I can’t believe that after all this time, I’ve never featured Paul Steen-Blake on an ArtFriday. I must correct this at once.
Paul describes himself as an artist/journalist and you can see where one side influences the other. His relatively new blog BETWEEN THE NEWS is about the spiralling 4th/5th generation warfare in geopolitical hotspots. Paul has the columnist’s knack of explanation, prioritising the inform in information. How does he describe his ARTBLOX series? “…buildingblocks that can be used to illustrate complex ideas or simply to decorate”. These are images you’d expect to see adorning long articles in Monocle-esque magazines. Except without the words, the meaning of the image is still accessible. And they look damn cool.
I want to call Paul an “urban artist”, but I wouldn’t want to tar him with the same brush that seems to cover most graffiti writers. Paul concerns himself with cities, these large hives of human socio-economic activity that is also the setting for the world’s battles. So he makes a tabletop game of urban warfare in a scale model of Grozny, surrounded in imagery like it’s your very own war room.
In response to the increasing use of UAV surveillance in the military, he built his own.
You can find more of Paul’s work at his website and you can follow him on twitter.
You heard it here first. These new partners see the arrivals of two new states being represented in the Norman Rockwell Museum and Art Institute of Chicago as well as ArtBabble’s first partner from outside the US, the Van Gogh Museum. I imagine this won’t be the last international partner.
I’ve become fascinated by the potential of the KQED partnership and will hope to find out more soon. Also personally stoked at what the Guggenheim has to offer. Hopefully they’ll involve the other global members of the Foundation.
All of the content will be available on ArtBabble.org some time Tuesday 28th as they’re still adding at of this moment. Babble On.
Nina preaches a particular brand of participatory design that I only partially understand myself, but I guess this is why Nina gets paid to give talks on the subject. I understand it as a movement in museum ideology from passive to active to social. This last part is exceedingly difficult to manufacture. What Nina is aiming for is getting a dialogue going that comes so easily in that mass-social-experiment known as Web 2.0, where complete strangers form communities over common themes. The trick is getting that 2.0 goodness off the Internet and into the physical museum. There’s no point in having a dualism of high web-based participation and a passive museum space. Nina fears this becoming a widening gulf. So do I: my beloved AR can’t happen otherwise.
In most museums, technologists are still seen as service providers, not experience developers. They live in well-defined (and self-protected) silos. There are stereotypes flying in many directions—that curators won’t give up authority, that technologists don’t respect traditional museum practice, that educators are too preachy, that marketers just want to get more live bodies in the door.
This is why Nina dreams of a museum that’s also a bar. It an attempt to move museuming into a established model community structure. (Nina – if that ever gets off the ground, I’ll drop everything and come be a barman/curator)
There’s nothing I think isn’t fair in what Nina said. Rob called it “misinformed” and I disagree. It’s justifiable to base a critique upon a single visit. It may be the toughest challenge, but if you can’t grab someone on their first visit, how likely are you to get a second. It’s brutal, I know, but people have 300 other things vying for their attention. So if someone goes to your gallery and doesn’t feel the same involvement as the Internet, that could be considered a curatorial weakness.
First off, I’d like to argue against lumping all sorts of museums together in this discussion. I think the relationship between virtual and in-person offerings is necessarily different when the museum is an art museum.
Standing Order 6: Don’t Fork (the Insurgency). I believe a museum is a museum. If we start finding reason to exclude art museums, then why not maritime museums or archaeological museums? Every taxonomy of museum has different issues. Hell, every institution has different issues. We’re not dealing with magic bullets or surgical scalpels here. We’re talking about the movement of museums towards the future. That movement is going to stagger and lurch. It would be a shame if the lurch made the technology side of museums merely an accessory, in an art museum or otherwise.
This is why I harp on about Augmented Reality. This is why Nina was talking about loyalty cards. (Not “interactives”, whatever that means. That words sounds so 90s, like “multimedia”). These things can be homogenised right through a museum.
When I talked with Rob Stein, the IMA’s CIO, about my frustration, he suggested that “institutional change has to start somewhere.”
