Part five of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. You can search for the other parts using the search box in the top right hand corner.
His memory was flawless. Apart from having absolutely nothing from before he was thirteen when he work up alone in a hospital bed with the doctor unable to find any trace of him on any database. Whatever put him there had left his body covered in tiny wounds and a long, thin and perfectly straight scar along the left side of his skull. From that moment onwards, Duncan had been building himself from scratch.
Duncan pushed open the large steel up-and-over door of his single room flat. The dank sunlight filled the single room, barely casting any shadows. It wasn’t sparse. Duncan just didn’t have much stuff. People who lived in what was a stack of converted storage containers didn’t tend to have a lot of possessions. Duncan lived at the very top of seven storeys of concrete. It gave him a great view first thing when he left his flat but was bitterly cold in the Winter. Duncan looked over the favela that this part of the city had become. He took a deep breathe of what would be the last mostly-clean air for a while and made his way down the bolted-on stairwell tower.
“How may I help you?” said the smartly dressed girl behind the front desk.
“I’m here for a 1 o’clock interview. My name is Duncan.”
“Please take a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.”
The girl’s irises were an unnaturally bright green. As Duncan took a step back towards the rigid plastic chair, the green of the girl’s iris looked like it began to bleed into the rest of her eye until two emerald pools stared out from her flawless pale skin. She then raised her hands and her fingernails glowed the same colour. Duncan watched as she moved her fingers in front of her like some kind of elaborate dance of sign language.
“That’s an augment I’ve not seen before,” said Duncan. The girl turned her head towards him and the colour quickly returned to the normal position. She made a small smile.
“It’s new,” she said, “Only got it last month. It’s so much quicker now.” Duncan sat down and let the girl get back to work. He was glad to sit. The nerves were building up inside him. He watched the people in the Central Auditerminal. Some were browsing the variety of shops that went all around the edge. Some were sitting, reading or on talking on phones. A few were taking pictures of the four grand exhibits placed in this room. Most people carried suitcases or bags. Some were passing right on through to check into their flights. A number of people walked past Duncan to climb the marble staircase next to him. They strolled around the mezzanine before disappearing into the exhibition galleries of the museum. After fifteen minutes, a woman came striding across the auditorium with a slightly frantic edge to the way she walked. Her hair was ash blonde with slightly lighter grey strands in it. She wore all black. She gave Duncan a well rehearsed smile of greeting that made fine dignified wrinkles appear. She offered Duncan her hand.
“You must be Duncan. Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Jonquil, the Deputy Curator here.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Duncan said as he shook her hand.
“Come this way, I’ll give you a quick tour first then talk about what you want to do whilst you’re volunteering here. It’s only me giving the interview I’m afraid as our Head Curator is in meetings all day.”
So what does this mean? A lot more unemployed in the culture sector for starters as the most likely replacement will be a small team within the Culture department. A lack of a national body to oversea museums probably means that local councils will be able to do what they like. Can we expect a bunch of new job losses in the smaller museums? Or what’s stopping the selling of collections?
Presentism, as this blog often cites, is the short-term decisions of living in the Present over building for a long-term future. Now is important over working out where we are going. I am a firm believer that growth is the way get us out of problems and cuts do not promote growth.
I ask all of you now; with the MLA going soon, will you miss it? How will it affect you? What do you foresee happening? Drop a comment below (it may take some time to approve).
And if anyone in another country wants to see my CV, send me an email.
What does “the curatorial” mean? I’ve been wrestling with this concept since I first read (and re-read) Maria Lind’s essay for Artforum from October 2009. Lind’s brief article posits the controversial 2008 S?o Paulo Biennial (in which one of four floors in the Pavilion was left empty) as an example of the curatorial. Lind begins her piece with the following:
Is there something we could call the curatorial? A way of linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space? An endeavor that encourages you to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it? I believe so…
I thought I had a grasp on the curatorial until Vidokle very politely asked me to clarify his position as not being critical of the theory at least in principle, after I had suggested the opposite in my earlier NewCurator post about the expanding spectrum of what can be defined as curatorial activity. [See update to previous post, which includes a quote regarding his opinion of the curatorial.]
