Here is a creative use of iPad affordances–particularly its tangibile functions––for viewing museum objects… let’s look at it today in the seminar.
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Must-Have Narratives!: The Museum and Proprietary Cultural Heritage…
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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)
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Objects in the Age of their Digital Reproducibility
Walter Benjamin’s influential essay on the work of art in the age of “its technological reproducibility”, argues that, while art has always been theoretically reproducible, the “here and now of the original”, its “authenticity”, its “aura” and its “unique existence”, are obliterated with “mechanical reproduction”. Yet Benjamin also notes that mechanical reproduction enables new kinds of “existences” and encounters, as well as new kinds of human perceptions:
“First, technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction. For example, in photography technological reproduction can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens . . . but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether . . . Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations to which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record.” (Benjamin 2010, 14 [my emphasis])
For Benjamin, these qualities, while novel, were destructive, involving the “liquidation of the value of tradition”, substituting a “mass existence for a unique existence”, and potential weapons for political powers (Benjamin 2010, 14; 35). Yet these new qualities of mechanical reproduction, here relating to photography and film, were also used as productive elements in early filmic experiments. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is one example:
In the midst of a scene showing the group in the motorcar, Vertov shows stills of the action, close-ups of people’s faces, reels of negatives and their contents, as well as the process of piecing reels together to create the film itself. Details of things and behaviors in the world, and the process of image-making itself, are revealed by cinematic techniques. As Benjamin writes, “It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious” (2010, 30).
Today, Benjamin’s observations about 1) how new technologies (both positively and negatively) transform collective perceptions and 2) the various ways new technologies both conceal their histories and (re-)production and reveal otherwise unseen or “unconscious” elements in the world are echoed in much of the literature surrounding new digital technologies.
1) On Shifts in Collective Perception
Jeff Malpas’s chapter in New Heritage, following Benjamin, argues that peoples’ perceptions are being further detached from the real (both material and in space/place/time), which in turn changes the way “we understand, experience, and interpret ourselves” (Malpas 2008, 19). In a different vein, Gwyneira Isaac’s paper on the ways new media has become the new museum object shows how new technologies have changed the experience of viewing in museums: “The interplay between . . . digital images and their material referents, has initiated new ways of responding to and experiencing museum objects” (Isaac 2008, 297). Likewise, in Srinivasan et al’s (2010) paper on the digital museum as ‘contact zone’, the attachment of narratives, originating contexts, and diverse knowledges to the audience encounter with an object activates more complex understandings of objects’ meaning.
2) On the Concealing or Revealing of Objects’ Qualities & Contexts
Malpas’ paper also sticks with Benjamin on the topic of objects’ contexts. Malpas argues that digital technologies “dissolve the presence of the thing in its place” (2008, 19). A quality of digital technologies is “not only their capacity for endless reproduction . . . but also their capacity to transform the elements that they reproduce, to produce new such elements, and to juxtapose those elements in new arrangements and forms of connection” (Malpas 2008, 20). His final call to action—to find “ways to deploy new media in ways that maintain, and do not obscure or dissolve, a sense of place” (2008, 26)—is in many ways answered by papers by Srinivasan et. al. and Kimberly Christen (2011). In Srinivas et. al’s perspective, digital technologies’ juxtapositions and digital objects’ “extensionality” and “mutability” in fact reveal “cultural threads” and narratives. Contemporary digital heritage projects like the Museum of Anthropology’s Reciprocal Research Network (Rowley 2010) and the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal (Christen 2011) illustrate the ways digital objects can be seen in the context of “the processes and relationships that ground information systems within larger cultural logics and historical events” (Christen 2011, 190) as well as otherwise distant peoples, places, and other things, while maintaining “cultural protocols aimed at maintaining specific types of knowledge” (Christen 2011, 191).
At the same time, Isaac also notes that in digital reproduction, the “copying” of complex codes becomes another form of “technological enchantment”, using Alfred Gell’s terminology. Like the notion of Benjamin’s “aura”, Gell’s notion of “enchantment” involves the idea that a thing is produced in an irreproducible moment of human creativity. When symbols and numbers are copied and reformatted “’the numbers are read and inscribed anew each time’ . . . so that ‘each copy . .. is still an “original” inscription of information’” (Isaac citing Binkley 1997). However, unlike a painter envying another painter’s piece, I wonder whether code experts are equally “enchanted” by these technologies.
So, what are the impacts of new digital technologies on ‘objects’ and our engagements with them? Responses to this question, as with Benjamin’s generation, teeter between fear and optimism. At the same time that new technologies release objects from their original contexts or moments of human creation, they have a potential to enable new productive connections, juxtapositions and encounters that reveal otherwise obscured networks they are a part of or layered knowledges embedded in them.
A Few Questions:
-How are digital technologies changing perceptions or practices of engaging with objects? If digital media are themselves new kinds of objects, as Isaac argues, are there differences between physical objects and digital objects? And what are they?
-How do digital technologies obscure or reveal cultural practices, traditions and histories? Is restricting kinds of access enough to ensure that cultural values are maintained?
-What are the exciting and/or dangerous potentialities for the new contexts and connections digital objects encounter? Can audiences still “misread” objects from their own contexts or worldviews?
-Returning to our discussion last week, why do we feel uneasy when we think of the computerized reproduction of a carving, but perhaps not of a photograph? What qualities of human production are still held sacred?
These were some streams and questions I found interesting, but I’d be interested in other ways you engaged with this topic!
Cited:
Benjamin, W. 2010. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability” [First Version]. Grey Room 39, pp. 11-37.
Christen, K. 2011. “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation. American Archivist 74, pp. 185-210.
Isaac, G. 2008. “Technology Becomes the Object: The Use of Electronic Media at the National Museum of the American Indian. Journal of Material Culture 13(3), pp. 287-310.
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.
Rowley, S. et al. 2010 “Building an On-Line Research Community: The Reciprocal Research Network”, www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2010/papers/rowley/rowley.html.
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In Time Vancouver IPhone App
I found a neat iphone app that gives catchy news headlines from Vancouver’s history called In Time. Its a simple interface (just a list of headlines) that leads into short articles that are fun reading with photos of ‘then and now’ that give a little context within the city. I’ve been addicted to it for a few days (until I ran out of stories).
(photo from the Ontario Augmented Reality Network)
http://www.oarn.net/2011/12/vancouver-in-time/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vancouver-in-time/id480547811?ls=1&mt=8
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Using Story Telling Release Cultural Anxiety
I found these set of documentaries in CBC very interesting, and related to the topic of following paper : ” Indigenous Exhibition in the Age of Cultural Property”:
8thfire : http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/8thfire/
The same issues discussed in paper such as Trust, Power factors in negotiations with first nation communities have been outlined and depicted using media narrative techniques very well,
There was a challenge introduced in paper about prioritizing the first nations stories, art, music, and sacred objects based on what museums and tourist industry are looking for versus what first nation are aiming. I personally think, ignoring, and misbehaving these communities over years and generations has created a cultural anxiety between them, which most of conflicts presented in paper are based on that factor, and narration of these stories to a right audience (new generation), will release this cultural stress, and madness, which needs to be considered as an important factor while dealing with these communities, I believe even new techniques in documentary creations are good approaches which can help to better narrates these cultural pains, and cure this ignorance.
Please check the coming episode:
http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/8thfire//2011/11/whose-land-is-it-anyway.html
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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.
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Indigenous Exhibition in the Age of Cultural Property
I was pretty surprised (and then of course not surprised) to see this story about yet another hipster appropriation of Aboriginal material culture. The Inuvialuit project I will discuss in class today aims to digitally recontextualize Inuvialuit material culture currently in storage at the Smithsonian… including snow goggles. As museums digitize and circulate Aboriginal cultural heritage online, are they facilitating return of control to communities to represent themselves, or opening up their cultural heritage for commodification and exploitation? Are good intentions undermined by the medium?
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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.
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Musings on Theoretical Cocktails
Problematic and predictable “rhetorical strategies” of postcolonial museum scholarship, as described by Michael Brown (2009):
Comb the archives for objectionable, racist declarations by long-dead museum employees, mix in a bit of authorial hand wringing about a troubling exhibit label or two, flavor with a dollop of Foucault and a dash of Gramsci, shake vigorously, serve. (Brown 2009, 148)
OK, so it’s a bad cocktail. But, as Brown also shows, the realities of museum work and, let’s be honest, of much more current rhetoric surrounding contemporary moves toward “community museums”, “collaboration”, and “digital repatriation” is no less diluted (am I a pun-ster or what?). While these now-catchphrases in the museum often suggest a simplistic reversal of colonial processes, their realizations are often incredibly complex; the creation of the RRN at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Rowley 2010), and Brown’s examples from the NMAI show a few examples. Who constitutes community authority? Or, as NMAI curator Paul Chaat Smith aptly put it: “You go out into one of ‘the communities’ and ask people who’d never thought twice about museum exhibitry to design exhibits.” Further, what powers are negotiated in collaborative efforts? And as Clifford shows in his essay, often museum “contact zones”, while being productive encounters, involve unequal reciprocities or “power imbalances of contact relations” (Clifford 1997, 193). Meanwhile digital heritage and archives become complex as they negotiate both local and national imaginaries, or different levels of “comradeship” (as defined in Anderson 1991). And, albeit facetiously, to respond to Claude’s earlier link (on the Met curator speaking about George Washington Crossing the Delaware on the Colbert Report), we see that the sacredness of accepted knowledges and ideologies is challenged by open access information. Indeed, there may be some hazards in blighting nationalist imaginaries with access to information (“that was painted in Germany?”). Wikipedia’s reaction to impending US Congress bills is perhaps more poignant.
In any case, this weeks readings encourage us to be cautious of cheap cocktails.
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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.