Rob was clearly a bit sore about Nina visiting the IMA as a regular visitor and coming up with this very hard criticism. And it was very hard. Not harsh or snarky. Hard. That was Nina in full cultural critic mode, analytical and evaluative. There are lessons to learn, as proven by the large amount of discussion it generated.
Do I think the IMA deserved it? No. There are far worse museums committing far worse sins. I do believe it has to start somewhere and the IMA is doing great work. Looking at the list Rob made, things like Project IMA or the “Multi-User Collection Browsing with Physical User Interface” have some really exciting elements in this field. I can’t think of many museums seriously trying to make this much effort to establish web-and-reality communities. As Rob states about innovation in museums:
At times it seems to be ephemeral… a gossamer to be grasped at. Other times, you find yourself standing right in the middle of it without knowing how you arrived.
So, Nina went into a gallery and found it sparse compared to the online experience. Rob states the what they have done (albeit, in short term projects rather than total museum integration. Fair comment?) and then talks about the very interesting things they’re working on to get that experience. I like to think that they’ll “get around to that sparse gallery space”. It has to start somewhere.
Nina gives us a warning about a potential ghettoising of museum tech. I think it’s unfortunate that it was the IMA that inspired such a warning. Rob tells us where they are with the current museum tech movement. Where we are and what we should be concerned about. Two points along a line we can make judgements from. There’s a lot to learn here for us well-informed museum people, especially when we need to start thinking like the uninformed public that can’t drag out important members of the museum staff. Was is it that we’ve learnt?
Instead of large-print black and white barcodes to be scan at close-range (like my QR code), a Bokode is a tiny dot that can be scanned at a distance of a few metres.
A lot of this video may take a more science-geared mind to understand. In short, it’s smaller, has a greater range and can be “interpreted” quicker by cameras (hence the AR models didn’t twitch). I like how the video instantly see it’s potential use in a museum.
This has been the hardest ArtFriday I’ve ever had to write. Normally, selecting an artist is an easy process or browsing through my social network connections and offering a bit of my own personal interpretation. I don’t pretend to have that curatorial disconnection. I select artists because I love their work. I’m trusting my tastes and asking you to trust in my tastes for the awesome.
The problem for this week’s ArtFriday is that it’s Hazel Dooney.
I am a massive gushing Hazel Dooney fanboy.
So what do I write? What do you want to read? I’m in danger of writing “I Heart Hazel Dooney” fifty times and be happy with it, safe in the knowledge that I’ve conveyed my opinions accurately.
Go to Hazel Dooney’s website to get better explanations about her work. I feel I would only get in the way. Hazel can also be found at her blog and twitter.
We’re in a credit crunch. We all know that. I won’t bore you with the details you already know about budget cuts or the lack of jobs. What I have noticed recently coming through in the media lately is reflection on how people are working around it.
I started the week watching Alan Yentob’s Imagine: Art in Troubled Times.* He talked of art and austerity, Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and speculated how recession affects the arts for the better. In the Great Depression the US government paid artists a salary to produce things to perk up everyone else. However municipal backing brings no guarantee of quality. I wonder if that were to happen in today’s recession who would get the say on what was a good piece of art and what wasn’t. Would artists conform to what Ben Bradshaw or Peter Garrett thought they should be making? Doubt it somehow.
This programme made for an interesting debate, asking who the arts are for and what they seek to inspire. Art (in its most encompassing sense) allows us to be transported from our everyday lives for a while. So what can we do to foster this idea and make it work for people? Can we do anything? And quite frankly in this recession can we even afford to? One way which has already been happening is to use the empty shopfronts which are increasingly a part of High Streets and Downtown areas the world over. Who wants to look at this?
Free Parking - For Lease by ryan-chow. Used under Creative Commons.