What is the curatorial then? And why does it seem focused on exhibitions as a starting point (“beyond exhibitions”) when organizing exhibitions is but one albeit highly visible aspect of a curator’s responsibilities? And are curators in disciplines other than modern and contemporary art engaged with the curatorial or is it a theory situated firmly in today’s art?
Why is this concept so elusive? I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a rigorous reader of theory. I’m sure that presents the biggest challenge to grasping this idea, which Lind likens to “Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the political’, an aspect of life that cannot be separated from divergence and dissent, a set of practices that disturbs existing power relations.”
When Jens Hoffmann, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, declares, “My voice in making an exhibition is equally important as that of the artist,” is that the curatorial in action? Hoffmann’s quote comes from the 2007 publication Ice Cream, and follows this statement, “To make a provocative claim, it’s curators who have contributed to art to effect greater change in the art world than artists (I refer here, of course, to both negative and positive effects.)”
Later on Hoffmann says, “The shift in curatorial practice is a result of the increasingly close relationship between artists and curators and the utilization of artists’ practices by curators.” I imagine that the borrowing of artists’ practices would include institutional critique, which Lind specifies when she says she imagines a mode of curating that operates “like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions—owing much to site-specific and context-sensitive practices and even more to various traditions of institutional critique.”
Is the curatorial a further internalization by museum professionals of the re-definition of institutional critique that artist Andrea Fraser articulated in her 2005 Artforum article “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”? As in, to quote Fraser, “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.” She continues, “It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kinds of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”
Is the curatorial inevitable? Or is it too late and too uninformed to ask that question? Is the curatorial, much like the over-use of the word “curator,” a development already so embraced and enmeshed in practice that there’s no turning back? Everyone seems to be acknowledging changes in the profession of the curator, but is this the actual progression or is it more an affinity being articulated by curators and theorists?
So, let’s talk curatorial-ly. Please. And preferably not steeped too heavily in cultural theory jargon. Did any of you attend the conference in Leipzig? Care to offer any observations on that or other essays, conversations, or ideas you’ve had?
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Here’s part four.
Chapter Two
Duncan had kept a meticulous record of every job he applied for. Every record included the original posting, the job description, the person specification, a copy of his application including his personal statement. Each record was sorted into date order of application deadlines. Each application was a small improvement on the last. The last item of each record was a rejection letter, or a page with a simple red cross on it if there wasn’t a response. Duncan had kept three hundred and twenty eight records of unsuccessful application for every position he could. Including several letters enquiring about internships or volunteering. He kept copies of the records digitally in several places, keeping them in sync but also had four binders of paper copies on the second-hand desk in his one room flat.
Record number three hundred and twenty nine was opened. Duncan inserted the final item: a letter inviting him to an interview with regards to becoming a volunteer at The Intramunicipal Museum. The letter had been stuck to his concrete wall for a week to remind him and to revel in it a little. It was only volunteering, but Duncan felt he had something to prove. Duncan was bright. Not a high grade student but a solid performer all the way through his educational career. It was down to Duncan never forgetting anything. Everything he heard, saw and read was stored away and instantly recalled. All standards tests said that Duncan wasn’t a savant or even struggled with containing that much information. He could just store it away. It made all of his teachers and lecturers unnerved as he sat there without making any notes. It didn’t make him popular with them either when he pointed out their contradictions.
Dbasr is a free, open-source content management system. It’s designed to allow musicians and other rich media artists to build, customize, manage and update their own website and web presence using simple tools. [[Go watch the video and help fund the project at http://www.indiegogo.com/Dbasr - another fundraising tool]] [[via http://coilhouse.net/2010/06/joshua-ellis-presents-dbasr/]]
Cultural institutions in Great Britain and the U.S., which had until now relied on BP, the British oil company, as a benevolent, generous patron, are now faced with decisions about how to deal with to the public-relations dilemmas posed by accepting support from a company that has been demonized, due to the horrific Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the company's much criticized handling of the aftermath.
