itself, a “witness” to history (p. 333).  Despite Pachter’s sentimental attachments, the fact that an “original” artwork was a witness to history is merely a piece of conceptual trivia and not inherent in the residual aesthetic output of the “Masterpiece”.

Pachter desperately appeals to the emotions by claiming that “liveness” (p. 334) will always be desirable as an authentic experience that future technologies could never replicate.  Ironically, he never mentions how liveness itself will soon be replicated with similar means (i.e. nanotech combined with future developments in Artificial Intelligence).  Again, with personalities being routinely synthesized and remediated in the near future (Bainbridge 2006), “live presence” will also be perfectly replicated without any sense of “originality” nor “authenticity” behind live performances.  In a surreal fashion, “authentic original” entity-molds will be left to ramble to younger generations about how they were once a “witness” to the days before the perfect copy. Unfortunately, these younger generations might use the more derogatory application of the word “relic” to these individuals and remove all previous religious semantic associations with the word.   Contrary to Pachter, I believe that authentic-ness only contains a temporal mystique and is institutionally treasured only before the perfect copy has been developed.

Admittedly, there is something to be said for an original artifact being a lone “witness” to a historical event.  However, this appreciation can only be conceptual and that – especially in the Nanotech age – there would be no way for anyone to empirically validate that a copy is different from the original unless insisted on by an official cultural representative (i.e. museum guide, critic etc).

If anything, Pachter should re-evaluate the transcendental nature and purpose of art(ifacts). For Kant in 1790, there were two kinds of beauty.  One was Free Beauty – independent of contextual background (esp. historical background) and the other type of beauty to consider was Adherent Beauty (contextually dependent) (Kant 1790 in Pluhar 1987:53, 229-232).  True “originality” and “authenticity” in any cultural artifact or mentifact transcends its usual museum and corporate cultural context as a collectable commodity.  Also, the most “timeless” object/entity is always something above its mere historical context as it is more than merely something that was the “first” to appear.

ADDITIONAL READINGS:

 William “Sims” Bainbridge (2006). Strategies for Personality Transfer. Terasem Journal.  http://www.terasemjournals.org/PCJournal/PC0104/bainbridge_01b.html

 

Kant, I. 1790. Critique of Judgment. Werner S. Pluhar [Trans.].  Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.  ISBN: 0-87220-026-4.

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January 16, 2012 by jeremy

A Most Assailable Voice

Jeremy O. Turner’s personal commentary on:

Peter Walsh (1997). The Web and the Unassailable Voice. Ch.24. Pp. 229-236.  (ch. 24, MDA). Ross Parry [Ed.] Museums in a Digital Age.London: Routledge, 2010.

Walsh basically argues that the generic narrator’s voice for museum audio tours represents dubious intentions through its often “patronizing” and institutional tone of voice (Walsh in Parry 2010:230). Further, Walsh claims that the unassailable voice does not seem to believe or understand what it says (expresses the collective museum committee’s bureaucratic voice). Walsh generally considers the disembodied narrating voice to be vaguely irritating and even turns people off from visiting museums. For Walsh, this voice should be “endured rather than enjoyed”.  Part of this is due to its “know-it-all” tone that uses an endless monologue to appear “polished” and authoritative.

Walsh claims that such a voice would not be useful in a Web environment.  However, I believe that Walsh is taking a very reductive stance based on his experience of 1990s-era digital data-base repositories (i.e. merely “a library” […] “without librarians”, Ibid:231) rather than the full performative palette available to the fantastical affordances of virtual worlds and augmented reality. His claim that the web is a “faddish new medium” (Ibid.) just goes to show how dated this article has already become. He is right to claim that communication is not (always) a monologue but can be a dialogue.  Fortunately, the anachronistic “World wide web” from the 1990s has been transmuted into a meta-medium “world” of multi-personal communication, chimera ontologies and hybrid synthetic realities. Within this new paradigm, institutions such as museums only need to pretend to be authoritative to be worthwhile.  Now more than ever, museums have the option of engaging in a welcome form of institutional role-playing activity as part of the exhibition experience.  Ultimately, museum collections have the opportunity to have artifacts and mentifacts “come to life” in their “imaginary world”.  Especially for conventional and online museums, it helps to engage the audience theatrically and having this type of “unassailable” voice does provide a sense of institutional purpose to be derived from this total experience.  Such an experience is indeed suitable for the 21st century’s interest in historical role-playing – as shown in video games and chat-based virtual worlds.

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEOS:

Voice of Fire 2006 Instructional Video…

Voice of Fire 2006 in action at the Surrey Art Gallery!

Walsh’s “Wizard of OZ” metaphor was actually applied for one of my own interactive character installations at the Surrey Art Gallery’s Techlab in 2006.  This top-down “voice of authority” mythos can be re-purposed to re-vivify a sense of awe and mystery for re-experiencing museum and art-gallery collections. For the Techlab, I created and projected a large vertical avatar that mimicked Barnett Newman’s iconic painting “The Voice of Fire” [1967] (Walsh 1997 in Parry 2010:229). This avatar was a long red-vertical stripe (almost the same size as the original stripe) and its world was the blue-space behind it.  Unlike the original painting (collected by the National Gallery), my “Voice of Fire” could come to life, navigate around the blue colour-field and directly interact with gallery attendees as well as speak with its own “unassailable voice”.  This voice was actually mine (pitch-shifted through sub-woofer bass speakers) and I role-played in real-time as the Voice of Fire and answered questions about the nature of art, from what I felt was the painting’s own ontological perspective on its material confinement to museum institutions.

Both docents and kids who had visited my Voice of Fire exhibit had actually made a correlation between the “Voice of Fire” and the “Wizard of Oz”.

As with similar examples to the one I just gave, the aesthetic purposiveness of the art-work (and its appropriate cultural context and expressivity) should determine whether or not this type of voice should be employed. Whether or not to use an authoritative institutional voice like this is now a creative decision. Some artifacts and mentifacts require the process of its discovery (i.e. its frailties and human activity) to be hidden and contextually complete only to those who have created them.  Otherwise, museums can self-reflexively acknowledge their inherently bureaucratic and stifled collective “personality” and utilize the theatrical aspects of institutional authority.  By doing so, audience members of many demographic orientations may be further immersed into the “imaginary world” of the museum. Demographic dissonance only occurs if the artifact or mentifact is seen as culturally sensitive.  For those objects/entities, it must be very clear where the disembodied voice is originating from and why. By not being contextually explicit or playful in its approach the museum voice might indeed dissuade attendees from wanting to explore the cultural nuances that unravel the more complex cultural aspects of an artifact/mentifact.

Walsh questions whether or not this voice should be remediated in cyberspace.  In my opinion, the answer to this lies within how the individual wishes to navigate through the “cyberspace” experience. Timothy Leary famously distinguished between two kinds of exploratory “cyberspace”.  Each kind derives from the ancient etymological root-word for “cyber”.  In the Hellenic tradition, the root-word was “kubernetes” (“pilot”) and allowed any individual (in their time, naval captains) the option to navigate their own course through the environment (Leary 1999:366).  However, the Roman Empire had reinterpreted this word as “gubernates” (Ibid.).  Gubernates – instead of kubernetes – implies top-down institutional guidance (i.e. control and governance) when dealing with informational terrain (including bureaucracy).  To conclude, cyberspace museums can choose to either allow the end-user to explore collections on their own (with their own agency) and/or seek guidance from an imaginary gubernatorial-guide.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Leary, Timothy. “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot.” CyberReader. Ed. Victor J. Vitanza. 2nd ed.Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1999. 364-372.

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