Inspiration

For a while I’ve been pondering change and trends in museums. In my article, ‘Museum metamorphosis à la mode’, I suggest that certain museum developments may correspond to a fashion logic, as evident in trends of interest running across the museum sector, and in how keeping up with current culture has become as important, and cooler, than serving as custodians of the past.

The V&A’s Rapid Response Collection is a very interesting example of this, where ‘[o]bjects are collected in response to major moments in history that touch the world of design and manufacturing. This new strategy helps the V&A to engage in a timely way with important events that shape, or are shaped by design, architecture and technology.’ (http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/r/rapid-response-collecting/)

Louboutin’s 2013 Nudes collection, for example (the collection is not fashion specific, by the way, but I choose this example because it relates to my domain in particular), was thus recognised as representing a significant sociocultural shift, as ‘[t]his was the first time that a major fashion house had adjusted its definition of nude to include skin colours other than white’. (Rather shocking, really, that it has taken so long). Furthermore, the collection’s curators leverage Twitter and Instagram to ask for the public’s suggestions for new accessions; another museology-of the-current trend.

‘Fifi’ pump in five nude shades, designed by Christian Louboutin Ltd, 2013. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

But aside from this movement towards matching and musealising the Zeitgeist, I also detect a trend for nostalgia on the rise. I’ve written about the death and the resurrection of the diorama elsewhere, one of my favourite examples of an altmodish museum technology which nevertheless has a unique didactic and experiential quality, and which furthermore appeals to our yearning for the past.

Another surprisingly strong example of this came up yesterday on Facebook, where the National Museum of Denmark latched on to the ‘Throwback Thursday’ trend on social media, and posted a vintage photo from the museum galleries. Interestingly, the majority of responses expressed a nostalgia for this kind of museum display, with remarks such as ‘It’s actually really beautiful. When I was a child, the National Museum was more magical, lots of objects and hardly any explanations – that was cool’ and ‘would prefer exhibitions as they looked back then, showing the quantity and variety of objects’.

It is interesting, I think, that the public responds in this way (disclaimer: I have not been checking out who ‘the public’ is in this case – some of the other comments seem to come from museum people, and the quoted commentators may also represent a bias, it’s only one instance and an unrepresentative sample, etc. – nevertheless), perhaps a little differently from what the museum expected.

Screenshot from Facebook, post from Nov. 27th. on National Museum of Denmark’s profile page

From a museum history perspective this type of display is terribly out-dated and dull. Furthermore, museologists may see this display form as a reflection of the traditional authoritative museum from which it stems, an institutional identity which modern museums are very keen to leave behind. Glass cases become negative by association, perhaps, as much as because of their actual constraints.** But for a new generation of museum goers it’s the blinking interactives and dead computer kiosks that are old hat, aesthetically troublesome and cloyingly didactic. The unmediated collection, on the other hand, appeals not only because it is quaint or induces nostalgia, but also because it seems fresh. Rock collections simply rock.

(For me personally, Pitt Rivers Museum and Galeries d’anatomie comparée et de paléonlogie top the list of museums I’d love to see (oh, and ‘House on the rock’, which looks like every kind of museo-manic awesome rolled into one as directed by David Lynch)). In this age of ever-increasing levels of digitisation and connectedness, I believe that materiality and mental space is sometimes experienced as a scarcity, and could therefore become a mega trend* in the future. If they want to make that their unique selling point, museums have both in buckets.

——

** Note added Feburary 24th, 2015:

As stated by Britta Brenna (2014:47f), “In a long tradition of museum critique the glass case has been a metaphor for what museums do to objects. Museums, it is claimed, decontextualizes objects, severe their bonds to any original context, and taps them for monetary and use-value. However, these critiques have a tendency to treat the glass cases as ‘black boxes’; self-evident museum features that do not need further investigation.”

Brenna, B. (2014), ‘Nature and texts in glass cases: The vitrine as a tool for textualizing nature, Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, Vol 2, No 1 http://www.nordicsts.org/index.php/njsts/article/view/1201406

#MoMu

October 13, 2014

Inspiration

1 Comment

Thanks to a confusion of hashtags on Twitter I just came across another story that somehow relates to my project interest (seems to happen a lot these days). MoMu, which is otherwise associated with ModeMuseum Provincie Antwerpen, has now also become the shortform name (&hashtag) for the newly reopened Moesgaard Museum in Århus, Denmark.

But apparently, MoMu also refers to the Museum of the Mundane, a London and New York based (and agency driven) ‘celebration of everyday design brilliance’. The simple but clever concept is about attaching museum-style labels to mundane urban objects like ATMs, manholes or traffic lights, in order to point to their design history and significance. It is easy to imagine this kind of campaign being instigated instead by a city museum, or perhaps evolving as a grass-root phenomenon, like yarn bombing, and interesting to wonder what kind of things would then have been given attention. What would I put a label on? What would you?

Still,

MoMu may be a glorified ad for the branding agency that created it, but it nevertheless raises an interesting point: perhaps it’s less the famous towers or historic districts that define a city, but rather the mundane objects encountered at every street corner. Together, boring objects accumulate to form a richer image of the city than the one you see in tourist brochures.
(Rory Hyde http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/02/best-urban-objects-mundane-bollards-bricks-black-cabs)

The Guardian story also references another project, the miniscule Mmuseumm in New York which presents itself as a ‘modern natural history museum dedicated to contemporary global archeology’ with

an understanding that “as is the macrocosm, so is the microcosm.” The only access to a greater truth is through the individual perspective of a collective gaze. By examining the small things, the vernacular, we are able to look at the big one, life itself, or at least start to see its edges. (http://mmuseumm.com)

This thinking is, again, reminiscent of Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence/Modest Museum Manifesto and also brings to mind The Museum of Important Shit (links go to previous posts about these, with links from there to origin). Together, they show up a kind of pattern of interest in a ‘re-enchantment’ of the mundane, or a belief that the everyday is actually rather enchanting if only we care to see it. This belief is the ‘utopian motif’ mentioned by Gumbrecht (2006) (who references re-enchantment as the antidote to the disenchanted modernity, as diagnosed by Max Weber) – utopian because of the sociological and political idealism that it conveys.