We've arrived in a world where everyone is a content creator. And quality content is determined by context. Finding, Sorting, Endorsing, Sharing – it's the beginning of a new chapter. And not since Gutenberg have we seen such a significant change in who's able to use the tools of content creation to engage in a public dialog.
The emergence of a new King — a Curation King, reflects the rise of the new Aggregation Economy. It is an exciting time to be in content, and the best is yet to come. [[I don't know why I read these things, they only make me angry]]
The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages. [[There is so much head-slapping moments in this article, I don't know where to begin]]
I think I’m going to ban discussions on privacy for future conversations. Not because it doesn’t matter, it does. In fact it matters so much that it tends to overshadow other aspects of the discussion. And you know what? The privacy debate is much the same… it always boils down to a simple trade-off. Privacy is currency… You might argue some of this is not augmented reality. I agree. But a slightly broader definition of what constitutes “augmentation” of reality leads us down very exciting pathways of thought. Architecture itself is a form of augmentation. And layering data, changing the utility of a space, expanding our interaction with a physical object, these are all augmentations of a kind. It was argued that architecure and urban design will change as we move down the path of augmented reality and the IOT.
Their website features a Foursquare Community page that leverages the Foursquare API to highlight their activity and that of their guests in a unique way. The list of Foursquare users who’ve been to museum is highlighted. The tips users have left… are shown as well. This is a nice way to integrate the opinions and suggestions of other users directly into the site. The venue’s current mayor is shown, along with a list of the past mayors of the museum. They also highlight their mayor special at the top of the page, which offers a free 1stfans Membership when their mayor checks in at Target First Saturday events. The museum’s special badge, BK Art Star, is shown, along with all the users who’ve ever earned it. One of the most interesting parts is the list of Foursquare tips the museum’s staff have left on other venues in their Prospect Heights neighborhood. These serve as recommendations for visitors on places to eat or drink when they come to visit the museum.
LAST fall, when the Neversink Valley Area Museum in Cuddebackville, N.Y., set out to raise $11,000 for architectural renderings of a new building, museum officials turned to strangers for fund-raising using the Internet… Through a Web site called Kickstarter.com, the museum met its fund-raising goal in fewer than 90 days with help from 69 donors… The fund-raising process, known as crowd funding, has enabled the museum to move forward with long-term plans for a state-of-the-art center to replace the historic buildings where it currently resides.
Viral funding describes the contagious process of raising support and funding through social networks and online media.
Sponsume makes viral funding easy by offering a free customisable project page and easy-to-purchase project vouchers that can be shared with your social network.
Now, there are more ways than ever to raise money thanks the to Internet. A huge market of do-it-yourself crowdsourcing websites has made fundraising easier and more effective. The good news is that you don’t have to be a techie to access all of these great resources. Even the most adamant technophobe can get online and start raising money. [[Three links to new fundraising sources]]
Location aware software for mobile apps are getting more common and more complex, but still function upon the proximity to single GPS points. The problem mobile-side is the significant drain upon the battery.
(Via ReadWriteWeb) Location Labs has announced the beta for its geofencing library for the new iPhone. This will allow new location aware apps to response to more than a single GPS point. In short, you can define a whole sector of GPS points as a single area, place or building. If Foursquare-type apps are your thing, this would mean people would actually have to enter a place before checking in.
GPS real estate. I wonder about the future lawsuit of owning location data. When geofencing data is claimed by a third party other than the people who own the building. Anyway, I’m thinking out loud. The useful part is that a museum that can plot of every corner of its own floorplan can be involved with the next generation of location aware apps. There’s also the function for automatic “checking-in” (To borrow from Foursquare again) and also automatically saying when you’ve left.
Other uses could be improved Augmented Reality apps that provided information exactly over an object without additional location tags (like QR, bokode etc.). Maybe location-aware WiFi? You can only connect to a network when sitting in a defined area.
