Linda’s defense, social media and the impact on museum image

Linda’s dissertation has been the third at TEC-CH to explore the use of social media in cultural heritage communication. Before Linda, Joao Paulo analyzed the impact of social networking on the growth of cultural knowledge, taking music as example of a cultural product and the specific case of Brazilian music on the web. Olga looked upon the potential of web 2.0 for communicating Italian cultural heritage and leaned on a case for adopting web 2.0 by a small museum in Italy.

Linda’s approach was an analytical one, focused on the way social media impacts on museum image and on the perceived benefits and disadvantages of its use in museum communication, from the perspective of museum decision-makers. Her hypothesis is that social media have changed the museum communication landscape and will consequently induce museums to change their communication strategy. Starting from the observation that there is an unequal integration of social media services in museum communication in the city of Geneva, Linda has tried to understand the reasons behind this, focusing on four museums in Geneva: The Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) and the Centre d’art contemporain (CAC); Musées d’art et d’histoire (MAHs) and the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG). The results point to the fact that museums look at social media as a means to attract an audience that would not have been otherwise touched by typical museum communication. Though the results point at the openness and interest towards using web 2.0, they also highlight the limited amount of information that decision-makers have on the variety of tools and services now available (the decision-makers interviewed knew Facebook, and while two of them also used Facebook, none of the interviewees knew about Twitter). Regarding the content production strategy, it appears that the museums in her study which used social media tend to re-use existing content rather than creating it for scratch for publishing on a specific platform. The overall conclusion of her study is that the museums studied are aware of the benefits of using social media and of the positive impact they might have on their image, but are either reluctant to use them, or would use them in a very limited part of their potential, due to lack of human and financial resources, and especially due to lack of personnel specialized in communication through social media.

The Museum of online museums

This website puts together a selection of outstanding museum exhibits, updated regularly. You will find ranked reputed museums websites and online applications such as MoMa, SFMoMA, the MET Timeline of Art History, etc., but also unexpected listings, such as Comprehensive Gallery of Airline Meals or Gallery of Improvised Prison Escape Tools.
The parameters of selection might be overtly subjective, fitting the overall writing style of the website, but overall I find it an interesting resource.
Personally, I appreciate the fact that anyone can become a director of the MoOM, hence the long list of board directors, downsizing any pretence of social hierarchy :)

Enjoy browsing: The Museum of online museums

And thanks Mauricio for sending this in!

Exhibition Display: A Technological Perspective

In response to our loyal blog reader S.'s request, I have researched on display technology in museums and am here to offer my two cents.

Display is one of the most vital aspects in the existence of an exhibition, as "show-and-tell" is the core idea of how museum learning occurs in the most traditional sense. With objects, interpretive schemes and curatorial knowledge, an exhibition display combines and compacts a multitude of knowledge into one concentrated dose of information that visitors can see, touch, hear, smell and/or even taste, and bring home the memories of "a museum visit" and hopefully new things that they do not already know. With the invention of various display technologies, it enhances the amount of information that can be packed into a museum exhibition and presents them in manner that is wondrous and resonates with the technology-enhanced lives of modern day. Considering that the topic is extremely broad and has many implications, this post will focus on the most interesting (yes it is as subjective as it sounds) uses of technology in recent exhibitions, in an attempt to shed some light on the potential uses of such medium.


The above video is demonstration of a project at the Vienna University of Technology called The Virtual Showcase. Quote from project website: "The Virtual Showcase allows for three-dimensional graphical augmentation of real objects placed inside a glass housing similar to a traditional showcase. The Virtual Showcase has the same form factor as a real showcase, making it compatible with traditional museum displays. Scientific or cultural artefacts are placed inside the Virtual Showcase, allowing to add additional virtual objects, explanations, reconstructions or virtual characters used for storytelling. The virtual (and the real) part of the showcase can react in various ways to a visitor, enabling intuitive interaction with the content displayed."