Projects like these, however, attempt to make real the utopian dream, by establishing Foucauldian heterotopias in the form of museums of the mundane, or – to use a concept which I am currently working to formulate, as an extension of Foucault’s terminology, to describe exactly this kind of museum gaze which may also see the other-and-more-ness of everyday objects – by creating heteroscopic peepholes providing an other-view of the everyday.

Aesthetic experiences in the everyday

October 10, 2014

Inspiration, museology, Questions and Musings

1 Comment

In the 2006 article ‘Aesthetic experience in everyday worlds’, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‘reclaims the utopian motif’ that aesthetic experiences may occur in the everyday. The article builds on the ideas presented in his own book The Production of Presence (2004), as well as on Kant’s description of aesthetic experience as ‘disinterested pleasure’ – disinterested because it is independent of purpose and function, which we otherwise tend to pursue (as per his definition of beauty as ‘purposefulness without a purpose’) – ; on Heidegger’s dual concepts of ‘earth’ and ‘world’ (which, to be honest, I don’t quite get, but it’s something to do with objects, as we are experiencing them, being at the same time conditioned by and concealing their ‘primordial givenness’, and yet historically specific, erm…); and finally on philosopher Martin Seel’s idea that aesthetic experiences, or, in Seel’s terminology, the effect of appearance, is conditioned by a decontextualisation of the object and its related conceptualisation from its original context (Gumbrect 2006:305). From this complex of ideas, which all, as Gumbrecht points out, focus on the subjective experience rather than on the ontology of the object of experience, Gumbrecht proposes four concepts contained in aesthetic experiences: the content of aesthetic experience (i.e. the feelings & impressions experienced); the objects of aesthetic experience (i.e. that which triggers these emotions); the conditions of aesthetic experience; and finally the effects of aesthetic experience (that is, the consequences or transformations produced by the experience).

The condition of decontextualisation is characteristic of museum objects (not only due to the physical museum context, but also to the practical and symbolic process of musealisation, cf. Desvallées & Mairesse 2010), but both Seel and Gumbrecht hold that, in principle, any object or concept is capable of becoming decontexualised, and therefore that effects of appearance or aesthetic experiences may occur also in the context of the everyday. In fact, Gumbrecht asks, ‘[h]ow much longer will the visitors of museums be bored to near-death with the self-accusatory truism that museums (inadvertently or not) give a certain aura even to the most banal objects?’ (2006:315), when ‘straighforward pleasures'(ibid.:316) of the everyday may provide more intense or enjoyable aesthetic experiences?

The question that remains, however, is what triggers these experiences, this decontextualisation? And perhaps, from an institutional perspective one might want to ask if such experiences can be triggered, if it is possible to set the frame for an aesthetic view of the everyday:

‘remember some of those moments in which what we consider to a thoroughly normal everyday experience all of a sudden appears in a new, exceptional light, in the light of aesthetic experience. These are moments that make sudden changes happen through a switch in the situational frames within which we experience certain objects. We suddenly think of food as “artsy food”, we suddenly see clothes as “fashion”, we suddenly begin to appreciate an “elegance” in the solution of a mathematical problem, or we are suddenly surprised to hear a rhyme that we have inadvertently produced while speaking. Under which specific conditions do such switches occur, and how do we return from them, if ever, to the more pragmatic everyday attitudes?’ (Gumbrecht 2006:302)

Having just finished Gumbrecht’s article, I came upon a short series of tweets from @DRKunstklub showing a collection of dead frogs, which added another perspective to the notion of everyday aesthetic epiphanies. The fascinating story behind the collection is told also on DR Kunstklub – a division under the culture and arts section of the Danish Broaccasting company – ‘s website and Facebook page as well as on the independent website I Do Art. Here Lone, the collector, says of her motivation for her unusual collecting interest that ‘I collect in order to create philosophical questions and contemplate things’ like life, death and destiny, and later explains how, in the case of this particular group of dead frogs, found on a road, it was the aesthetics that suddenly spoke to her, and inspired contemplations about beauty.

Tweet from @DRKunstklub Oct. 10 2014 10:56 Caption reads: “A reflection occurs, over what is beautiful, and whether we always need to be beautiful. Can the ugly be beautiful?”

It seems to me that Lone’s description not only reflects the potential for finding aesthetic experiences in even the most mundane details of our everyday surroundings, but also illustrates one of the the central concepts in Gumbrecht’s The Production of Presence, that is, the oscillation between ‘meaning effects’ and ‘presence effects’ that is central to aesthetic experience. To be elaborated…

References

Desvallées, A. & Mairesse, F. (eds.) (2010): Key Concepts of Museology, ICOM & Armand Colin, available for download from the ICOM website, http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/Key_Concepts_of_Museology/Museologie_Anglais_BD.pdf

Gumbrecht, H.U. (2004), Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, CA: Standford University Press

Gumbrecht, H.U. (2006), ‘Aesthetic experiences in everyday worlds: Reclaiming a utopian motif’ in New Literary History, 37:2, 299-318

Musealisation of personal objects

September 17, 2014

Inspiration, Mediation, Questions and Musings

3 Comments

Working on my third article, about the museum gaze and museum objects, last week I came across three very different participatory projects that all resonated with me. In different ways, they inspired considerations of objects outside the museum, of attributing museal value to your own things and of notions of the everyday vs the extraordinary. #Deldit2014 is an Instagram based call for submissions of photos of how we live in 2014. The initiative comes from ‘Den Gamle By’, an open-air museum of urban history and culture, whose mid-19th century township was recently supplemented by a section of city life in 1974. Now, in preparation for a future exhibition of 2014, the curators ask the public to share photos of their homes under a common hashtag.

