Today I was forwarded a post (hat tip: Alttext) by Paul Bausch of Onfocus, entitled The Former Audience in Meatspace. In it he recounts his experience with a tour guide at the High Desert Museum in Bend, OR, where he received much more information about an exhibit than he ever would have had he not gotten the tour. He then wonders why more of this great information isn’t online, or used in the actual exhibits for other people to hear.
The tour guide relayed stuff that wouldn’t make it onto the official wall text describing the exhibits, but the extra layer of information helped bring the scene to life. […] I thought that the tragedy of this is that all of this knowledge vanishes when he’s not around. In fact, I’d been to the museum several times and hadn’t hit this vein of information. With this info, the museum was a completely different experience.
I think he hits the nail on the head why new media is so important in the museum space. It allows us to enrich the museum experience beyond just putting a painting on a wall or fossilized bones on a pedistal, and it also goes beyond the walls of the museum itself. It gives the patron a way to experience the museum in a different light, in different way, and in their own unique way.
This is something we really prescribe to with our new media projects at the Walker. Art on Call gives people the opportunity to listen to comments from artists, curators and yes, tour guides, whether you’re at home or standing right in front of an artwork in the galleries.
Our blogs give people behind the scenes info on exhibitions, technical how-to’s, interviews, and just plain arty fun, giving people yet another side to the Walker. Even our Minneapolis Sculpture Garden website has it’s own video tours! All of this is available at the kiosks in our front lobby, or from the comfort of your own home.
When I read Mr. Bausch’s post it really made me think about all of the work we’ve accomplished and realize that we’re moving in the right direction. It also made me realize that in this age of increasing technology, more museums should be moving in this direction as well. It’s obvious from his post that being interactive, customizable and “deep” is where the trends are moving to. You need look no further than the web itself to see it. Technology adds more layers to the information, it adds more to the experience, and it adds more to the overall museum community. It would be a disservice to ourselves and our patrons to ignore that.
Brent, I enthusiastically agree with the benefits of this trend.
I have been a member(at times)of the WAC, and a consumer of its offerings over almost 20years. Even tho I bring to the museum a higher-than-average amount of cultural information and art training (being an active visual artist, continously gathering info from worldwide sources), I found my experiences at the Walker to be sometimes frustrating, as if the doors were somehow closed altho the exhibits and events were open.
Lately, tho, my perceptions have changed. With the advent of the Walker Channel, the interactivity of the blogs and their rich links to other online sources, the accesibility of ArtOnCall, and the WAC-supported mnartists.org, as prime examples, I now feel much more invited to be a part of the museum itself. This is highly rewarding to me personally and, as participation grows, must be even more rewarding for the institution. The experience extends way beyond the museum walls, via the internet’s growing interactivity. I can now “visit” and contribute to the museum from anywhere in the world!
Looking at other museum websites from around the world, I find the Walker is at the forefront of this movement. Another reason to be proud of Minnesota!
PS - PLEASE PRESERVE THE OLD GUTHRIE - IT AINT TOO LATE! IT WILL BE A JEWEL IN THE WALKER’S COLLECTION IN 30 YEARS, AND CAN BE A GREAT PART OF THE MUSEUM’S SPACE, NOT NECESSARILY AS A THEATER>>>LETS BE IMAGINATIVE!!!
Comment by Jim Grafsgaard — 10/29/2006 @ 11:44 pm
http://www.savetheguthrie.org
Comment by Jim Grafsgaard — 10/29/2006 @ 11:57 pm
I just returned from the Association of Science and Technology Centers’ Annual Conference where there was allot of discussion about these very issues. I think the biggest challenges we face in this arena are related to cultural shifts the staff at our institutions will have to make. Museums have traditionally played a very authoritarian role where they hold the knowledge that they parcel out to the visitor. However, following the emergent web trends that you describe will dramatically change this structure where the information will flow more freely back and forth between visitor and institution. Even though the positive examples in this change abound many traditionalists in the field are quite frankly terrified of this level of exchange and the challenges it might bring. Personally, I think they need to get over it but also know that the technophiles who might drive this change probably need to do more hand holding to guide people through this new way of being a museum (art, science, or natural history).
Comment by bryan kennedy — 11/2/2006 @ 4:37 pm
Bryan, I agree with you and those types of issues are exactly why I wrote this post. I think that institutions as a whole need to realize that opening the doors of information does not in any way diminish their authority on a topic. In many ways it actually enriches it by allowing others in on the conversation. In my opinion, if you’re not willing to have a dialog with your public, why are you inviting them into your museum, and why should they care enough to come?
Comment by Brent Gustafson — 11/2/2006 @ 5:03 pm
Brent,
I agree completely with your take on the matter. I have long maintained that the “white cube” of the gallery space strips away most or all of the contextual clues that originally informed an artwork’s creation–the artist, the time and place in which he/she worked, the issues that mattered to him/her, the works by the same artist that led up to the piece or that followed it, the works by other artists to which it may have responded–even the discourse that has grown up around the artwork since its making. Technology can help restore those threads, and reconstitute the semantic constellation that endows the work with much of its meaning. This is not to say that artworks have no expressive power on their own, but simply to acknowledge that many artists have developed conceptual projects far removed from the everyday experience of even educated visitors, and not immediately apparent in the physical manifestation of their work. The link below leads to some of the many multimedia contextualizations we have published over the years both in the galleries and online at SFMOMA.
Having said that, technology is not the only way to convey this broader context. We have also been experimenting lately with “learning lounges” in the galleries that augmenting computer kiosks with video clips and good old fashioned analog media: wall displays of photos, texts, and FAQs about the artist and his/her symbolic universe. Our research shows that visitors love seeing videos of the artist most; they also spend time looking at the wall graphics that explore an artist’s oeuvre. So while we often think first and foremost of technology because that’s what we make, it should be considered but one of an array of interpretive strategies that include brochures, docent tours, wall labels, etc.
Comment by Peter Samis — 11/6/2006 @ 12:39 am