Buzzing with #MuseumIdeas
Museums are time machines. Not just in the simplistic sense of being capsules containing objects from the past, but as organisations. They have often been captained or crewed by a staff who are more concerned with safely transporting the fantastic objects from a hallowed past into an abstract future and worryingly unconcerned about relating to the present population around them.
Fortunately, in the last two decades the sector has become much more connected with current audiences and for me one of the strongest themes at the Museum Ideas conference (6 October 2016) was about an intense awareness of museum’s roles in the past, present and future.
This was most apparent in Dan Hicks talk about the conceptions of the future that the directors of Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum have had through the years. Most striking being the never-instigated high-modernist vision from the 1960s.
While all were amazed and impressed by the ‘giant lemon squeezer’ that the Pitt-Rivers museum could have become (complete with ‘CLIMATRON’!), the architecture physically enshrined the ideas of the time: that the complex ethnographic collections of the Pitt-Rivers could be organised in a way that was ‘correct, abstract and timeless’ and that this perfect vision could be carried through into the future — while being witnessed by visitors along the way.
Interestingly Dan and others were firmly of the opinion that the digital realm would be one of the key platforms for the pluralist interactions necessary to take museums beyond this stark modernism and enable rich interaction between current audiences and the collections museums hold.
There were fantastic examples of this from across the world — many blending digital and physical tools. The highlights for me:
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s programmes looking at disenfranchisement and co-creating with under-represented groups in Chicago’s west side.
Aarhus’s Den Gamle By (Old Town Living Museum) had an excellent project co-creating an exhibition of recent music history using social media to solicit object donations and oral history.
The York-based National Railway Museum’s amazing community theatre project — In Fog and Falling Snow stunned everyone with a rare example of a community co-created project that was not only enjoyable and engaging for the c.400 participants but resulted in a fantastic output that delighted hundreds.
A truly innovative and inspiring re-use of a museum space and a fantastic, creative partnership with theatre producers and the community.
One of the side points that I found particularly insightful was about the National Railway Museum’s attitude to choosing and developing projects:
The final highlight was the rightly celebrated Multaka project run by Berlin’s museums working with recent refugees and helping them become guides to artefacts from their home regions in Iraq and Syria.
One thing that was emphasised by Barbara Wolf (Deutsches Historiches Museum) was the fact that the tours given by the refugee team emphasised conversation and fun — not ‘scientific’ details about the objects.
This was another reflection of the conference’s other strong theme — one first discussed by the opening speaker Ken Arnold (Medical Museion):
Encouraging curiosity from both physical and digital audiences means using the right tools, JiaJia Fei made this case very forcefully with a comparison of her roles in the digital teams at New York’s Jewish Museum and Guggenheim.
It was also something that was emphasised by my colleagues Gavin Mallory and Alex Morrison in their pre-conference workshop.
The workshop got good responses and the whole conference buzzed with a sense that participatory museums will put digital at the core of their activities.
The slides from their talk give some great ideas on how your organisation might begin to implement changes and improvements.
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