Screenshot from Instagram, submission for #deldit2014

Participation in this project simply requires taking a snapshot of your home, the contents of your fridge or other snippets of everyday life. It thereby simultaneously satisfies the widespread urge to share your life on social media, and offers the tantalising prospect of contributing to future heritage, although the museum makes it clear that only select photos will enter their collection. But what makes the project most interesting for me is how adding hashtags or other descriptions inspires reflection not so much on the specific contents of my home, but of how they are typical of the times. What transpires is that most signifiers of personal taste and choices are actually ‘so 2014’: buying organic milk and veg, streaming TV series rather than watching TV, replacing CDs with Spotify and records (and referring to them as ‘vinyl’ rather than records or LP’s), having white painted floorboards; this, I realise, will seem like a timestamp when looking back sometime in the future. But of course the task of identifying and collecting the present is a great challenge, also for curators who cannot rely on the comfortable clarity of future hindsight, and are also themselves caught up in the Zeitgeist as well as in the unspoken codes of their own social taste tribes. Enlisting the public is therefore a brilliant strategy, as it simultaneously aids the curators and potentially broadens their perspective; promotes the museum in a cool, fun and approachable way via participants’ social media networks (marketing gold); and inspires reflection on current cultural heritage. At Museum of Copenhagen, the exhibition ‘Søren Kierkegaard: objects of love, works of love’ comprises the philosopher’s personal possessions and quotes from his writings on the subject of love with contributions of objects and their related ‘love stories’ from the public. This juxtaposition of refined prose with mundane objects worked a treat, and the simple yet rather striking execution of the physical exhibition renders it well worth a visit. The exhibition also has a virtual counterpart, from which the excerpts from Kierkegaard’s writings have strangely and sadly been omitted, but where some of the objects and the stories behind them can be found. (And although not all items from the exhibition can be found online, at least here all digital content is fully functioning, which unfortunately was not the case onsite. This remains a curse on digital mediation in museums, regardless of the platform, and equally frustrating each time.)

Private snapshot from the Kierkegaard exhibition. The simple exhibition design consisted of a circle of double-sided exhibition cases, showing Kierkegaard’s quotes and objects in the inside circle, and items from the public related to the same themes on the outside.

Frankly, I haven’t read any Kierkegaard (this exhibition served as yet another reminder that I really ought to change that). Still, contemplating the philosophical concepts and many forms of love – loving friendship, romantic love, love of the self or love of a parent, for example – has such a universal appeal that prior knowledge of the literary sort was not a prerequisite. As the museum’s director, Jette Sandahl says, ‘[i]t’s a subject we are all experts on’, and, one might add, a subject that nevertheless can leave us all confused and unsure, as no level of expertise can safeguard us from fumbling and failing. This uncertainty, I gather, is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s writings on love. And while the historical artefacts may have the solidity of traditional museum objects, grounded in verifiable facts and documentable data regarding a person of indisputable cultural significance, it is the ambiguity of the subject matter that makes the exhibition interesting and relevant. For me, Kierkegaard’s possessions had less of an aura than his words. The object that struck me the most, or stuck with me the most, was therefore not one of his, but one that was most banal. A simple handwritten note, of the ‘Will you be my boyfriend? Yes/No’-type. Of course, it’s instantly recognisable, we’ve all been there, as senders or recipients or both. It invokes sweet memories of a tender and somewhat silly age, but then again, little more than that: it is not a tale of everlasting passion. So what amazes me is that ‘Thomas’, who donated the object, had kept this scrap of paper for all these years, especially as the proposed ‘relationship’ came to nought. It is touching that it survived to become a museum object, with the essential capacity to speak simultaneously of the specific and the universal. Thomas’ anecdote of how the note was passed to him gives this item a specific provenance, but it also allows us to remember our own similar stories and reflect on scales of emotion, on coming of age, on the myriad of possible paths that makes up a life. The simple object, when cast in the right light, thus becomes an object for reflection. Again, of course, I am reminded of Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. Still not impressed by the novel nor convinced by his Modest Manifesto for Museums, I have to concede that personal objects and stories of individuals can sometimes be very well, if not necessarily, as Pamuk would have it, ‘much better suited to displaying the depths of our humanity’ (ibid.). Such an object might also have found its way to The Museum of Important Shit. A spin-off project from the film 20000 days on Earth, the website introduces the museum thus:

This virtual Museum catalogues the things that remind us of those transformative moments that make us who we are, and unlocks the stories connected to them. This whole thing started with an old piece of chewing gum. Seriously. We were shooting the film and Nick told us this spine-tingling story. Nina Simone had been a nightmare backstage at one of her final gigs. But when she walked on and sat down, she took the gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano, and… transformed. It was one of those rare moments. Nick felt the gears of his heart change. We’ve all had experiences like this. A few weeks later, we’re shooting another scene. Nick is asking bandmate Warren Ellis if he remembers that Nina Simone gig. Warren interrupts: “I have that gum” he says. And he really does. A pathetic looking dirty piece of gum, wrapped in a towel. As Nick says in the film, “It’s shit, but it’s important shit. And that’s what this Museum is all about. We might not all have the masticated detritus of a jazz legend tucked away, but we all accumulate objects that have little financial value, but they hold the stories of the things that make us who we are. The Museum will unlock these transformative moments that define our very being. We urge you to share them with us, with the Museum, with the world. (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, London, September 2014 http://www.20000daysonearth.com/museum/)

For some reason, this project stirred me. I wanted to make a contribution of my own, and was sad to realise that I did not have a secret stash of stuff to share (or at least the bits and pieces that I do have I decided were too private to make public, although sometimes the most public of spaces, such as the World Wide Web, can induce a comfortable sense of complete anonymity.) The rock stardust (‘Nick’ in the story being singer Nick Cave) obviously gives the project a certain allure, as well as amplifying the impact and reach. But the notion of these pivotal moments in life, and how we might hold on to them by way of simple objects, also just rings true. Although I may have discarded my own knick-knack, I can still relate to the urge to keep and treasure such relics, as material manifestations of a life lived, of joys and dreams and memorable experiences. It is, after all, a common condition, as argued by Sherry Turkle, who introduces the concept ‘evocative objects‘:

We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with. (2007:5)

Our love affair with evocative objects, however, has a touch of the illicit, as if sentimentality was an unseemly indulgence. One could argue that perhaps memorabilia is better kept in our hearts and our attics, that ‘important shit’ should not be musealised. Even though the cultural value of museum objects does not correlate to market price, the aura of precious odds and ends might fade in the public glare. Important shit may be too important to be subjected to the mortifying process of musealisation (if one is to trust the likes of Adorno and Huyssen). It could also be argued that personal debris is not worth the attention of museums. That while an object may speak volumes to the original keeper, its significance being a personal matter, it may not have much to say to a public audience, as museum objects are expected to do. Then again, perhaps this commonplace and very human attachment to bits of worthless junk and days gone by rightly calls for a communal celebration. In which case, however, it is the collective story, and not the individual objects, that warrants museum attention. Now of course, the ‘Museum of important shit’ is a museum only be name. It makes little sense to assess the project or the submissions according to any museum standards. Still, it’s an evocative concept, one that triggers many thoughts about the correlation between museums, objects and subjects. About the conditioning of objects to the museum context and to museum narrative. About epistemological twists and turns. And about the difference between seeing museum objects as things that tell as story, and regarding them as potential things to think with. And then, of course, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

