Guest Post: Noell Wolfgram Evans

Participating Contributors

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Marcel Duchamp

Say what you will about his art, Duchamp was right in his idea of turning spectators into contributors.  While this is an important concept in art appreciation, it’s perhaps even more important as a survival philosophy for museums and historical societies.

From the beginning, museum spectators (visitors) have taken a passive stance in their relationship to their museum.  This, it goes without saying, needs to change.  The continued growth of social media tools can not only be beneficial in enabling museums to start intentional conversations with their visitors but also can be used to turn those visitors into participating contributors.  It’s allowing visitors to do everything from   helping to shape the direction an exhibit will take to supplying some of the content to be displayed.

The advantages to developing this relationship with the visitor are numerous.  At the top of the list though may be the way that this entrenches a visitor within your (or perhaps more accurately their) museum. Additionally, a visitor with items on display is perhaps the strongest advocate a museum could have.  With a personal connection to something to talk/Tweet/Blog about the contributing visitor is now not only part of the curatorial team but also part of the marketing unit as well.

Let’s look at a few examples of this concept.  As you consider these remember that there are opportunities to integrate visitors through technology no matter the size of your organization.

One of the best examples can be found at the Ontario Science Centre.  In a space that focuses on Toronto, they have an exhibit that explores the city by using a web-enabled kiosk loaded with a map from Yahoo! Maps. The exhibit encourages people to take pictures of themselves around the city, tag the photos, and then upload them to the museum’s Flckr account.  These photos are then pulled directly into the exhibit map so that when the visitor tries to learn more about say the local coffee shop, the image that comes up is the one of that visitor at the coffee shop which they took and uploaded before leaving for the museum

In a completely different environment, The US Army created a mobile exhibit trailer for its recruiting efforts.  When you enter the trailer, there is a touch screen panel whose initial graphic is a map of the United States.  You can use that map to find your region and there watch videos which were created and uploaded to the site by other potential recruits.

At a different level, The Summit County (Ohio) Historical Society (in conjunction with other local organizations) has established the Summit Memory Project.  It’s a place that allows people to share everything from postcards to first person accounts of the area’s history.  People submit their photos and stories and then members of the Historical Society scan and format the material to maintain a consistency.

These are just three examples of many.  While museums continue to work on social media as a method of communicating, there should also be equal time spent on exploring how those tools can be combined with existing exhibits or used separately as a standalone exhibition tool.  If the goal is to move visitors from Duchamp’s passive “spectators” to participating contributors, what better way is there to do that then by re-purposing the tools they are already using?

Noell Wolfgram Evans is the Senior Writer/Producer at Mills James.  You can follow him on Twitter at Noell_MJ.  He can also be reached at nwolfgramevans[at]mjp.com