Or maybe, tracking where you museum users are walking with handheld tours and working out the most popular objects/exhibits and where people gather. Vitally important metrics for museums.
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Here’s part three.
Talisman knocked twice on the large door of the meeting room with one of his rocky knuckles. When the door opened he thought that the room was dark. The darkness shifted position and Talisman found himself staring eye-to-chest with an enormous man. Talisman looked up at the chiselled jaw of a harden soldier, but also noticed the immaculately neat hair and designer glasses. What the man was wearing was also a paradox. It had all the fine tailoring of an expensive business suit with what looked like all the protection of military-issue bulletproof body armour. That’s when Talisman noticed the two sleek semi-automatic pistols in tactical thigh holsters made of fine Italian leather to match the briefcase being held in the man’s right hand.
Damn, thought Talisman, a Paladin. This only made things more difficult.
Paladins were originally the name for a royal guard. It then became the term for a warrior priest and in some cases a knight with some magical talents. These Paladins are neither righteous nor magical. They are employees of the Paladin Security International, highly trained bodyguards and security personnel with law degrees from some of the world’s top universities. They can act as a private military and legal representation, often at the same time. They understood all the loopholes of the legal system and often shot you through them. Those they didn’t need to terminate, they buried beneath litigation. No wonder the Portfolio Direktor was so clean if he had Paladins flanking him.
“Welcome Mr. Talisman”, said the Paladin with a deep Oxford accent. “My name is Mr. Barrett and I represent Paladin Security, Political Division. Direktor Kelman will see you now.”
Talisman entered, moving around the impressive frame of Mr Barrett. The door was softly closed behind him.
In preparation for a lecture in early June at the National Museum of Iceland, I had a minor epiphany—that the spectrum of what can be defined as “curatorial activity” is simultaneously being expanded in two diametrically opposed directions. At one end, the word “curate” is being used to describe myriad activities not pertaining to museums or art, while at the opposite end is the increasing specialization of the practice as exemplified by introspective theorizing and institutional criticism as well as proliferating academic programs.
Two recent posts illuminate this dichotomy. “Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Age of Curation” by Eliot Van Buskirk for a Wired magazine blog takes Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps to task for suggesting that Apple “curates” the software allowed on iPhones and iPads. Van Buskirk says that in reality Apple polices the software on these devices. But he admires how Epps cleverly manipulates her point by employing the word “curation” and then goes on to give several examples of how “Curation is already fundamental to the way in which we view the world these days …” listing Facebook, news outlets, and devices like smart-phones as examples.
Meanwhile, in his article “Art without Artists ” for the May 2010 issue of e-flux Journal, the artist and e-flux co-founder Anton Vidokle warns of the tendency towards self-inflation and self-infliction within the curatorial profession. Vidokle criticizes the dangers inherent in the concept of the “curatorial” which according to a recent conference on the topic, is “a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions,” and which Marie Lind, director of the graduate program at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, has partially described in an Artforum essay as, “an endeavor that encourages you to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it.” According to Vidokle, “Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.”
My intention with this post is not to bolster or argue against either of these permutations of “curator,” which could be oversimplified as the amateur (a Facebook user) versus the academic (an over-educated, overly-theorized professional curator)—hence the title of my post. But I do want to note the concurrent existence and continued escalation of these developments. I can’t effectively argue that there is a causal relationship between the two, but I do think that the increasing use of the word “curate” to describe functions outside of the traditional curatorial profession does enhance the desire for insiders to study what it means to curate to the extent of conceptually formalizing the activity, as in the “curatorial.”
The optimist in me hopes that this increasing spectrum of what can be called curatorial activity ultimately makes our profession more relevant within the art and museum worlds and to society at large. As mentioned in my January 2010 Museum magazine article this trend is already off and running and we might as well embrace it.