References Adorno, T. (1967)1981, ‘Valery Proust Museum’, in Prisms, MIT Press, Cambridge Huyssen, A. (1995), ‘Escape from Amnesia’, Twilight Memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia, Routledge, New York & London Turkle, S. (2007), ‘Introduction: The things that matter’ in Evocative Objects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Additional note:
[Interestingly, Golden Days, an annual ‘cross-cultural’ festival in  Copenhagen, has just announced the theme for 2015 as ‘Festival of Important Shit’, focusing on public  perceptions of cultural heritage. The presentation states that “[t]he official and canonised heritage is  starting to reek of sour chores and cultural aristocracy. One is called to ask if we have musealised our  past and made it unreachable by locking it in glass cases? Only when churches are closed down,  orchestras shut down or listed buildings end up in flames, do we feel that something is missing. But  only then. In the meantime, we engage with history through roleplaying games and flee markets, or by  blogging grandma’s recipes and sharing forgotten family albums on Facebook.” (my  translation) http://goldendaysfestival.dk/festival-2015%5D

Catch up notes

June 24, 2014

Inspiration, Logbog

2 Comments

A ramble of inspirations and illustrated notes, some of them pretty old (but need to get them out of my system and pinned down in blog form)

Museums are the new rock’n’roll

Dress, autumn/winter 2010–11. Courtesy of Alexander McQueen. Photograph © Sølve Sundsbø / Art + Commerce – From: http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/#sthash.M7n8DzvP.dpuf

Next spring, the Alexander McQueen retrospective Savage Beauty will be on show at the V&A. Organised by the Costume Institute in New York, the exhibition was a massive blockbuster hit when showing at the Met in 2011, with queues growing out into the street. When tickets for the V&A edition went on sale in April, the servers broke down after five minutes due to massive demand (I know, because I was trying to book tickets myself, thinking this a perfect treat for when I’ve finished my thesis). Being pretty slick on the branding/enterprise front, the V&A had of course fuelled the hype (there are still plenty of tickets, although certain days are selling out almost a year in advance), still it’s interesting how exhibitions – fashion exhibitions not least – have become must-go-to gigs.

[Note added 6/7/2015: show so popular that the V&A will be open through the night for the final two weekends of its run (!): http://www.itv.com/news/london/2015-07-03/victoria-and-albert-museum-to-open-all-night-for-alexander-mcqueen-exhibition/ ]

All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores
quote Warhol, whose remarks are often remarkably right on the money. I’ve already blogged about the close connection between Saks and Museum at FIT Shoe Obsession exhibition, and as the theme also emerged quite strongly in the workshops I held with the Designmuseum, I will be examining this relation more closely in my thesis. At Stockholm Arlanda airport, Anton Berg chocolates presented itself with this complete museum display – glass case, object labels, museum lingo – to advertise its brand. This side featured a chronology of the company’s history and and product design, the reverse explained the process of cocoa production. Content wise, telling a story of tradition and expertise served to denote quality, but the meta level message of the museum display as medium elevated the chocolate bar to cultural icon.

Display at Arlanda airport

Touch

At Nordiska Museet in Stockholm the permanent display Power of Fashion (Modemakt) shows fashion and dress from three different centuries. Concentrating on three decades – the 1780’s, the 1860’s and the 1960’s – rather than showing a full chronology means that a greater diversity from each period is represented, which works well as a curatorial strategy. It therefore seemed odd that the touch models provided for the visually impaired did not reflect this selection, but instead allowed you to sense e.g. the silhouettes of a 20’s flapper dress or the Dior inspired styles of the late 40’s /early 50’s. Showing consideration for this group of visitors without truly granting them access to the curatorial narrative seemed to me to stress their exclusion even when trying to be inclusive.

Touch models illustrating fashion silhouettes of the 1940’s at Nordiska Museet

And at Weston Park Museum in Sheffield, I was really hacked off by the dumbing down-ness of this display for kids:

'Polar bear fur' in the arctic exhibition at Sheffield Museum

‘Polar bear fur’ in the arctic exhibition at Weston Park

I mean, if you don’t want to splash out on a real polar bear skin for your public to touch, or have some point about ethics, leave out the display or be upfront about faking it. Don’t be misleading, and don’t think you can get away with it just because you’re addressing youngsters. They deserve your best.

By contrast, Museum of Copenhagen allowed visitors of all ages, who visited the open excavations at a construction site for the new metro lines, to don surgical gloves and touch some of the finds. This felt like a privilege, and was enlightening not only on the subject of Copenhagen history but also on the process of musealisation.

My seven year old son handling archeological objects

Finally, at KEA, Copenhagen School of Design and Technology, they have a material library with thousands of samples (and a database) covering a great variety of materials.

KEA’s material library from Material Connexion

Not entirely sure if it’s open to the public or is only for the students, but it reminded me of a user informant in my first workshop, who expressed a need for exactly this kind of touchable collection. Many museums, Designmuseum Danmark included, hold library collections as well as collections of art or artefacts, why not extend it with material samples? Handling a textile, a metal, a polymer will give you far more information than reading about the same material, and could thus help you comprehend the museum objects in a different way.

But then again, looking closely also has its merits. And this guy, who I spotted on the street the other day, reminded me how photo sharing on social media may actually inspire os to look closer and engage with our surroundings in our hunt for new images worth a share (of course, this particular guy may have been a media phobic photography enthusiast, he still illustrates a trend). That cool kids give landmark sculptures or similar the time of day, I believe is a result of the social media revolution. Then again, a cynic could infer that we are merely looking for self adornment, not really caring about the origins or significance of the imagery that decorates our digital teenage rooms. Still, he looked, we look, we explore.

