Museums and the Web 2015 Presentation
Last week I presented (twice, actually) at Museums and the Web. I'm sharing here my slides and transcript of one of the two talks, titled "Museum Making: Creating with New Technologies in Art Museums." Based on my thesis research, this presentation critically examined a recent trend in art museums of initiatives that invite technologists and artists to experiment with emerging technologies. These programs might take of the form of hackathons, maker spaces, or startup incubators. Below, I look at the historical precedents of these programs—specifically in the history of museums as sites for art making, and in the origins of hackers and makers—and then share a few key lessons from the fieldwork I've conducted at three museum sites.
Museum Making: Creating with New Technologies in Art Museums from Desi Gonzalez
The presentation is based on my full MW2015 paper, accessible here.
Slide 2: This is the MIT Media Lab. I go there almost every day. It’s an interdisciplinary research lab known for it’s high-tech, whizz-bang experimentations. I think for a lot of people, the MIT Media Lab symbolizes, to put it glibly, The Future.
Slide 3: This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. 6.28 million visitors go to it every year. As the largest and most trafficked art museum in the United States’ busiest and most populous city, the Metropolitan is viewed as an authority on art, and also one that is traditional. At the same time, the Met’s collection of artistic treasures captures the imagination of people around the world.
Slide 4:Since I’m getting a degree in Comparative Media Studies, I thought I’d compare a few images. Here, we have two titans within their respective fields, one a glimpse to the future, the other stewards of our past.
Now, we all know that this is kind of a reductive comparison, or else we wouldn’t be here at this conference. But I do think this is an interesting place to start, because it points out the kind of perceptions that audiences have about what technology and museums are, and where creativity happens.
Slide 5: And THIS is the Metropolitan Museum’s Media Lab. Located on the fourth floor of the beaux-arts style building, its architecture is characterized more by drop-tile ceilings and fluorescent lights.
Slide 6: If you look around, you find hidden gems scattered among the Met Media Lab. Here’s an army of 3D printed models, some scanned from a single museum object, others remixing sculptures together to make wholly new artworks.
Slide 7: And this is a robotic arm that drags a black marker across a sheet of paper, plotting out the staccato lines of a seventeenth-century etching that have been modeled on Rhino Grasshopper software.
Slide 8: Those are just some of the projects being developed at the Met Media Lab. You could think of them as a scrappy R&D wing—one with only two staff and very tight budgets. Since 2012, the Media Lab has invited technologists to create with emerging technologies through a variety of programs, such as hackathons and their internship program. