“strangely, museums are still trying to work out what the internet is for”

@sebchandirector of digital & emerging mediacooper-hewitt national design museum, nyclabs.cooperhewitt.org | freshandnew.org

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cooper-hewitt smithsonian design museumandrew carnegie’s old mansionmuseum mile, new york city

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location

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science museumexplaininspire

art museuminspireengage

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formerly powerhouse museum, sydney

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consulting for many institutions & projects

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three parts.

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“the virtual museum”

we (thought we) were in control

“an encyclopaedic resource”

2001:

“authoritative”

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“the museum without walls”

visitor is in control

“museum as service provider”

2011:

our authority is entirely contextual

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‘families’ <-> ‘scholars’

‘curriculum’ <-> ‘free-choice learning’

‘experience’ <-> ‘information and fact’

‘exhibitions’ <-> ‘collections’

tensions & continuums:

‘serendipity’ <-> ‘speed & precision’

‘buildings & galleries’ <-> ‘platforms & media’

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“visitation to a museum’s online presence is in the order of 10x that of admissions”

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“visitation is a poor measure of impact”

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“We’re attempting to add new capacities to the world, and influence behavior around them. And we’re attempting to do it in an uncertain and complex environment; we neither know the exact recipe for success, nor we do expect that recipe to stay the same over time.”

Kellan Elliot-McCrae, Etsy

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“any utopian project has failure hardwired into it”

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“institutional wabi sabi”

more detail at http://bit.ly/14MTYrK

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technology acts as an amplifier.

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vectors of scale

contextual depth geographic reachtemporal persistence

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geographic reach

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Museum of Old & New Art, Hobart, Tasmania

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temporal persistence

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temporal persistence

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temporal persistence

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persistence of identity. does your museum remember its visitors?

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outside of art museums, collections are very unfashionable

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collections are what makes us unique.

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1. lightweight architectures of participation

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powerhouse online collection 2.0 2006

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the value of an incomplete record

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unexpected tag hacks

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cross collection linkage

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the first wave of crowd projects used people’s goodwill & spare time

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is a engaged community of users more valuable than a collection?

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a wildly successful failure

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photographic negatives

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2008 first museum

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first 2 years 2.5m views

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most popular image

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1st museum in flickr commons 2008

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14 tagsfrom flickr

0 tags

ingestion of flickr content tagging

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platform behviours

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congregant behaviour

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creative remixing

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“… Though [the integration of community sourced knowledge into the catalogue] completes the circle of gift exchange, the principle of reciprocity requires all parties to continue to give and receive in order to maintain the social bonds the gifts have created. In the case of the Powerhouse Museum, the sustainability of their gift exchange relationship with the Flickr community puts the productive capabilities of the Commons in jeopardy.”

Alyssa Croucher, 2010“Cultural heritage photographic collections and a circle of gift exchange”

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what are the limits to ‘digital volunteerism’?

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2. increased engagement needs increased staffing

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3. there is no virtual. there is only the real.

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a malleable world

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Free Universal Construction Kit

source: fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit

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asian art museum 3d scanning

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“acknowledge the internet exists. and is in our visitors pockets.”

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a world of devices

source: loulovespictures

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a world of devices

source: luke wroblewski

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first audioguide, stedelijk museum , 1952

mobile devices in museums aren’t new

source: loic tallon

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logistical impact of device proliferation

source: harald groven

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the second wave of the crowd uses sensors and devices ambiently

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a world of sensors

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source: eric fisher

locals vs tourists: rio de janiero

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recycling bins as survelliance on london

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exhibit tracking with wi-fi (powerhouse museum)

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how might we utilise these new visitor capabilities in rebuilding a musuem?

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rebuilding the museum is an opportunity to reinvent it - entirely

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Slide Subtitle

cleveland museum of art

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“we are not an art museum. we are a design museum. there is a difference”

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science museumexplaininspire

art museuminspireengage

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cooper-hewitt collection has always been a ‘working museum’

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THE MAKINGOF

A MODERN MUSEUMBY

ELEANOR G. HEWITT

WRITTEN FOR

THE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON CLUB

1919

“Restrictions are eliminated, except the few necessary to protect the objects; the salient point is, that the objects are there for use, to be worked from, and, if so desired, to be removed from their positions and placed in any light ... Naturally constant use will have a tendency to damage, even destroy certain objects ... but ... if in that time an artistic tradition passed on ... the existence or non-existence of these objects will not seriously matter, and during all that time the Museum will have been fulfilling its destiny”

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0.3% on display7% photographed

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Cricket Cage, late 19th century.

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Figure, "Cat and kitten", late 19th–early 20th century.

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revel in our history and the quirks of collecting

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visualising the ‘shape’ of the collection

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seeing acquisitions by time

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4. we no longer traffic in unique, rare, or naturally interesting objects

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Chair, "Aeron", 1992.

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how is it made? why was it made?how does it work?why is it important?

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people, places, context, stories?

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making peace with interpretative differences

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who values the user’s stories? who sits in the chair?

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“new forms of curatorial practice”

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being on the network

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connecting the collection outwards

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5. “give everything and everyone a stable place on the network”

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code is open sourced on github

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6. collect the present. at scale.

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“Enthusiastic digitization by amateurs, a phenomenon previously ignored by information professionals, is providing a rich source of online cultural heritage content ... ephemera and popular culture materials are often better served by the pro-amateur community than memory institutions.”

Melissa Terras, 2010 Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation. Literary and Linguist Computing 25 (4)

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popular culture exhibition 2010-2011

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large % private object loans

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“pro-am interfaces”

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0xDB launched 2007

full text search of film & tv

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0xdb

unofficial ‘collections’

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0xdb

subtitles pulled from torrents

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“a museum never truly becomes digital until it collects born-digital objects”

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new types of ‘object’ we need to collect, preserve, exhibit

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new types of ‘object’ we need to collect, preserve, exhibit

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1. architectures of participation2. increased engagement costs3. digital is the new real4. the present is not unique5. give everything a stable place6. collect the present at scale

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@sebchandirector of digital & emerging mediacooper-hewitt national design museum, nyclabs.cooperhewitt.org | freshandnew.org

thanks

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