Snapshot of a photographer

Fan museums

Back in December, I visited the ABBA museum in Stockholm as part of the Nodem conference. I like ABBA, as someone of my generation does, and I have to say that the museum’s vision of having people ‘walk in and dance out’ worked. There were loads of interactives – quizzes, karaoke, digital dress up games. It was good fun.

Got to be Anni Frid, at last!

But it also felt more like visiting a venue tailor made for hen parties than visiting a museum. Somehow, I it sits with me as a slightly gaudy experience.

By contrast, I was surprisingly touched by my visit to Graceland Randers, which I expected to be pure kitsch (I also like Elvis, so I’m equally biased when it comes to both). Whereas the Swedish experience was very ‘ABBA Inc.’; making full use of the commercial potential of the super group’s popularity and using the latest technological gizmos to amp up the experience, the fandom inspiring the Elvis museum was still very palpable. In fact, the museum’s founder, Henrik Knudsen, who built the Graceland replica to have a place to exhibit his huge private collection of Elvis memorabilia, was there to give guided tours of the collection. And even though it was a bit disappointing that the, well, ‘particular’ decor of the original Graceland had been replaced by a diner, a record shop and the exhibition gallery, the place actually felt quite museum like and not so tacky after all.

Henrik Knudsen giving a guided tour at Graceland Randers

Not sure what my point is here. Maybe something about soul and lack thereof. Anyway, enough.

Sleep No More + Recalling 1993

March 28, 2013

Inspiration, Logbog

Backlog logbook

March 5, 2013

Inspiration, Logbog, Uncategorized

1 Comment

Over the last few weeks, I have attended a handful of interesting events which deserve summing up for future reference, and because they presented insights worth sharing. Also they serve as a lesson in getting it down while it’s still fresh in your mind, as I realize that some of the (surely brilliant) thoughts I had after some of the earlier events I now can’t recall, like how inspired I was by Else Skjold’s research or the details of working with Cecilia’s probe. Which explains why the entries get shorter and shorter…

Loic Tallon open lecture at CIID: Adapting to mobile: a museum perspective (26/2)

Last week, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design hosted an open lecture by Loic Tallon. Tallon is director of Pocket-Proof, a digital consultancy specialized in helping museums develop strategies for mobile media with some pretty cool projects under their belt; chair of the Museums and Mobile online conference; and producer of the annual Museums and Mobile Survey. He also co-edited Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media with Kevin Walker and co-wrote the paper ‘Going Mobile?‘ with Isabel Froes for MW2011, amongst other things. So, in short, he’s cool, and has a solid knowledge of and experience with this field, and I’m thrilled that he agreed to do an interview when I get to New York. So more on that later.

Aimed primarily at designers, the presentation centered on six tips how to think about designing mobile projects for museums, reminding newcomers to the museum field that while smart phones may be the latest craze, mobile interpretation tools in museums go back a long way. Listed in the photo below, I’ve added my own notes on the six tips beneath.

Loic Tallon’s top tips for museum mobile design

Be specific about what mobile is (and is not)
– Smart phones, tablets, audioguides etc. are not one and the same – explore the specific affordances
– Why do it on mobile (e.g. smart phone)?
– Central characteristics of smart phones: digital, personal, portable, connected

Forget about the technology
–Get past default ‘we need an app’ thinking or simply replacing audioguide # with QR codes
– Think about what experience you want to create, what content or what stories you want to share
– Mobile technology can now do far more than museums ask for (there was a really nice graph for this, but I didn’t get my camera out in time, and I haven’t been able to find the slides online) – but what is it we need it to do?

Mobile projects are not new for museums
As demonstrated in videos and audioclips from past museum tours, with some lovely examples like Stedelijks groundbreaking 1952 broadcast technology and a dramatic Tuttenkhamun tour narrated by Orson Welles.

Define who it’s for and what it does
– with reference to Falks situated identities: visitors motivations are key
– clearly defined objectives (the experience) for a clearly defined audience.

Support the museum’s challenge
#1 challenge: getting people to use them ( see museums & mobile surveys) (now, I think this is the wrong way to think about this issue, as it suggests that the goal is to boost uptake stats; rather, this kind of knowledge should not only make you wonder how to get people to use them more, but should also make you think about whether they are actually valuable for the visitor or if they are quite fine without them, thank you)
– so think about the experience from the visitor’ perspective – what do they need, what is the added value: forget about distribution of your products, think instead of supporting visitor needs, what kind of experience they want (which is kind of the point I was making above, except the assumed sollution in this context may be better experience design, whereas non-use, the non-scaffolded, unequipped skinnydip museum visit is at least not addressed as an option. Further to this rant here and here).

Bring capacity building, not just a product (or pilot)
-Work with museums, let their needs, ideas, perspectives decide the development

This advice should go out to museums as much as to designers. Sadly, I think one big problem is that because most museums do not have in-house development, they don’t build up much experience or understanding, and so are quite easily manipulated by flashy suggestions from design bureaus who, at the end of the day, are trying to flog a product.

Further on that note, I couldn’t help noting how many people were there; the small venue was totally crowded. This field is scarily popular. Were these people all museum-mobile-designer wannabes? And if so: are mobile museum experiences more a designer’s wet dream than a visitor need? Or a result of the museum folks’ desire to rub shoulders with the creatives? I’m not pointing any fingers here; this was exactly how I got to be interested in this field. Just speculating.

Either way, Tallon’s sound advice should come in handy.

MMCN network seminar: Methodologies of mobile communication and media research (22/2)

The Mobile Media and Communications Network is a newly founded network of Scandinavian researchers sharing findings, work-in-progress conundrums, publication possibilities and more around their research into mobile communication and media. Starting from last year’s ‘Researching Mobile and Locative Media’ workshop and PhD course at Århus University, the group met once in the autumn to establish the network and this time for a seminar focusing on methodology. The plan is to continue with biannual meetings as well as instigating mobile media sessions at relevant conferences. There’s also a website in the making, and an open invitation for other reserachers in this field to take part.

Even if I can feel like an outsider, even a bit of a leech, given that I probably will not be contributing to this field but only learning from it, it is still very interesting for me to take part in this network and learn from some of the leading researchers and shooting stars in this field. A mix of presentations and discussion, the atmosphere is nicely informal, meaning that rather than showing off people share uncertainties, allowing for a constructive dialogue. As we discussed that this could also be a forum for PhD students to get feedback on their work (rather than pushing for another PhD course this year), I should seize that opportunity at some point.