Curator of the latest of these ventures, Manon Slome thinks that art can thrive in this kind of environment and something positive can be created. She discussed the Manhattan No Longer Empty project on Bad at Sports. With galleries going under and artist representation lacking, it made sense for all to use what was available for the minimum price. In an attempt to revitalise these empty spaces, artists were invited to make installations in response to the economic crisis. Often they would make site specific pieces in response to, for example a fishing tackle shop ‘capturing the zeitgeist of the store.’ Slome reports a great response from the public, from artists, and increasingly from backers who appear to see the positive aspects of this kind of ‘community art’.
So there do appear to be some upbeat elements in these uncertain times. Art might help us all through. Even just going to the cinema or to a museum for an afternoon might be enough to transcend the credit crunch for a little while. Shouldn’t museums and galleries be making the most of this in their advertising?
This all seems redolent of the art of the Depression era doesn’t it? Cheering up the masses? Take heed of a final warning from Arts and Ideas. Their panel talked of the myth of positive austerity. That the willing embrace of WW2 rationing and ‘getting on with it’ really is a myth. Nobody saw it in those terms then; it was damned hard. We all know how tough it is at the moment. I wonder what folk memory will say about this recession. What nostalgia will have been created of this time when historians look back?
* Admittedly not a podcast but a BBC TV programme and hence not available worldwide.
Whenever I get a new follower on twitter that says they are in “Marketing”, more often then not, that’s just cause for an instablock. This is the only way to deal with any snake-oil salesmen.
So when I say that Arts Marketing guru Maryann Devine is the real deal, you can trust me on that.
Today, Maryann is launching a ten-week e-course called “Arts blogging — without the angst!“. Ten lessons and worksheets delivered to your inbox. Check the link for more details and how to sign-up.
Normal prices are $61 for the course and $68 for the premium course that comes with a whole bunch of additional extras.
But there’s an extra special 30% off for all newcurator readers, making the price $42.70 or $47.60. Just use the coupon code NEWCURATORRULES. Code valid until 15th August.
There has been an interesting juxtaposition in the podcasts that have caught my notice this week. They have been either about the very latest developments in technology for the future or the preservation of things that are being lost.
APM’s Future Tense talked to NASA about their communications projects. They have already tweeted from space, but aim much higher (and further) than that. By building an interplanetary internet they want to be able to make the most of spontaneous interactions with space vehicles and telescopes. I’d love to think it could be this:
‘Take more macro photographs of that crater, send them to the Hubble telescope and copy the email to the Smithsonian so they can archive them at the same time.’
Normally in space exploration, you would have to plan to take those photographs on your next mission, so this would get things working much faster. How could this technology have an application for museums? Could we send data out there instead of just retrieving it? A virtual space museum? I would love to hear what you think.
The BBC World Service special report Save Our Soundsdiscussed the changing soundscape. In a thought provoking podcast, they covered urban sound design, lost soundscapes and are preserving sounds by charting aural turnover on an interactive map.
Sound is often used in museums: as part of audiovisual display, as oral history or in interactives. What I find more interesting though is the sound of the museum itself.
If you closed your eyes for a couple of minutes what would you hear? It really depends on where you are. There could be the hubbub of school groups or the quiet contemplation of people considering art on the walls. The hushed but frenzied excitement of somebody discovering an object they love and telling their friend. A film quietly playing to itself on a slow day. The scratch of a pen on paper as someone takes notes. Footfall, chatter, excitement, boredom. And behind the scenes? Typing and papershuffling in the offices. A telephone conversation. The whirr of machinery in conservation services. The clatter of someone making a cup of tea in the staff room.
I bet that your museum sounds different in all kinds of ways to the one where I work.
I think that it would be an interesting experiment to have a museum sound art exhibition. Chart a day in the life of a museum, edit the snippets and pipe it into a gallery. I would love to people-watch while the visitors figured it out. Very subtly done, it might seem like a haunting.
Too self indulgent? Or just seeing things from a different perspective? I think it is worth a shot.
I started off talking about new technology. All technology gets old eventually and will probably end up in a museum. Here is a great videocast by The Stuff of Genius about that once brand new technology, long range radio.
I’ll try my best to describe this new definition of hyper reality, but understand I’m still trying to get my head around it.
First, reality. Plain old reality. Go outside, go to the park. You understand this concept, yes?
