A brief few words of introduction…

A short introduction to my tenure as the first Horniman Museum Art, Design and Natural History Fellow.

My plan over the next three years is to explore the Horniman’s amazing Natural History Collections through the lens of science fiction. Quite what this means, how it will happen and what it will all come to in the end is as uncertain as the future. I can promise that my explorations will in part take the form of regular fragments of text and image appearing here. I can also say straight away that my approach to this Fellowship has so been informed by Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, which looks at museum design in terms of the creation of social platforms. I’m particularly interested in her concept of museum objects as social objects. This is to view an object in terms of how it is able to generate a conversation. A social object is transactional. She gives the example of how walking with a dog can allow for social interactions between people, through the dog. I’m interested in the question of how an object within a collection becomes this kind of social object? How might objects facilitate dialogue? More than this, the question is how to turn that social object, or collection of social objects, towards guiding processes, towards new thinking and positive action? Discussions around the Horniman’s Natural History collections need, in my opinion, to facilitate agency and responsibility regarding issues of human impact on the natural world. I will continue to explore how science fiction might offer ways to read the collections but for now I will just put forward the idea that although science fiction is future orientated, it is grounded in the challenges of the present moment.