Both Bechmann, Ess & Waade ‘s project about Tripadvisor and the communicative functions of travel apps (as yet unpublished, but the abstract presents some very interesting points about key functions and significant tendencies in locative mobile apps, such as their visuality and connectedness), and Gunnar Liestøl’s presentation about establishing a methodology for design development of ‘Situated Simulations’, a kind of indirect augmented reality, were very interesting and relevant for my project. I was particularly intruiged by Liestøl’s notions on the value of negativity, of negation, pointing to what is not there, as essential to the design process, which counters the insistance of possitivity in design thinking ass advocated by Ided, Aalto a.o. Also here, a paper is under way, which I will look forward to reading.

I also picked up on the fact that Liestøl also used the term ‘mediation’ – but when asked, also confessed to some uncertainty as to the appropriacy of this translation. It seems that all Scandinavians share the frustration that there is no truly appropriate English translation for such a central term in museology as ‘formidling’ (German Vermittlung), only a host of related terms that convey some aspects, but not the complexity of meanings in the original term. And while mediation may be the correct term etymologically, and in accordance with ICOMs key concepts of museology, it is still not used by the anglophone museum community, as the common usage of the word has very different connotations. So, I too will have to keep circling around this issue, before tackling it head on in my thesis.

#SMWSMK: Social Media Week at Statens Museum for Kunst (21/2)

Social Media Week in Copenhagen inlcuded a string of events at Statens Museum for Kunst:
The art museum on social media – presentation by three different museums on Livestream

Allegra Burnette, creative director for Digital Media at MOMA, presented their social media strategy and a catalogue of initiatives across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and traditional blogs, all used in differerent ways to document, distribute or engage the public in ongoing exhibitions.

Jesse Righam, Digital Communications manager at TATE similarly laid out their social media strategies, which seemed to have a strong focus on the marketing potential of social media. An interesting aspect for me here was how fashion culture, via bloggers (e.g. Stylebubble), designers (e.g. Westwood) and collaboration with the industry (e.g. Topshop), was used to gain access to a wider public, quote RIngham: ‘it taps into that audience that we need, the visitors of tomorrow’. Perhaps this has been the inspiration for the newly founded Louisiana Channel‘s decision to feature Danish designers Henrik Vibskov, Peter Jensen and Anne Sofie Madsen as commentators on art (in relation to fashion, but still).

Finally, Sarah Grøn from SMK generously shared the ups and downs in the process towards ‘becoming social’, making the point that staff’s personal experience with and command of social media platforms is a prerequisite for using them succesfully as an institution.

After a panel discussion, which mainly revolved around sure-fire communication on Facebook (apparently, updates about artist’s birthdays and the weather never fail – the key is to give something the puiblic can personally relate to), the day concluded with presentations by Merete Sanderhoff and Unges Laboratorier for Kunst on ongoing projects at SMK. Not entirely convinced by ULK’s Tales App (perhaps I’m just not getting it, or perhaps it is one of interesting, but somewhat artyfarty concepts that work best as concepts only) but I would recommend trying Hintme, the scanner/twitterbased concept which I have written about earlier, which is now open to the public in a beta version. So go check out the website, make sure your QR scanner is up to date and go try it out in on of the participating museums! Better still, let me know how you liked it.

Modesalon: Fashion, music & identity at Designmuseum Danmark (30/1)

During fashion week, and in conjunction with the current exhibition of vinyl album covers, Designmuseum Denmark hosted two fashion salons about the relationship between fashion and music. Sadly, I missed out on the second one, a conversation between designers Mads Nørgaard and Henrik Vibskov, but found the first, featuring music scholar Morten Michelsen and fashion researcher Else Skjold, very inspiring.

Following themes such as emancipation, experimental expressions of gender and marginalisation, they spoke of fashion and music as bodily media for cultural expressions, and of the problematics of the ‘subculture’ discourse, which has now gone out of fashion, to be replaced with concepts of scenes, tribes and genre as social phenomenon.

Skjold is currently finishing up her PhD research on men’s fashion, a very interesting project exploring the potential and developing the methodology of wardrobe studies for cultural studies into fashion as well for market oriented developments in the fashion industry. I had a brief chat with her after the session about our shared interest in how fashion is not just products on a catwalk, but a complex mix of utility, identity, style and culture when used in real life. I expect that her thesis will provide some useful insights into these aspects as well as into considerations on design methodology in cultural studies, and might try to hook up with her at a later stage.

Responding to someone else’s probe

Thanks to Cecilia, a master student from the IT University of Copenhagen, I have been getting a chance to ‘taste my own medicine’. For her master thesis just finished, she explored how to design for sensory experiences in digital media, focusing on the potential for the fashion industry; a very interesting project and field, and highly relevant to my own research. During her process we’ve had some inspiring conversations and I am curious to learn of her findings. What’s more, she used cultural probes in her empirical research, and I had to fortune to one of her informants.

Her beautiful probe package consisted of seven activities exploring various sensory expressions – I was asked to produce sensual forms in clay; to create a colourscheme, to articulate my thoughts on sensual expereinces on a series of postcards etc.

Apart from inspiring my own thinking around the importance – and complexity – of sensory and aesthetic experiences, and how to translate that into digital designs, it was interesting to be an informant and experience the very subjective interaction between designer and informant when performing her probe activities. Like the blurred boundary between what was her research interest and what was mine, and between my personal and academic understanding of the sensory, brought on in part by an overlap in project foci, and in part by engaging myself in her probe. Or the time issue, as in how much you can ask of your informants. For my part, I enjoyed working with the probe and also had a sense of obligation, meaning that I completed all tasks, but even so I can see how the demand on the informant’s time must be taken into consideration in the probe design, and may also account for some of the lacking responses in my own research.