Then there’s virtual reality. Computer-simulated environments. I remember when this meant putting on a heavy plastic welder’s helmet that burnt your retinas showing you out-of-focus polygons. Now, it can mean Second Life, a virtual world where you can put on cat ears and burn your retinas trying to work out why you suddenly crashed into a virtual billboard.
Augmented reality, in theory, is adding a layer of virtual over common reality. Normally in the form of a mobile phone (I still think AR should be in goggles) and using GPS, “viewing” reality then gets some extra information. It’s still in the very early stages of icons and hyperlinks. You could use an AR device to look at a building and see it has a giant floating marker above it or a yellow outline that then links to the building’s wiki page. We haven’t gone into William Gibson territory where your AR device shows that building being eaten by a 60-foot space squid. Yet.
So, what’s Cross Reality? ReadWriteWeb has these twoarticles, but I’ll summarise: Real world sensors affecting virtual reality world (and I guess vice-versa). In short, turn something on in the real world and the virtual thing comes on as well. If it isn’t happening yet, I imagine it will soon, but you can turn the virtual thing off and the real one will turn off as well.
As soon as AR get to the Gibsonesque animated giant squid stage, I guess it would also bridge the gap further. Imagine, I’m standing in an art gallery in Paris with my AR goggles, in front of a large kinetic sculpture with two buttons. I look to my left and I see a SecondLife avatar piloted by a man in front of his PC in Brazil. We can talk to each other. I press a button and the sculpture spins clockwise. Donaldo’s avatar presses the other button and the sculpture spins anti-clockwise. We are both seeing a spinning sculpture.
Then I walk away from Donaldo, clearly annoyed at his virtual button pressing. He sees me walk away and his cat ears display the “sad” expression.
This example, whilst elaborate, is pretty simple as I’m only talking about CAD models and synchronised switches. Cross Reality can involve a serious sensor net pouring data into a virtual world. Augmented Reality in the invasion of the real by the virtual. Cross Reality is some of the Real World dripping into the virtual. And who are the purveyors of the materialistic reality with a repository of cold, hard reality-based information? Some sensors, some program architecture and your museum’s datashadow runs in tune with your museum without much further work.
Quick Example: You have a gallery with a SecondLife shadow. You hang pictures on the wall that have small RFID tags on corners of the frame (for positioning). Your virtual shadow also shows these pictures. When you change the exhibition, the virtual gallery changes automatically.
What could be potentially exciting is a plug-and-play system. Like when you plug in your USB drive to your PC it automatically recognises it and (hopefully) can run it straight away. Well, imagine your gallery having similar USB ports and when you plug in your… laser light show or something, your virtual world picks up the 3D model out of the device and has it act the same in the virtual world.
I’ve wanted to do an ArtFriday on a sonic/audio artist for a while now. I felt ArtFriday was becoming too two-dimensionally heavy. Problem being, I confess, is how little I fully understand or comprehend audio art. I just lack the language. Then again, I’m of a generation that can just about remember music videos on television and the first generation to be sold the concept of large amounts of digital music in your pocket. This may be why I’ve often been annoyed at audio art whenever I have gone to a place to experience it. I’m just not wired that way.
Also, visual artists greatly outnumber audio artists in all the social networks I’m part of. So I’m glad David Jensenius emailed me. I was also pensive that it may mean nothing to me. I listened with my big Sennheiser headphones. My response to David’s email: “I like this”. This is my brain being rewired.
David’s use of space fascinates me, especially as I’ve never got on well with audio art in actual space. Sitting at my desk with a decent pair of headphones, listening to 7, I got an incredible amount of work done. I was somewhere else, gently surrounded yet kept at a distance by the sounds of a social situation that I recognised and was alienated from but actually didn’t exist. 7 is made of seven layers from seven different places.
(D./C.)e-NTW:v.2.0 continues the theme of space/non-place as traffic from an email server is translated into sound. This is the music from between-places, from Send to Inbox across a gap you only partially know about.
Iraq 2006 horrified me. Machine gun basslines fed directly into your inner ear makes you realise that this is the noise you’ve zoned out when watching the news. Accompanied by Anne Rhodes singing the numbers of the death count as both Valkerie and game show scoreboardEach number counted with a “Ta-da!” as Iraq becomes a Hollow State.
These are all spaces/places. 7 is the place I know, yet didn’t exist. (D./C.)e-NTW:v.2.0 is the place I don’t know, yet I’m sure exists. Iraq 2006 is the space that I may never know and struggle to think exists anymore than a hole of failure in the Middle East.
David Jensenius is on twitter and you can find his website here. Go to Listen/Watch and listen to these three pieces with a good pair of headphones or speakers. Then listen to the rest.
How could a museum get better the more people use it?
The question comes from the analogy of the web/museum 2.0 label. Wed 2.0′s “architecture of participation” has more than enough examples, what are the museum equivalents?
Two things first: The question says “How could”, so I’m allowed to be as liberally creative with my answer; the other is “better”
Better?
What does a better museum look like? One with high visitor numbers? Increasing visitor number surely means the museum is getting better as an unused museum is surely a poor thing. Maybe I should be thinking in marketing/business terms and getting better with more users is dependent upon the goals and objectives of the museum? We want 2000 local schoolchildren to do our education program. We would be better if we had 6000.
These example don’t make any reference to participation apart from passive attendance. I should include the 2.0 set of relationships between Museum and Mob. Something more than just increasing the statistics of object and observer. To be “better”, there must be problems/issues and therefore solutions. Museums have plenty of problems. Museum 2.0 is involving users in the solutions. More users, more solutions. Or at least a solution based upon an average.
So what are museum’s problems? What could be done better?
There are two starting points, I guess. One is complete transparency. Opening up, declaring all your problems, shouting “We’re doomed!” and then try to motivate your users to offer solutions. The other would be to construct the problem as a puzzle or game (a la Superstruct) and act as carefully influencing guides to your users to see where they end up.
Out of all museum problems, is one of them a lack of knowledge? I get a bit cynical when it comes to crowd-sourcing knowledge. Not because of any elite sense that I would only listen to academics, but I struggle to see what obtaining 1000 people’s thoughts on a particular object achieves. I know I say this after quite liking The Odditorium‘s encouragement of creative responses, but Museum 2.0 is what happens after. Are all those labels kept? What happens when they are all put in a folder? Are they Beautiful, Emotional or Useful or are they just adding to the clutter?
Are they thrown away? If they all are, then the users are making anything better than your numbers and the exercise is redundant. If a few are kept, say the ten most interesting labels are curated, then you didn’t need 2.0 participants – you just need more interesting people in your museum.
Keep them all, keep half or none. Is this participation making the museum better or solving its problems? I guess it was published in Seb Chan’s blog, and received more blog attention from me and Nina so I guess that’s a benefit. Maybe it could spark new ideas because of it. Baby steps.
So what are the problems? Money? (Maybe a bit tacky). Collection Management? Using an increasing amount of users to find what is Beautiful, Emotional or Useful based upon participation with objects. If something is in your collection and it’s never been seen, nobody cares about it and/or its broken, maybe you could consult several thousand people as to whether or not its truly is a Museum Piece. You would have a better, more efficient, less wasteful museum.
(Okay, okay, you deaccesioning police. Take all these objects not wanted by one museum and put them on a museum-only eBay that only museums can purchase from. Store all the objects in ghost boxes.)
Would a user’s experience be enhanced by this? It could mean they wouldn’t experience the bad. It would mean that what is in the museum has been decided to be worth something by the wisdom of crowds…
Doesn’t look like a lot of fun, does it?
Problems made better with more people… Painting the building? General maintenance? Many hands make light work-type jobs? An incredible army of microvolunteers working to make the museum a better place? Well, instead of flooding the foundation, how about the flooding the top? Microtrustees, each paying a small amount of money (helping the museum no end) to get one vote in the running of the museum (making it better). More users, more income, more rounded direction etc.
