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

Nice niche

Hey guys, I just had to tell someone about this museum’s webpage. The Museum is physical but from what I read on the website, they have their whole collection online as well. It makes me want to take a road trip.

The DigiBarn Computer Museum

niche

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery, miscellaneous, museum

Rip, REMIXXX!

I watched the film over the weekend and I liked everything about it. Not just what Gaylor was saying and copyright and copyleft but also how he was saying it. The animations, the way he presented text, the way he would make old video stand out by filtering it or putting a funny mask over it, everything. In a way, he was remixing those video clips making them into something new. Using new media to making something new is really what this video is all about.

Gaylor’s explanation of the original purpose of copyright helped me to see that it’s intent wasn’t evil. Every artist should have the ability to get compensated for their cultural contribution. The problem with copyright today is its very rarely about culture, it about greed and control. The people who own the copyright and have the means of enforcing it don’t care about the cultural influence their product has on people, they only care about it’s monetary value.
This brings us to the movies “star” (if the movie has one), Greg Gillis aka Girl Talk. I think the only reason Girl Talk isn’t selling out international tours is he wasn’t best friends with anybody who was a music exect when he started letting people hear his music. If one of the major labels signed him and opened their entire catalog to use as source material, he would a house hold name. But because his music involves well, pop music nobody wants to touch him. His punishment for being a musical genius? Obscurity.

Lawrence Lessig is in the movie, advocating what both Gaylor and Girl Talk are doing, helping to start a revolution. This is a liberal use of the word start because this revolution has been going on for a long time but it wasn’t until recently that the revolution had a positive view to it. Gaylor, Girl Talk, Negativeland and all the others before them where on the wrong side. They were the bad people because they where breaking the law. Now people are questioning why is this law in place and should it be illegal for someone to use pop culture as the clay in their sculpture.

I’m trying to find a way this really ties into Museums but other than people remixing the exhibits and bring them into the museum or open sourcing the exhibit, which addresses the issue of participation in the cultural experience not just consumption, I can’t think of a way to tie this in.

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery, Bruce Gaylor, museum, peer production

Can you open source this for me?

Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks successfully articulates what happened over the past twenty years with the internet and why this is important. Though I havn’t ready every paper or book on this topic, I would give this book to anybody who ask how has the internet changed the world.

Benkler points out that this change in information sharing isn’t new. This has been going on for the past 150 years, starting with the streamlining of the mechanical press and common use of the telegraph. These technologies changed the way people did business, increasing the size and diversity of the audience. This caused the formation of a one way model of communication. This model was passed on from newpapers to radio and then to television and even to our culture. It might not be the best way to communicate but it did become the dominate form of communication for the last century.

Now look forward, take away the influence of the last 100 years. The technology today gives us the ability to break away from this old model. Benkler says, “The Internet presents the possibility of a radical reversal of this long trend. It is the first modern communications medium that expands its reach by decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture, and knowledge”. This decentralization has lead to new ways of sharing information that wouldn’t be possible without the internet. The most well known idea that Benkler writes about is that of open source software also called Freeware. Freeware relies on a large group of individuals contributing to a common project without any single person claiming rights or exclusivity to any one part or the resulting completed project. Skeptics might say there is no way to complete a project with so many voices. Freeware has proven to be more reliable then some pay software and in some cases developed faster. The success of this idea hasn’t stopped at software.

The idea of open source is no being applied to other industries. In the February issue of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson writes about how open source is changing the way people made everything, from chairs to cars, “A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world” (Wired 2.2010). Andersen makes the observation that atoms are the new bits.

I think this idea can also be applied to the museum. Having patrons submit information about the exhibits or ideas for exhibits would be a good way to have people participate in the experience of the museum. Also having a section of the museum curated by an open source group could help a small museum gain visitors and funding.

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery, museum, open source, Yochai Benkler

More & More

Hey people,

I did some more searching and looking into what our readings should cover. I thought we could start with a bit of history and transition into what’s being done know. Here are the links i found:

This book, Museums In Motion,  is about the history of museums and most of it is in the preview on Google books. I was thinking the class could read the first chapter and the last few chapters about the exhibit, etc. The problem with the google preview is the publisher excluded random pages in the book as opposed to just an entire chapter. If we do decide to use this book, someone is going to have to buy it or bootleg it so the class can read it.