Sharing is Caring 12

December 14, 2012

Inspiration, Logbog, Mediation, museology, Questions and Musings

7 Comments

‘Sharing is Caring 12 – Let’s get real!’(1), held in December 2012, was the second in a series of international seminars about engaging the public with museums’ (digital) assets (2). Touching upon some of the hottest topics in museums, the event drew quite a crowd, and was a fine opportunity for networking and catching up, as well as for getting an update on current projects and ideas. Still, I had my reservations (3), this time exacerbated by the snappy, happy-clapping rhetorics of a title like ‘Sharing is Caring’, explicated in a rather evangelical blogpost on Formidlingsnet by last year’s keynote speaker Michael Edson; ‘A year of Sharing and Caring‘. He explains the notions thus:

sharing, as a deeply moral impulse to take the knowledge, beauty, and secrets that we know are there, locked within our organizations, and make them available to every person on earth and caring, as a manifestation of our collective duty to ensure that everyone in society has access to the full spectrum of ideas, experiences, and resources that they need to live happy and successful lives (4)

outlining “the next frontier of work: building equity and civic value through openness, transparency, generosity, and community” and stating that “What matters is millions and millions of citizens wrestling with big ideas, engaging in personal discovery, making new things, and sharing with one another.”(ibid.) It is hard to argue against these ideals, although they hardly answer to the second call of the seminar title: Let’s get real! There is an awful lot of buzzwords and hot air in this field. Also, zealous idealism can be pretty scary, and good intentions is not the same as indisputable truth. I therefore second Sarah Giersing’s concerns in a reply to Edson’s post:

I cannot help but feel a little scepticism. Something about the rhetoric, the title “Sharing is Caring” especially, simply rubs me the wrong way. To me “Sharing is Caring” has a certain ring of something selfrighteous to it, something patronizing even. To me it sounds a little like the optimistic name of some religious endeavour – or a humanitarian aid relief project – to save the world. Nothing wrong with philanthropism, but we might be wary of the missionary aspect. (ibid.)

For Giersing, the answer lies in also sharing the authority in defining what constitutes our cultural heritage. As project leader for Copenhagen Museum’s Væggen (5) she has been working to put this idea into practice for years, and gave a very inspiring presentation about the potential, but also the great challenges, in inviting users to contribute content and knowledge to museum collections (6). Her chief advice for others wanting to pursue a similar track was a) to not only ask for users to contribute content but also provide metadata, to ensure that institutions had information on the context and provenance of the collection item; b) to ask for uploads in a durable data format, with considerations not only for access speed, but also for technical quality and preservation; and c) to ensure appropriate data rights, i.e., that the contributor has the right to upload the content, and that the institution has the right to use it when part of the collection.

Museum ideals
Now I’m not sure just how far Giersing believes institutions should go in sharing authority, but for me, I think the relationship can never be completely equal, as I believe in the value and necessity of curatorial expertise. To use a perhaps dubious analogy, although millions of passionate football fans will be shouting instructions at their screens and have strong opinions about the game, the tactics and the players, I don’t really think that their beloved game would benefit from crowdsourced management. SImilarly, I think that high quality curation requires professionalism. I understand that there is also a postcolonial problematic in this stance; who has the right to assume authority over a shared heritage. Still, I don’t see how it can be otherwise. Letting go completely, not letting interpretations be guided by the knowledge inherent in the institutions but starting from scratch sounds like futile chaos, and any staging of democratic dialogue will always involve some level of authority, someone deciding to invite that dialogue and how to use the output.

This is not to say that I believe museums should reign supreme, and I fully agree that museums could learn a lot from the public. Nevertheless, assuming authority – and praticing it wisely – is part of the custodial responsiblity. Although we have moved, or are moving away from the role of museums as shrines to the nation, modern-day museum ideals – post-, transparent, participartory, inclusive etc. (7) – are thus not all that different from the Bildung ideals of the museums of the enlightenment (8). Asking the public to participate, museums are still taking an educational role, still trying to build a certain kind of citizen, even if nowadays we are asking of that citizen to express their individual mind.

Which begs the question: Is expression neccessarily better than impression? Why is visiting an exhibition, having whatever experience we may have, understanding whatever we do, and making our own associations, deductions etc. no longer enough? When libraries are still happy to lend us books – old books, difficult books even – without an accompanying guide, how come museums feel that the experience of art or cultural artefacts must always be scaffolded?

India Art Now/ India Fashion Now: Challenge
Let me digress for a moment, to a brilliant exhibition I visited earlier this week; namely India: Art Now and India: Fashion Now at Arken Museum of Modern Art i Ishøj, DK (9). Both the artworks and the fashion exhibited were beautiful, humorous and thought provoking.

Couture by Amit Aggarwal & Manish Arora, display view from India:Fashion Now

Rina Banerjee. “She was now…” 2011. Installation view at ARKEN

So I didn’t really need the to be told what to feel or what to think about, and therefore found the wall labels, meant to elicit afterthought and debate with questions like ‘Go exploring among the clusters of woven hair and hanging bumpers. What is the atmosphere of the room? What bodily sensations do the materials and the way they are used in the installation evoke in you?’ or ‘Imagine the human destinies interwoven in the painting. Do they live in hope, pain or joy? Is their world also yours?’, to be heavily didactic, patronizing and superfluous. Rather than aiding my understanding, they disturbed my perception, and evoked irritation more than anything else. So much so, that my companion and I ended up discussing whether this kind of mediation, which I would sooner expect as part of an educational material for school classes, is even right for that target group?

Wall text from the India:Art Now exhibition, relating to the India:Game Now app

Proctor (10) is right in stating that it’s not about the technology, it’s what we do with it, what we ask our visitors to do. Any technology can be used for any kind of mediation. But personally, I would prefer an openly authoritative introduction to contemporary Indian art to this kind of touchy-feely claptrap. Even if I miss a point or two.

The exhibition app, India: Game Now (11), was also a disappoinment. Content was limited, the challenges and questions were pretty daft, navigation was unclear, and the app did nothing to help us find the featured artworks in the exhibition. But worst of all, interaction with the app did not improve our understanding or appreciation of the exhibited works, the context or each other’s perceptions, which was also an aim of the game. If anything, the medium detracted from the experience, shifting the focus from artefacts to technology. Unsurprisingly, I regret to say – I have yet to have a mobile museum experience where this is not the case.