I may have not given a satisfactory conclusion, then again, my hazy definition of a “better museum” would probably need more than my solitary opinion.
Quite a few video-heavy post recently. Here is part one and part two of Director of the National Academies Press, Michael Jensen giving a speech to the AAUP. In it, he talks about the environment, digital open access and the radical changes required for scholarly publishing to adapt to the future. All in about 16 minutes. (Via if:book)
Replace publisher with museum and the speech still makes relevant points.
The Odditoreum’s small exhibition component is 18 ‘odd’ objects that are not currently in storage. Shaun Tan, a celebrated author was invited to write ten of the labels… Seven labels were written by young children (from Stanmore Public School) to inspire other visitors to write their own ‘labels’ during the holidays.
That discussion has traditionally focused on visitors’ ability to distinguish real artifacts from props and the question of whether an experience with a reproduction is lesser than, equivalent to, or superior to engaging with “the real thing.”
But in the Odditoreum’s case, it’s not the object that’s in doubt but the interpretation. The objects are real, the labels absurd.
Is “making up meanings” for objects (real or not, in a museum or not) really the same as “making alternative meanings”?
This all seems more like a way to start a creative writing class than an exhibition.
Personally, I like the idea of telling lies in museums. You can make up such wonderful lies. That is, ultimately, what makes a good book. But Paul Orselli’s comment is right, there is a difference between “alternative” and “made-up”. Whilst this exhibition was certainly aimed to drag out the creativity of the museum visitor, I feel it touches on another issue: the subjective/objective in museums. I can’t approach the topic of when something shifts from the traditionally objective to the radically subjective without bringing up the Good Doctor Thompson.
Hunter S. Thompson invented Gonzo Journalism almost by accident. He was sent to the cover the Kentucky Derby. Instead, fuelled by a variety of drugs, he faxed in his almost random notes about the crowds he saw and the bizarre culture around him through the completely unreliable eyes of intoxication. The most important aspect was the he was in it. He was in the story and was the story. Journalism was supposed to be about pure objective observation. The point was not that he lied (of coursed he “lied”). The point was, as he put it, that he took a novelists approach the journalism, hoping to receive and transmit more of the Truth. Maybe then more people would give a damn.
Now, the Powerhouse Museum asked an illustrator and author of children’s books to write the copy of an exhibition. Then they asked people to write their own. What you got was a view straight into their psyche. When Thompson wrote, you looked into his eyes into the eyes of the 70s American Alternative Culture.
This year, Bourriaud names his exhibition Altermodern and falls just shy of giving it the subtitle, “I Made This Word Up”. He displays art that fits his, arguably subjective, globalised outlook towards consumerism and universal rights.
The shift is often painful. Museums pride themselves on their objectivity, often confusing it for authority. Thompson proves that hi subject Gonzo Journalism can provide just as much authority on a given subject, but it did not mean the style was generally accepted or even had a particularly long shelf life. There are few journalist who managed to take it forward with the majority of subjective journalism being the remit of idiot celebrities, banging out mostly ghost written columns about they people they know.
I choose the term Gonzo Exhibition Design carefully. I wish to highlight the novelist approach rather than drug-addled narration. I also refuse to use the “New” prefix of the preceding movement “New Journalism” (Yes, I know the irony). I often hear that museums are there to tell the stories of objects. When this was tried objectively, we ended up with Kopytoff-style Object Biographies. Good Lord, just tell stories. The best stories are about made-up alternatives.
They talk UK politics (I agree with Serota about nobody wanting to be Culture Secretary). They talk about geopolitics with MacGregor clearly pushing his internationalism. Interesting he associates it with London as the City of Diasporas. They talk about the Marbles. I like to think my insight was right. The question of ownership is redundant, the question of taking it around the world is more important. They talk about sculpture, the Olympics etc.
Then Bamber Gascoigne makes them take about the future, museums and the Internet. It was Serota’s answer that stood out for me:
The big challenge for big institutions over the next 20 years is going to be to what extent we wish to simply remain authors and to what extent are we going to become publishers?