My main concern in both these developments is simply that they each move further and further from what was the initial focus of curatorial activity, that being art (or historical objects or natural and physical specimens to make this more applicable to the museum field at large). If either end of the spectrum glorifies the act of curating above and beyond what is being curated—be it paintings, data, or performances—then we move into precipitous territory. I don’t want to halt the process, but rather want to suggest we proceed with “care,” which, as many curators know, is at the very heart of their profession.
UPDATE:
Anton Vidokle has kindly requested I clarify that, unlike suggested in my original post, he is not critical of Lind’s notion of the “curatorial.” He elaborated on this originally in footnote # 2, from his article which I referenced above. The following is the text from the footnote.
“While I agree in principle with the description of “the Curatorial” as it has been articulated by Irit Rogoff and practiced by such figures as Maria Lind—insofar as that curatorial methodology and knowledge is not limited to exhibition-making only, and can be productively applied to many different activities from book publishing to teaching—my concern is with a rather large gap between theory and concrete power relations that exists within the culture industry, and only grows due to misunderstandings.”
The British Museum has begun an unusual [[??]] collaboration with Wikipedia, the online, volunteer-written encyclopedia, to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Or so we have been telling ourselves for ~2,357 years. This year, arts organizations and non profits are in a position to innovate . . .or else… How do these experiments in creating new economic models for supporting non-profits relate to how museums are thinking about financial sustainability?
I think we will see more museums looking at an expansion of services into new areas, and experimenting with hub-and-spoke strategies designed to reach into the community in new ways, or acting as an umbrella, a producer, and a curator of people, events, and opportunities rather than keeping all of those functions in-house, and the creation of new membership/rewards plans and other ways to raise money.
Asinine article from former advisor to Tory on Arts and Culture. Suggests "find your own money" as solution. Also, "And, can we any longer avoid deaccessioning, if acquisition funds are now empty and museums have to fund acres of storage for third-rate pictures?"
I promise (and I hope you will too) to have a cup of tea, put a few pennies in the donation box, or buy a little something in the shop EVERY time I visit a museum.
What can Ubimark do for you?
Ubimark enhances physical reality (books, places, objects) with stories, travel experiences, ratings or information.
» Ubimark Books. Paper books, such as “Around the World in 80 Days” are linked to the web through 2D codes.
» Ubimark Tours. Locations throughout the world are annotated with information, tips, reviews, personal testimonials, which are delivered through an Iphone App.
» The Ubimark atlas. This site is an online atlas for all the stories, information, or personal testimonials made available through the books or through the iPhone app. Information can be browsed by double clicking the markers on the maps. Each marker connects to a specific page and location. New information can be added to the books or to the iPhone tours by the users through this site. All you need to do is to create an account on this site.
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Part one is here. Here’s part two.
This year, Talisman had no strategy. The new Portfolio Direktor was a complete mystery. He couldn’t get close to him nor discover any information about him. The graven face Talisman wore was due to a real dread that this would have to be the first budget meeting ever where he had to wing it.
Talisman shuffled past the main entrance to Civic Centre with its sweeping stairway and strange neoclassical statues. Either side of the large doors was what the original architects saw was an appropriate symbol representing the triumph of man and the power of the people: a naked man punching out a horse. This entrance were for official visits, state ceremonies or high ranking-elected officials. People like Talisman didn’t use this entrance. He carried on around the side of the building to enter through two wooden double doors in dire need of a new coat of paint. Talisman signed himself in at the desk, took off his trilby-style hat and made his way through the less-than glamorous wing of Civic Centre. Most of the narrow corridors had faded blue walls with cancer-yellow strip lights. The difference in décor when he got to the floor of the meeting room was noticeable. The first being that everything had an extra six inches in every direction. There was elbow room here, despite Talisman not noticing another person since he got out of the lift.
One of the most intelligent things ever written on io9.com was by Matt Jones, Design Director of Berg. “The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future“. Radical architecture designing an urbanism that is “increasingly linked and learning”. I strongly suggest you read this article. This quote from Dan Hill stands out.