Participation with a purpose
Which is why I loved Shelley Bernstein‘s opening keynote at Sharing is Caring (12). Chief of Technology at Brooklyn Museum, Bernstein has developed and executed some of the most innovative – and succesful! – participatory museum projects of later years, such as the crowd-curated Click! exhibition (13) in 2008 and this year’s GO – a community-curated open studio project (14). On the back of this, her words carry some weight. Interestingly, then, she describes herself as an anti-tech technologist, and, whilst employing social media as tools for participation, she emphasizes that it is a success when people abstain from using these tools when actually encountering art, in or outside the museum, as this takes away from the engagement.

Shelly Bernstein presenting at Sharing is Caring 12; photo from Twitter by @ninahviid

Also, instead of catering to a ‘don’t make me think‘ philosophy of usability, she insists on raising rather than lowering the barrier for participation, designing interfaces that require people to learn the tools, the sometimes lengthy process and their purpose before being able to take part. It is a deliberate move away from the Like-button model for easy interaction, as this requires and inspires no real engagement anyway:

The like button is easy, and while we don’t think participation in GO should be difficult, we do think we need to move away from the gold standard Facebook has forced upon us to something that’s more powerful and serves the needs of participants specifically taking part in this project. Will everyone get beyond the like button during GO? We sure hope so; participants may never register and might not pick up a mobile device, but if they find themselves in an artist’s studio on September 8-9, it’s likely they are already way beyond that ubiquitous little button, and in our minds, that is a success. (15)

At the end of the day, it’s not about social media, and focusing on those, as many museums (and businesses) do, hoping to get a cheap, quick and chic fix-it-all, too often muddles the vision which should be about content and true engagement.

Academic critique
Thus, while Jasper Visser, museum consultant and second key note speaker at Sharing is Caring (16), repeatedly stated that museums had no need for PhD’s and should rather employ selftaught innovators, this only confirmed my belief in the need for academic reflection on the development now taking place in museums, and for the discourse (and hot air) surrounding this evolution. Caring for museums, and thereby for the societies and communities that they serve, can also be sharing your insights regarding and concerns for what may be misguided beliefs in the power of people 2.0.

——————-

Note added on February 4th, 2013: In an editorial note in the latest issue of Museological Review, the peer reviewed journal from the Leicester University School of Museum Studies, Dr. Bernadette Lynch succinctly expresses the misgivings I was trying to pin down above:

The utopian rhetoric of mutuality and shared authority in today’s museums, in reality, places a community member […] in the role of ‘supplicant’ or ‘beneficiary’. Museums and galleries continue to subtly maintain inequitable social relations by exercising invisible power, setting parameters that offer what Cornwall calls ‘empowerment-lite’ [*] Thus the image of the 21st century, democratic, dialogical museum simply does not match the rhetoric. Furthermore, by placing people in the position of beneficiaries, the museum continues to rob people of their active agency and the necessary possibility of resistance.[*] This would explain the anger of many participants who express frustration with these well-meaning institutions. (17)

References
(1) http://www.dkmuseer.dk/content/sharing; http://www.formidlingsnet.dk/category/sharing-is-caring. Videos of the presentations can be found on http://vimeo.com/channels/sharingiscaring, and comments, posts and conversations can be found on Twitter under the hastag #sharecare12.
(2) See also the anthology Sharing is Caring, edited by Merete Sanderhof, Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst 2014. Available to order or download from http://www.smk.dk/en/explore-the-art/free-download-of-artworks/sharing-is-caring/
(3) https://blatryk.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/museum-as-a-research-field/
(4) quotes in the following taken from http://www.formidlingsnet.dk/a-year-of-sharing-and-caring
(5) http://vaeggen.copenhagen.dk
(6) http://vimeo.com/channels/sharingiscaring/55927145
(7) cf. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000): Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, London and New York: Routledge;
Marstine, J. (2011), ‘The contingent nature of the new museum ethics’ introduction to Marstine, J. (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first-century museum, London & New York: Routledge;
Simon, N. (2010). The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0;
The Inclusive Museum annual conference and book series http://onmuseums.com
(8) Kahr-Højland, A. & Quistgaard, N. (2009): ‘From ”scientists for a day” to ”critical citizens”: The emergence of a new paradigm within science centres and museums involving narratives, interactivity and mobile phones’, manuscript submitted for review in Museum Management and Curatorship. Article IV in Kahr-Højland’s PhD Thesis Læring er da ingen leg?: en undersøgelse af unges oplevelser i og erfaringer med en mobilfaciliteret fortælling i en naturfaglig kontekst. University of Southern Denmark.
(9) http://www.arken.dk/udstilling/tidligere-udstillinger-2/
(10) Proctor, N. (2011). Mobile guides in the rhizomic museum. In Katz, J. et al. (Eds.), Creativity and Technology: Social Media, Mobiles and Museums, Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc.
(11) https://itunes.apple.com/app/arken-india-game-now/id551000132?mt=8
(12) Bernstein, S. (2014), ‘GO: Curating with the Brooklyn Community’ in Sanderhoff, M. (ed.) (2014), Sharing is Caring. Openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst
(13) http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/
(14) http://gobrooklynart.org
(15) Blogpost by Shelley Bernstein: ‘Getting Beyond the Like Button’ http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2012/08/23/getting-beyond-the-like-button/
(16) http://vimeo.com/channels/sharingiscaring/55927142; cf Visser, J. (2014), ‘The future of museums is about attitude, not technology’ in Sanderhoff, M. (ed.) (2014), Sharing is Caring. Openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst
(17) Lynch, B. (2013) ‘Generally dissatisfied with the utopian museum’ Museological Review no. 17 – Museum Utopias Conference Issue © p iv
[*] Please find references in the original http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/documents/museologicalreview/mr-17/3_Lynch_FINAL21January2013.pdf

—Musings

A personal blog about museum research

Archive

Inspiration

Looking good

‘Innovation rhetoric as a tool for publicity and fundraising’

#MoMu

Aesthetic experiences in the everyday

Musealisation of personal objects

Catch up notes

Sleep No More + Recalling 1993

Backlog logbook

Loic Tallon open lecture at CIID: Adapting to mobile: a museum perspective (26/2)

MMCN network seminar: Methodologies of mobile communication and media research (22/2)

#SMWSMK: Social Media Week at Statens Museum for Kunst (21/2)

Modesalon: Fashion, music & identity at Designmuseum Danmark (30/1)

Responding to someone else’s probe

Sharing is Caring 12