The Future Museum of Public Art – Final Files

Here’s a link to the idea that we presented to our classmates in EMA 6361.
Full Presentation:The Future Museum of Public Art

And here’s a web-based prototype that gives a small window in to what we have envisioned.
Web-based prototype: Public Art Prototype

Filed under: Abimbola O. Ijagbemi, Ben Smithson, Catherine Rodriguez, Chelsea Conway, Nico Smith, Sydnie Montgomery

Rip, a Remix Manifesto!

The Manifesto:

1. Culture always builds on the past

2. The past always tries to control the future

3. Our future is becoming less free

4. To build free societies you must limit the control of the past

I think it’s fair to say that the tensions between the past and present/future has always been in controversy. And things like copyright get developed over time to combat these issues. One point the film “Rip” makes about the intent of copyright is to ensure some compensation for an idea. I think the film touched on this, but could have delved a little further in it. One of the issues with that it where do you draw the line between an idea being one person’s versus another’s. For instance Girl Talk seems to think that the next breakthrough in curing Cancer could be locked away behind a patent that someone holds but is doing nothing about it. So much about being successful with an idea is doing something about it. How many times do you see a product or hear an idea and think, “oh I thought of that!” or hear a song and think “I could write that!” but the point is that you didn’t. They did, so quit your whining, and think up the next thing.

I think the way that this ties in with the Museum is on the basis of property ownership, physical, or intellectual. There was the example in the film where some big company bought a patent on a plant that an entire civilization had been using medicinally and spiritually for centuries. Well, so how did the company have the ability to purchase that patent? Power. In the modern world economy, that power is monetary.

So how do the Museums in North America and Europe own all the exhibits from ancient civilizations? They took them, and eventually put them in a building for the world “to see and to learn from.” So now what? That stuff is there, in museums, and in warehouses, and we can pay a fee to go see it. Where does that money go? Does the money you pay to see the mummy exhibit go back to Egypt where the mummy came from? It goes into preserving the building that encases all those exhibits, among other things. I question the ownership of the museums and what that means for the public who visit them. I understand that the building needs funds to pay for electricity and everything else, but it seems kind of backwards that we pay to see history, to see the paintings, that now with the internet we can probably do a Google search for and view for free. Granted it’s not the same to see a picture of a a T-Rex instead of view the model of his skeleton, but the picture is free.

So how do we ensure the museum makes money in this digital age? That’s the question I raise after viewing “Rip.”

Filed under: Chelsea Conway, a remix manifesto, rip

Benkler’s Wealth of Networks

Wealth of Networks by Benkler was a good read. He basically raises the point that wit hthe internet, communication is faster and more open, and this changes everything from how capitalism works to how democracy itself functions. Once this wealth of information is available to the world, how does that effect how they go about their day, what they choose to buy, or what they choose to believe?

He talks about Wikipedia as a new use of technology to foster collaboration. Benkler is without a doubt in favor of open source and sharing information, not restricting it. He sort of reminds me of of Clay Shirky and his book Her Comes Everybody, in the idea that now that we can all work together everything will get better. If we’re talking about the museum, I think open sourcing the information and allowing the crowd to have some say in content is a good way to make the crowd feel involved enough that they may actually go to the museum more. (If getting people to pay for a tick to the museum is the goal, which I don’t know that we have stated any goals as a group, but that is certainly the goal of the museum currently).

I think crowd-sourcing can be more productive to capitalism than advertising. Maybe that is just me, because I rarely pay much attention to advertisements, and get most of my recommendations from people I know or people who I trust. If someone I trust says it is a good play then I will buy a ticket to see it (case in point I saw The 39 Steps a couple weeks ago and LOVED it, but without having heard about it from a friend, would never have gone to see it from an ad). The ability to share recommendations like that is greatly increased by the internet.

Now if you could assemble your own museum, maybe with a group of people, I wonder what that would look like? It could be more engaging and interactive, more popular, all the things we’ve been talking about fixing with the museum.

Here’s a good breakdown from the American Association of Museums about the issues that Museums face in the future. Funding is number one, some other interesting points are keeping up with technologies, and maintaining museums relevance to society.

http://www.futureofmuseums.org/thinking/

Filed under: Chelsea Conway

Physicality of the Museum and Reading Glut

One of Wright’s main arguments through the book is that hierarchies and networks have both existed through history.

As he says, “Networked systems are not entirely modern phenomena, nor hierarchical systems necessarily doomed. There is a deeper story at work here. The fundamental tension between networks and hierarchies has percolated for eons. Today we are simply witnessing the latest installment in a long evolutionary drama.”

And he goes al the way back to extend his arguments, pointing out that there are tablets with lists of animals and other things from 4000 years ago. And through that history, you can see how cultures (at least Western ones) have worked to collect information, and eventually store it, such as in institutions like the Library. It is a physical house where knowledge is catalogued and organized. A lot of the cataloging is built up in a way that allows easier access to the information, so that anyone can ultimately access anything they want to look for. The difference with the internet compared to the library is that a person does not have to go to a physical space, which because of its physicality is limited in how much information it can store. They can go to a theoretically unlimited virtual space and access anything. He seems to believe that it is important for the internet to have both a top-down and bottom-up approach, that each has its merits.

Once again, the issue of physicality sticks out to me in regards to bringing the museum into this argument. Libraries and museums are essentially the same idea. They are storage centers of collected information, one  uses books as the medium, and the other uses artifacts (if we are sticking with historical/anthropological museums and not art although you could argue art is an artifacts) to tell a history of ideas. Now with the internet it is possible to access the same information you would find in a library faster and cheaper and arguably easier than ever. Museums however, are a little different, because so much about the museum is about the experience of being in the space, and seeing the exhibits “live.” A lot of museums actually exist in the locations where the events they are archiving occurred. For instance the american Civil War Museum in Gettysburg. Besides the wax figures and gift shop, a major part of visiting that museum is actually going to the place where the Battle of Gettysburg occurred. It’s really more of a memorial, but museums and memorials are closely linked, and I think for a memorial to really be effective it must have a physical space that relates to that which it is memorializing. So there is some issues that must be considered when it comes to the physical location of a museum. It’s not a simple decision.
On a related note, how’s this for re-thinking the physical space of the Guggenheim Museum? I think it looks like a blast! I would go back to the Guggenheim in a heart beat if it was real.

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/9054/jds-architects-experiencing-the-void.html

Filed under: Chelsea Conway

Bolter & Grusin’s Remediation

Reading Bolter and Grusin, I kept coming back to the idea of creating a virtual museum. I think one of the limitations of the museum is that people expect it to be a single place that remains stationary and that they have to visit. For example the Lourve in Paris, which I would love to visit because it has such a vast collection, yet I’m limited because it’s not just that I would be visiting that museum, but it would require flying to Paris. So out of convenience and money, the museums I have visited have been either local or in the U.S. Yet I don’t think that a complete virtual museum would be ideal. Hands-on kind of exhibits are always engaging and entertaining.

B&G discuss in chapter 10, about Mediated Spaces, how the Disney amusement parks remediates Disney film and television, and vise-versa. We see that working still today. There was a Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney, then the movies came out, and I think even a video game. Now if we think of museums as being educational, then I’m not sure the total value of a Pirate museum. However, I could easily see a museum remediating a film like Jurassic Park that educates it’s visitors about dinosaurs (animatronic ones, not real ones, no deaths please…). Or adding a virtual level to a physical museum.

The museum is so limited because of the amount of space a building has, so exhibits get rotated sometimes to compensate for that. But just imagine if you could combine the physical and the cyberspace and thus have an unlimited possibility for exhibits? Who’s to say that you can’t walk through an art museum and look at the physical painting “Cafe at Night,” along with have some kind of device that puts you in the cafe that Van Gogh painted, or gave a short explanation about his painting techniques or showed you other works influenced by him? There’s unlimited connections you could make between different artists or different points of history if you used the fluidity of the virtual space to assist in making those connections.

Filed under: Chelsea Conway, bolter & grusin, remediation

The Future of the Book [or Museum]

Will we find books in the future museums? Will they be archaic relics that reside in glass cases only to be touched by the gloved hand of a nerdy document examiner, like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Declaration of Independence? Will there be a section of the museum that encompasses only pre-Civil War American Literature, one for the Gothic Novel, one for Romance novels, etc.? Maybe?

However, I think for the most part, “books” will not die. Nunberg and Derrida both discuss how the book as we know it (and this is a continuation of the ideas of Johns from last week’s class) is not natural. The elements of the book like pagination and indexes and title pages were all decided upon over time. So I feel that if those technical aspects of the book evolved over time, then the book itself can as well. The issue seems to be more that we associate “the book” as being the paper product, when really that is a medium of distributing the book, just as the Kindle is a medium or the *new* iPad (I curse this name by the way…so dumb…). The concept of book however, that knowledge can be shared, is something that I think will continue, though the packaging may change.

The essays in Nunberg seem to deal mostly with the legal concept and authorship of the book. The Hesse essay “Books in Time” points out that there were arguments about authorship in the Enlightenment time. He references John Locke, who believed that the senses revealed the only true knowledge, and that the book was just the medium, “a fulcrum between sender and receiver, rather than as a repository and container of fixed truths (23).” Yet, we have largely forgotten that idea. People do associate books with truths, and when a book is revealed to be untrue, like Million Little Pieces, there is outrage.

Duguid’s “Material Matters” essay addresses the material, or technology, of the book, referencing Benjamin. His argument is that the technology can not be looked at alone, but it should be understood in context with history and society. And he points to the usefulness of the book and that it should be understood fully before any new technologies try to supersede it. It’s important to understand what has worked and why, in order to understand what can work in the future.

History is important, for books, and for museums. Museums are built around the concept of history, and they are “a fulcrum” between the modern and the historical/the archaeological/the artistic. The book and the museum are both mediums of sharing information, whether that is fiction, nonfiction, history, art, or what have you.

I did a quickie-survey of friends about what their favorite museum was and why. Almost everyone I asked talked about Egyptian exhibits, which makes me think that there is a connection with museum and the ancient. It’s where we go to get up close up and hands on with ancient history. In school, little time is spent on the more ancient parts of our world’s history, but you know as soon as the teacher starts talking about Ancient Egypt, you can expect a tour of the King Tut exhibit when it’s in town. So how does that move into the future? How do we modernize that experience? Maybe it involves some virtual exhibits that put the guest in that time, lets them see the building of the pyramids? Maybe there is a way to cross-reference history through digital means, so that we don’t have to start in the beginning. Who says history should be learned or linearly? I think we can all agree knowing history is important, but maybe it’s not just about learning the history, but experiencing it? These are some questions I ask and hopefully we can work out some ideas as the project continues.

Filed under: Chelsea Conway