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
Everything we need to survive the possible outcomes of the future is dependent upon the city becoming an organism. The Internet of Things video from IBM says the “planet has grown a central nervous system”.
I don’t doubt that claim, except I say that the cities of this planet are going to be the first that actually construct a that workable system of system. We can really ramp-up the hardware inside our City Battlesuit.
The role of the city in the future will affect the role of the museum. All this data, all this information, networked and communicating along the city’s nerves, adding to the superabundance. Cross-referencing stuff will just produce more stuff. There will be organisations who will turn this into some useful apps, like the intelligent alarm clock that will check your calendar and your route.
The museum’s part in this must be to get directly immersed in this city’s central nervous system. It’s role will be like the lymph node, distributed throughout the city’s body (networked/linked) and providing the immunity against the city’s ills. Culture will be the city’s white blood cells.
I don’t see this as another form of social engineering. You can distract museum’s with all kinds of outside missions. I remember one museum who had to try to deal with the city’s knife crime problem. I don’t see this response involving a political step.
By being involved in the system, the museum can make its own responses. That data will be analysed (maybe into the visualisations that are so popular) to give the populous something to make their lives a little better. This isn’t just market research. This is about audience development. This is to make sure the living-city-organism doesn’t die or brutalise itself. This is to make sure the City has a Soul.
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Here’s the first part of many more to come.
GLYPH
Chapter One
Ben Talisman’s 120th birthday was about a month away and the feeling coming from deep within his bones told him that retirement was rapidly approaching. He had been working at the museum for ninety years, serving as Head Curator for the past forty. Today would be the 50th budget meeting at Civic Centre he was summoned to. Every year, he walked alone with his craggy face set in a graven stare. He used this time to go over his strategy. It took an incredible amount of planning and research to make sure the museum wasn’t shut down of ransacked for financial reasons. The first few meeting, Talisman had relied upon presenting all the good work and all the beneficial effects the museum had. After one close call where the museum was saved from closure within the last forty-eight hours, Talisman took to gaining advantages from researching whoever was the current Portfolio Direktor.
The strategy had worked so far. The problem was no reason or excuse could be used twice. The trick was to stun the bureaucratic system whilst getting the desired result from whoever had the authority to sign off on the budget. This meant these meetings had become increasingly bizarre. One year, Talisman had planted false evidence in the Direktor’s house to suggest that his wife was a keen patron of the museum. He did is when he found out that the Direktor’s brave face hid a deep neurosis over his wife’s death six years previously. Another time, Talisman had found the Direktor was addicted to a rare hallucinogenic made from the sweat glands of poisoned West African Children, so he conducted the entire meeting dressed as a reptilian archangel sent by a Pulsar God from the other side of the Cosmos.
Wave # 1: Search. Wave # 2: Social Media So, it is time to jump on the next wave, Open Data, Semantic Web, LinkedData, whatever we want to call it… Social media has created masses of new information that flows in real time to and from our mobile devices. That is great, but it is also a problem. Our poor befuddled brains need a bit of help figuring out which bits of that fire hose will help us. We don’t have an information overload problem, we have a filtering problem. Semantic technology is key to that filtering. But great writers and editors are also needed! [[Not a single use of Curator! Doubleplusgood]] 1.Top Tier Experts. 2. Dedicated Offshore. 3. Crowdsourced On Demand Work. 4. Semantic Aggregation Technology. 5. Open Data.
The mobility of social media interaction disperses the public awareness of living histories and recognizes the role of the individual as a contributing element to the museums developmental process. “Moving elements in a city, and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as its stationary parts. We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it, on the stage with other participants."
At other times, a gift that the museum doesn't want at all may be accepted "as a commodity," specifically designated for sale after a three-year period (to qualify as a tax-deductible donation by the Internal Revenue Service). A "commodity," he stated, is an "in-house term" for an object that is not registered as a piece of art ("like office furniture") but segregated in its own storage area awaiting an opportunity to be sold. These sales "raise a modest amount of money" for the institution. [[You can't do this in the UK.]]