Here is the Virtual Museum of Canada. I think I read that this isn’t an actual brick & mortar build so much as its a collection of interesting places in Canada to visit.

And last is this lecture, Towards a New Mainstream. It’s not really about museums per say but it is interesting. I thought it was going to be about something completely different before the guy started to talk. You can listen to it instead of actually watching it because he stands at the podium the whole video. Take it or leave it.

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery

Knowledge, be sure to tag it.

I really liked this book. When someone asks you why you haven’t put the dishes up, now you can tell them you’ve tagged all the dishes, cups, silverware and pots and putting them away is no longer necessary. Weinberger’s book about order challenges our perceptions of what knowledge is, how we order this knowledge, and how all this thinking about knowledge is wrong.

“The world started out miscellaneous but it didn’t stay that way, because we work so damn hard at straightening it up,” Weinberger states (p.10). Rarely will you go into a person house and find shoes stored next to old newspapers and clean clothes next to dirty plates. This is because order is a learned habit we have integrated into our thought process. There are three orders of order and in the first order we group like items together. Shoes mated and lined up by size, color and season. In the second order we organize information about the groups, an example of this would be an index of where products are located in a grocery store. We have been organizing items this way for centuries because, honestly we had to. These two systems only work of you have physical items you need to arrange. What happens when the items you need to order are physical? That’s where the third order takes over. Much of the information we seek is no longer in a physical state, there is no need for us to make it work within one of these two systems. The forming of this third order is changing how we view order and knowledge.

The paper ordering of knowledge is the foundation of many an institution. You trust that what is being taught in any middle school today is what children need to learn because an expert at one time went through all the information and ideas and put it together in a curriculum. The same is true of newspapers, travel guides and cable TV. We asked the experts to tell us what should be important to us only how can anyone else judge what information is and isn’t important to you? That’s the problem with the first two orders of order, there has to be first place.

Now, what if we didn’t have to look at ordering knowledge into what is and isn’t important? We have assumed that knowledge, like a map, is a territory and it needs to be conquered. This has made us passive knowers, looking up a topic, reading about it and memorizing it. Learning facts is more of a skill then proof of understanding knowledge. The idea of thinking of knowledge as a singular item, that there is one knowledge isn’t right and our mental picture needs to change. Now that all the knowledge is available to everyone, the burden of what to believe is placed back on the learner.

Maybe this is the issue I’ve been having with this museum project. I think about it as taking the exhibit out of the museum and bringing it to the people. Perhaps would needs to move it the knowledge behind the exhibit, the history behind the monument instead of moving the monument. One of the reasons I like to visit D.C. is because of all the monuments located there. The monuments themselves aren’t hard to replicated, most of them are stone pillars with well  phrases chiseled into them. What makes people come from around the world is the meaning behind the stone pillars. This meaning could travel easily on a semi-trailer and tour around the country. A person wouldn’t have to travel outside of their city in order to feel the importance of the WWII memorial.

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery, David Weinberger, digital disorder, miscellaneous, museum, order

The museum that comes to you!

Hey peoples,

I went to an event this weekend and they had a mobile (as in trailer) museum to celebrate this magazine’s tenth anniversary. I know it’s in the DFW area for the next two days. If you guys can get out to see it, it might help with the project in a way. I have pictures of the inside if anybody’s interested.

American Legacy Mobile Museum

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery

Disney and the art of Remediation

I forgot to list the chapters I read in Part II. They were Digital Art & Mediated spaces.

Disney is probably the most popular believer and user of remediation today. What started as a feature length animated movie has grown into a world wide phenomenon that has touched almost everyone on the planet. Anyone who has been a child in or near a western civilization has seen or hear of at least one Disney movie.

Bolter and Grusin discuss the history of the amusement park to give an excellent example of remedation and hypermediacy. Bolter says, “Disney had already pionerred another form of remedition, when he refashioned live-action film in the animated cartoon.” (p.171) When Snow White was made, Walt Disney didn’t change the story, he only took advantage of a new medium, feature length animation. The movie was a sensation, allowing for remediation again in the form of television. People could now weekly go to where fairy tales came true. The popularity of the show and the films allowed for another remediation from the television screen, to the amusement park. Here, people could be a part of the movie giving the visitor, usually a child, that transparency they craved while watching the movie or the tv show.