By allowing interactions with a virtual object, the showcase offers an augmented experience for visitors without risking damage for the original artifact. In addition, visitors can also access interpretive information and interact with an object that is usually off limits in a tactile sense. However, I wonder, does the interaction that visitors gain with an object's 3D rendering compensate for the loss of experience with the original artifact?

On this note, it is interesting to think about what happens if a museum completely relies on digital and virtual displays, without owning any permanent collections. This was the initial idea of architect Kisho Kurokawa when the National Art Center, Tokyo was built.

Besides the obvious fact of huge money savings, the lack of a permanent collection also allows a constant change of temporary exhibitions, including blockbusters that tend to attract visitors as well as more experimental work that pushes the boundaries of the art world. Kurokawa intended the museum to use cutting-edge technology in displaying images of artwork of flat-screen panels, instead of showing original artworks that are fragile and unclear. However, due to copyright issues, the plan was shelved indefinitely.

This also begs another question, should cultural institutions be exempted from certain copyright restrictions for the sake of public good? And should digital displays replace the exhibition of original art/artifacts?

Museum Blogs

As of today, the TEC-CH blog is officially listed on Museum Blogs, a museum news and blog directory supported by Ideum, of which the founder and director Jim Spadaccini is an instructor at the TEC-CH programme in Lugano.

With close to 300 links leading to various culture- and museum-related blogs, it is a rich resource for those who would like to learn the latest news about museums and various issues relevant to cultural heritage. It is a highly recommended read - who doesn't want to know more about "A Journey within A Journey" and Antarctic conservation? In addition to the latest contents of these blogs, one can also subscribe to the blogs individually or with the RSS mixer, which amalgamates your blog feeds of choice into one combined RSS feed.

The Youth Brand. An ethnography of youth looked upon by the ethnographic object

Two years ago, in december 2006, we have visited the exhibition Figures de l’artifice, at the Ethnographic Museum of Neuchâtel (MEN), together with prof. Sabelli (teacher of the TEC-CH course Exhibits and museum scenography), who collaborated with the Museum for many years in the design of its thematic exhibitions. Last Saturday we made our long 4-hour way to Neuchâtel again, to see the exhibition La Marque Jeune (The Youth Brand). What is it that makes this small museum so attractive and worthwhile having a trip longer than the actual stay inside the museum? (indeed, we have only spent inside slightly more than 3 hours, lunch and post-visit discussion included)

The exhibiting policy of the MEN bears the mark of Jacques Hainard, who became museum curator in 1980. Departing from the classical position of the ethnographic museum, where objects from other cultures are displayed in juxtaposition, Jacques Hainard reverted the look from the Other to the self, and changed the exhibiting practice into a critical deconstruction of our own society, taken for granted knowledge and assumptions (what he called “anthropology of the self”). This approach, named by Hainard “museographie de la rupture” (free translation into “break-off museography”), invites the visitor to critical reflection on himself and his or her society. Perhaps the exhibition that marked the break-off with past exhibiting techniques after timid attempts over 10 years of experiments was Le trou (The Hole, 1990), a free incursion in the realm between real and imaginary based on mythical, sociological, artistic and literary considerations on the role and interpretation of the hole. Other exhibitions have been staged as open critiques on museological practices and the cannibalizing role that museums play in exhibiting the cultures of other people; for instance in Le musée cannibale (The cannibal museum, 2002), the promotional poster depicted an ethnographic object sliced by a butcher knife; in the exhibition Figures de l’artifice, which we visited back in 2006, in the opening room an ethnographic object was placed on a surgery table. Marc-Olivier Gonseth commented in an interview taken in 2006, “The ethnographic objects that come here are subjected to a surgical operation, parts are suppressed”.

Exhibitions at the MEN are built on a discourse, which plays at the same time the role of driving force of the whole exhibition, and of thread that connects the exhibition sub-themes and gives coherence to the exhibition narrative path. This discourse can be specifically built for an exhibition, but also a historical piece of literature, such as a myth (Figures de l’artifice was staged following the Myth of Daedal), or a poem (the exhibition La grande illusion was done based on the poem Après le Déluge, by Arthur Rimbaud).

The museographic experiments done at the MEN consist not only into the choice of peculiar objects for display – faithful to the museum philosophy of using objects as “slaves” to the discourse, ranging from ethnographic to everyday life objects, Coke cans, cheap souvenirs, plastic dolls, .. – but also through the exploration of unthought-of associations between text, images and objects. What MEN excels in is the recreation of environments, with a particular attention to detail. In the exhibition Remises en boîtes, 2005-06, themed on death and the persistence of memory, the first room was the recreation of a frozen moment: an ordinary living-room, with the traces of someone who has just been there living an ordinary moment, slippers under the armchair, a cake half-eaten, a coffee half-sipped, and the persistent small of old, deadly. One line of text introduced the main exhibition theme: “We all think that the unexpected (death, trauma, accident) happens only to others..”.
From the exhibition Figures de l’artifice, which we saw back in 2006, I have the flash back of a plastic doll placed near a pair of Ibeji statuettes (Note: Ibeji statuettes are commissioned in the Yoruba culture by a family upon death of one or both of their twins), and of a life-sized wooden female statue in a physician’s dress, near a surgery table where an ethnographic object is to be dissected. When thinking about the exhibitions at the MEN, these are the kind of images that appear in one’s mind, rather than the classical display of wooden sculptures and ritual masks, in a row, with labels underneath. Unusual association of objects, commonly used in MEN exhibitions, are meant to produce, in Marc-Olivier Gonseth’s words, an iconoclastic choc.

La marque jeune, which we have visited last Saturday, is an exhibition staged upon a notable coherence of discourse. The iconoclastic choc does not abound, and is not specific of a single scenographic arrangement, but is used consistently throughout the entire exhibition. In a nutshell, La marquee jeune is an ethnography of youth, looked upon by indigenous icons of youth and initiation in youth. Indigenous statuettes have been placed in key places, from the 1970’s bookshelf, to a garbage bin near a young girl’s disorderly boudoir, over a graffiti-walled gang’s nest, or in the remains of a burnt up car wreck..
The MEN team propose this exhibition as a reflection on the youth phenomenon and its social evolution. Central is the relationship between youth, rebellion/anti-social attitude, and their social re-integration, especially through branding/commercialization/consumerism. What starts as an ethnography, done literally through recreated environments (from the 21st century neat and minimalist Ikea home, to the depiction of the evolution 1950’s-1970’s reflected in books read, TV screen, music listened and the couch design, to the 1990s and nowadays’ gangsters neighbourhoods, ..) reaches the boiling point in the staging of the purification and re-integration of youth rebellion and violent behavior through branding and commercialization. The passage from the zone Le salaire de la peur (The paycheck of fear) to La révolte purifiée (The purified rebellion) is done through a circular curtain, which opens at given moments, shedding tons of light into a semi-obscure zone. The gangsters nest is darkened, the atmosphere is heavy, metal fences, graffiti walls, a car wreck. When the curtains open, light spurts in from inside the redeeming area. I can see now a pair of sneakers hanging on a chord, a basketball net, and a wooden head under the front seat of the car wreck. Inside the purification zone, everything is neatly arranged, tidy and clean. Two baseball bats appear peaceful and seemingly innocent in the hands of two teenagers looking straight ahead from a clean picture, in a neat and orderly neighbourhood. Car wrecks are miniaturized and neatly packaged for sale. Marilyn Manson leans head from a poster with silver paint spurting all over. And in the middle of it all, driving away all reminiscence of a disorderly and too sweetly perfumed rebel girl’s boudoir, a glamorous display of women cosmetics and perfumes.
The last exhibition room closes in circular fashion the message put forward at the beginning of the exhibition path: “youth” as a life stage is an invention of the modern society, having been in fact considered for ages just a transitory phase towards adulthood. Inside a circular space, a Fang reliquary, guardian of ancestral skulls in initiation rites towards adulthood of the Fang ethny in Gabon, is surrounded by paper skeletons caught in peculiar acts around an earthquaque disaster - part of the collection ordered to the Linares family by the Mexican Museum of Popular Arts and Crafts to commemorate the earthquake in 1985.