Boom. Serota shows why he’s one of the most important museum directors in the world. MacGregor spoke about the Internet providing access, which is fair enough. Serota sees the Internet as a medium of information and museums as sources of information. Curators will be far more like Editors (Ahem! Okay, I said magazines, but I think the statements are still relevant). Okay, it may not be what comes out of a MW200x conference, but
After all my “What is a Museum’s Most Important Function” routine, Museumist asks a far more fundamental question: “What is a museum?” I think I’ll put forward my own definition.
Civilisation is a wall. Culture is jelly. Museums are nails.
I point to the 30 minute mark onwards. Sterling talks about a different materialism, objects as embodied social relationships.
I can’t work out if Sterling could be a museum-saviour or would happily see most of them burnt down. Or both. I now can’t work out why he linked to the “Museum’s most important function” Wordle.
I throw it open to you to help me unpick. I want to know what you think and imagine the list of Four Things is aimed at a museum collections. Beautiful Things, Emotional Things, Tools and Everything Else. The Everything Else part being things not-on-display, that offer-no-meaningful-narrative and are broken.
I first discovered Kirsty Hall in 2007 as she blogged about her daily artwork for The Diary Project. Drawing on a sealed envelope then posting it to herself each day, she charted an entire year.
Both artist and curator, Kirsty tries to capture and embody memory in her pieces. Often working in series, she creates haunting, evocative works of sculpture, textiles, photography and drawing. Her use of everyday, almost insignificant objects as her working medium only adds to their beauty.
She often works with vast quantities of pins or pieces of thread. What I particularly admire about her is that she always works alone and all the intricate, repetitive effort is entirely hers.
Kirsty is a prolific artist with a lot of work to choose from. I have selected the following works as I feel they embody the crux of her ideas.
Summer holiday season is upon us. What do you see and do when visiting a new place? Guidebooks point us to the highlights of the city or region, but what of other local things?
Smart City podcast discussed spottedbylocals.com. This tourist information blog, described as an ‘atlas of emotion’ is made up of suggestions of what to see and do by local people. For them, the best things in the neighbourhood are different to the guidebook ideas. It seems that seasoned travellers even say ‘sometimes the tourist attractions are the least interesting part of the trip’. Well, this doesn’t bode well for museums and galleries does it? They’re often the highlights in the guidebooks. What to do?
I suggest that museums play on this idea themselves, making use of their local visitors. An exhibition project combining local topographical art,personalised Google maps and visitors’ connections to these places and objects has potential. It could breathe life into tired collections and provide a way to get local people in the doors, as well as visitors from further away. It’s a similar idea to those exhibitions where the whole point is that visitors write their own interpretive labels. This information mapping could be extended even further. Adding catalogue data to the map would be valuable for staff and researchers. It would allow them to see the locations of finds or views. Map your collections using local knowledge. Like a visual version of oral history?
Listening to The Future and You, I kept the mapping idea in mind. American guest Robert Hooker discussed trends in IT, globalisation and immigration in the UK. It is always interesting to listen to an outsider describe your own environs. Some of what he said didn’t sit comfortably with me, but it did make me question how narrow my own experience is. Sometimes I find this reflected in the narratives that museums tell. Migrants will inevitably have different views and experiences of the local area. Being an outsider allows you to see things in a different light. Running a museum project to harness these narratives could create a new layer to the map. Or a new map altogether. A way of charting local history as it happens from multiple viewpoints.
Kansas Historical Society’s Cool Things in the Collectionfocuses on and discusses the biography of one object per podcast. A story cloth made by Hmong refugees narrates the story of the escape from Vietnam at the height of the war. This narrative textile seemed to me a predecessor to the mapping idea. The traditional use of fabric to tell a story that can be packed up and transported with you for easy accessibility has correlations with today’s Internet use. Save your map online and you can open it up for perusal through any Internet connection, wherever you are. Evolving the mapping idea in another direction, a virtual map could even chart the ethnic minorities’ diasporas and journeys to the local area.
Technology has moved on but the importance of storytelling has remained a constant. Local museums need local narratives. Bring them up to date.
Thanks 
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