Today Disney has capitalized on this idea and has given generations of people a tangable feeling of being able to step into a movie or tv show. The authors point out, ” By monitoring the production of the movies and the activities of the park, television could insist on the uniqueness of the films and the park, whole turing the anticipation of these experiences into a regular and ongoing process. The Disneyland park became one of the early instances of a product that was validated by being “as shown on television”"(p.172).

Thought artist for centuries have been trying to give the viewer this feeling of transparency, Disney has, on one level or another, treated every person who has gone to one of their parks to that transparency. This idea, that of transparency, is something rarely sort after in the modern museum but maybe is should be the future outlook.

Museums want their patrons to visit and experience an exhibit according to rules that usually limit the personal experience. Rarely are you allowed to take pictures or wonder through the exhibit at your leisure. Audio tours are often sold, reminding you that your not really back in time or on another continent but rather in a air conditioned building looking at an artifact from the past. The exhibit it self is a remediation of the event making transparency unlikely to happen. I think the future of museums is to give the visitor the same feeling they get when visiting a Disney Park. The idea that they are visiting another time or place and that nothing is off limits or out of bounds, that feeling of complete emergence. One museum that somewhat gives you this feeling now is The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

The building has an amusement park feel as you enter into it, with it’s brightly colored banners explaining the exhibits and an actual train in the lobby. The number of exhibits is akin to the number of rides at a theme park. Every wall and stairwell takes advantage of the opportunity to teach you something and either science or industry. The only problem with this particular museum is having to go to Chicago to visit it. This limits the number of people who can have this Disney like experience. This also revisits the question about availability and exposure. How to make something limited, unlimited?

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery, museum, remediation, transparency

Interesting Museum search

I found this on NPR website, I thought it was kinda interesting:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97377145

Also this: http://icom.museum/
Not sure if we can get anything from this one but it seemed like it might yield something.

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery

The “importance” of Paper

Derrida’s statements about the physicality of paper has intrigued me for two reasons. One, his observations are points we do usually associate with paper and two, so much of our educational culture is associated with paper.

When Derrida attempts to answer the question about paper’s function as a multimedia element, he brings up the popular mind set toward paper. The fact that there are levels of importance placed on paper, “there is also wrapping paper, wallpaper, cigarette papers, toilet paper and so on.” These types of  utilitarian papers are seen not as paper in the eyes of the general public so much as tools. When a person things of a book, they don’t usually think of it being printed on wallpaper or wrapping paper.

When I think of the purpose of writing, usually I associate it with writing for profit or writing a book and I think most people have this view as well. Derrida reminds us that: “… the history of the book, should not be conflated with that of writing, or the mode of writing, or the technologies of inscription… So the book is not linked to a writing.”

So how does this change writing? It doesn’t. If the separation of book and writing is made, then the link between books as knowledge is severed. The idea that students must consult a certain book to learn the knowledge or that approved books are need can stop. Learning on the individual level of each student can be facilitated.

When addressing the subject of education, writing and reading is also address because outside of school (and certain professions), most people do little of both. When I think of the future of writing and reading, I have to ask the question how does the book apply in a world where paper isn’t the medium used to do either of these actions? Patrick Bazin makes this observation: “Struggling free from the straitjacket of the book and directing its efforts toward a true polytextuality – in which diverse types of texts and images, sounds films, data banks, mail services, interactive networks may mutually resist or interfere with one another – this process of reading generates progressively a new dimension.” This new dimension is emerging as a viable way of demonstrating the knowledge a student has learned. So the idea of the paper report as the only means of communicating learned knowledge has been transformed.

The observation made by the authors about the cultural importance placed on the object of paper has also brought up the independence writing and reading has from it. Now compare this placed importance of paper to the idea of a museum. Museums are a means of preserving a part of a cultural, making a temporal event a current experience. Often this experience is limited to a single location, restricting access to this experience. My questions is how do we made the separation of this experience from the museum?

www.theeggandirestaurants.com/breakfast_restaurant.html

Filed under: Sydnie Montgomery