Photos from visit to La marque jeune (2008)

Photos from visit to Figures de l'artifice (2006)

We came, we saw, we conquered...TEC-CH

Update: Photos from thesis defence now available on Flickr!

The past week was one that was intense and liberating at the same time for some of our TEC-CH Master students. As the conclusion of their graduate studies careers, Joao-Paulo, Susanna, Paola and Miriam defended their theses at the University of Lugano. Their thesis topics, naturally, circled around the theme of technology-enhanced communications for cultural heritage, but yet they are individually special and present distinct aspects about the field.

Using Brazilian music as a case study, JP presented the importance of weak ties and popular hubs in the world of Web 2.0. Susanna, on the other hand, discussed the use of multimedia applications in the Archaeological Park of Populonia. Paola took a broad look at the Swiss museum industry and surveyed their uses of technology. Last but not least, Miriam discussed an inter-communicative online PR system designed for art exhibitions, using the case of the exhibition Piet Mondrian: Depiction to Picture at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, as her departure point.

Well done (former, and forever) TEC-CHers! Congratulations to our fresh graduates.

Photo20simo

Despite the first snowstorm of this season, five members of TEC-CH braved the weather last Friday to visit the Museo d'Arte of the City of Lugano, in order to see the Photo20simo (pronounced: fo-to-ven-TAY-si-mo) : maestri della fotografia del XX secolo exhibition. With over 300 photographs from the private collection of Torino's Marco Antonetto, the exhibition is a comprehensive look at the various concepts and genres that inspired masterpieces from artists such as Lucien Clergue, László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and many more.

In eight different themes: Abstraction, Portraiture, Art and Artists, Body, Landscape, Reportage, Still Life, and Fashion, the exhibition introduced a variety of ideas with archetypal examples that are signficant over the history of 20th-century. From Moholy-Nagy's photograms in the 1920s to the controversial Mapplethorpe nudes in the 1980s, further to latest photographic works by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, the exhibition leads its visitors to a world of immortalised memories, fantastic techniques and innovation.

One warning, however: with a traditional white-cube gallery approach, the exhibition assumes previous knowledge in art history or history of photography. If possible, a pre-arranged guided tour is highly recommended. Our wonderful and knowledgeable docent, Tiziana, introduced us to unspoken stories and deep meanings of these masterworks that are otherwise unknown to visitors.

TEC-CH Seminar: Museum Anthropology

Tomorrow, May 30, starts a three-days seminar held by guest-speaker Paolo Campione. Prof. Campione has a wide experience as anthropologist, he has conducted fieldwork in New Guinea, Bali and, most recently, northern Laos; in Italy, has studied the popular arts of traditional communities in Sardegna and the Alps. He teaches Cultural Anthropology at the University of Insubria and from 2005 he is curator of the Museo delle Culture, in Lugano.

The seminar is themed on Museum Anthropology, encompassing the history of the anthropological museum, issues in the interpretation of cultural objects, complexity of giving meaning, classification and display of ethnographic objects, with rich examples drawn from the Museo delle Culture in Lugano and the exhibitions which have been designed with the collaboration of prof. Campione. A special section is dedicated to the interpretation of Indian works of art and of distinctive objects from Melanesia and Polynesia, with examples from the museum collection.

All lectures will be held at Museo delle Culture in Lugano, in Via Cortivo 24/28.