Day Seven: Balancing Tangible and Digital at the New York Historical Society

Starry Night up close and personal, yet digital. Google Arts and Culture, according to Amit Sood, was positioned to bring museums and their resources to wider audiences. Even with such a remarkable resource, it did not do much to thin the crowds at MoMA last week, who crowded around the painting for selfies and social media photos. (Source: Telegraph UK)

My weekly docent duties can’t be finished without hearing a variation of “Are these skeletons real fossils?” and without seeing visitors’ reactions of awe and amazement upon hearing my reply that they are real. Seeing that regularly reminds me that people come to museums to see real things. Inspect a fossil bone, and it serves as a link to the lives of fantastic beasts that once roamed our planet. Examine an artifact exposes one to the aura of the histories of use and exchange that once tied people together. Behold a painting like Starry Night at MoMA, and you can feel Van Gogh’s effort as you see every single brushstroke.

Looking back at my own experiences in museums, and reading my peers’ introductory posts, a particular object or display (or few) that inspired us to double down into careers in museums. Objects make museums unique as educational institutions, but how can objects continue to draw us in and connect us to itself, to its histories, and to each other? How can museums work to “place a spirit of human connection at the core of our thinking,” especially when museums have been working with object-obsessed paradigms and when human attention is easily enthralled by frequent push notifications?

New York Rising: Blending both 19th and 21st Century exhibition techniques to tell the story of New York’s colonial and federalist history. While object information labels (including “tombstone labels” on the wall) are still present, they no longer become the focal point for viewers who want to learn more about an object without having their attention taken away from it.

As we toured the New York Historical Society with Mike Thornton, I noticed the plethora of touchscreen displays all over the museum. Even before our tour, I was reading about the history of recreation and entertainment in New York, from Central Park to Marvel Comics. Not only were these displays quite intuitive and easy to use (especially compared to other museum displays), but I liked that they supplemented the objects on display without distracting from them.

In New York Rising, for example, they combined the 19th Century salon exhibition (of cramming in as many objects and artworks into a space as possible) and put up a touchscreen that elucidated their social, cultural, and historical contexts — where real connections can be formed. Conveniently, the screens are positioned with some distance from the wall that visitors can just peek out slightly behind the screen to see the object. Rather than having buttons that invite kids to push them in nearly every conceivable way, touchscreens marry both display and input to invite focused interactions and investigations.

This Fisher Price playset has your favorite Sesame Street characters (kids had better consult that touchscreen if they ask who that smiling guy with the glasses is…) so you can make your own adventures like you saw on TV. But if you look in the back, there are rooms you can put them into and a chalkboard for practicing counting and spelling!

Reading and exploring such exhibits may tempt museums to pursue any digital tech on the market, whether touchscreens or virtual reality. Even when I browsed the Luce Center, I saw similarly supplementary integration of touchscreens and object arrangement. But I completely sidestepped the touchscreens when I saw a Fisher Price Sesame Street playset. I was a lot more interested in looking up close and seeing Bert and Ernie, Mr. Hooper and Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Susan and Gordon, reminiscing on childhood moments of laughter and compassion from that show. The touchscreens were still there, but sidestepping them did not diminish my experience with this object. I’m glad that using them was a choice for visitors like myself, that an object by itself still has the power to draw in and let visitors speak and feel.