One of the essential components of the museum approach to disability detailed within these publications is the exploration of the Social model of disability, as a counterpoint to the medical model that permeates society. The other incredibly significant aspect of these publications is the framing of social activism as a museological method… However, when we consider museums approaches to disabled people, we do not see the issue of representation or inclusion in decision making protocols, instead we see a continuation of approaches of paternalism demonstrated by a focus exclusively on ‘access’: ramps, wheelchair accessible text rails, brail signage, etc. All of course needs that must be fulfilled, but, none of which challenges the underlying oppression of disabled people within society, and in fact by focusing on such approaches as if they were a burden museums in fact continue the oppression. [[Great post, Dan]]
Every architectural project is immediately exposed and assessed in comparison to all other projects. Global convergences are possible. This does not mean homogenisation and monotony… Parametricism implies that all architectural elements and complexes are parametrically malleable… Parametricism aims to organise and articulate the increasing diversity and complexity of social institutions and life processes within the most advanced centre of post-Fordist network society. It aims to establish a complex variegated spatial order, using scripting to differentiate and correlate all elements and subsystems of a design.
Paradoxically, even though the buildings have doubled or tripled in size, there seems to be less inside than in the old buildings, not more. They've become unintentional "air and space" museums of a sort, because they're filled with more "air" and "space" than exhibits or activities.
And the staff to run the new place?
Many of them have been "furloughed" or "downsized" or just "fired" which makes one wonder about the future of a much larger physical plant.
This UK-based project essentiall is encouraging people to catalog objects and share the associated stories in a public database. A prototype of the universal, dispersed, publically curated collection?… Will objects that have their own "accession" and "catalog" records be less likely to be discarded, and more likely to be treasured and passed to a new user?
However, Medical Museion is currently reframing its identity, from merely a ‘museum’ to an institution for science communication. The point of departure for this identity shift is a growing dissatisfaction with the state of science communication. Traditional dissemination of science through mass media (either printed, electronic, or web 1.0-based) is no longer viable. Science communication needs to embrace the rapid emergence of the full spectrum of social web media (web 2.0), and many museums are adopting the practices of museum 2.0.
Cybergogy focuses on helping adults and young people to learn by facilitating and technologically enabling learner-centered autonomous and collaborative learning in a virtual environment. At the core of cybergogy is awareness that strategies used for face-to-face learning may not be the same used in the virtual environment.
Location data leads to a list of nearby places arranged in a nice UI. It’s a good directory with links to Google Streetview. Lots of potential to add things to each venues profile.
Now, let’s look at something similar. French organisation CultureClic’s app, also for the iPhone and they also show a Blackberry, Nokia and a Samsung. I figure it works on others. Watch.
Kids nowadays. Remember when there was such a thing as standards?
The Internet, all you needed was a standard screen and any browser. Now its all ep-ods and ep-ads and tablets and apps that don’t work with Android. Everything’s behind a password. In my day, we didn’t have to lock our data.
Whyioutta *shakes cane*
Welcome to the Splinternet, where your website might not work and Google can’t search it.
Is the fact that so many fantastic innovative museum things are occurring on an exceptionally expensive pieces of kit a form of social inclusion?
As an Android phone owner, I can’t think of a single museum making apps for it. A quick search on the market brings up a bunch of tourism and picture apps. Not a single official museum app.
Where’s the inclusion? Where has that bastion of museum work “Access” gone? We were doing everything we could to break down the barriers to the museum-loving public and then we go and provide all this innovation to a technological elite. Then this innovation is at the mercy of the sanctioning process of the platform and the limitations of the device.
Just how are museums going to deal with the Splinternet?
“To build a set of tools and services, spanning mobile devices and built environments, that can transform a public space into a reactive, collaboratively mediated experience”.
If there is something that is on my mind more than anything right now, it’s how the future of museums will depend on the function it provides inside the city. I’m talking less along the lines of educating and providing culture to the populous, but as an ingrained node of a living city.
HP has been developing 
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