Museum as Resource: A Few Thoughts
Last week, I virtually attended the Future of Museums conference, a free, online affair that brought together speakers imagining the potential of cultural institutions with practitioners who are fostering change within their own museums. (Recordings of the sessions are available online.) Two talks, in particular, resonated with my own research.
First, Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, gave the opening keynote. She envisioned three different museums in the year 2030, all of which have their roots in trends (and fears) pervading today’s museum landscape:
The Quantified Museum: Like the Quantified Self movement, this institution hinges on leveraging data about its visitors to shape experiences
The Disconnected Museum: In response to digital overload that pervades our lives, this museum imagines itself as an oasis, a physical space to take a break from the technology that surrounds us elsewhere
The Distributed Museum: Rejecting the gallery walls as its limits, this museum uses digital technologies and analog strategies to spread its holdings around the world
A few hours later, Lath Carlson, the vice president of exhibits at the Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley, proposed that museums are entering a new phase of evolution. If Museum 1.0 characterizes the first wave of these cultural institutions, in which a museum delivers information about the objects or ideas on view to its audience, and Museum 2.0 (also known as the Participatory Museum) is about creating a dialogue with a visitor, then the mantra for Museum 3.0 is “museum as resource.” The institution, as a vital resource for a community, is there first and foremost for the audience and should therefore collaborate with individuals as they decide what exhibitions to mount, how to disseminate their collections, or what kind of in-gallery experiences to spearhead.
Both the Distributed Museum and Museum 3.0 models touch on an idea I’ve alluded to in two recent posts. It used to be that you had to be physically within the walls of a museum to experience its collection, but these days, museum content is more available than ever. Museums have progressively been opening up their APIs, making data accessible and making the institution transparent to the public. So now that all this knowledge is out there, what do we do with it?
Merritt framed initiatives like hackathons and maker spaces as part of the distributed museum, allowing people to take a museum’s content and infuse it into new creations that will go out into the world. It’s not just enough to make museum data available on the web; museum now encourage the creation of new art. We’ve gone full circle: from the physical experience of objects to the digital dissemination of data, and back to the physical creation of new objects. Physical to digital to physical; objects to data to objects. (Liz Neely touches upon a similar idea in her discussion on 3D printing at the Art Institute of Chicago: atoms to bits and back again.)
The few museums bold enough (and, of course, that have the resources) to delve into making initiatives not only embrace the “museum as resource” attitude, but also interpret it broadly. Libraries, too, serve as public resources. The more experimental ones are recognizing that, in the age of digitization, books are no longer their hottest commodities, and are adjusting accordingly. In one light, these initiatives could be viewed as a ploy to appear relevant as pocket-sized screens dominate our lives; in another, museum making is just an extension of the institution’s mission to serve the public.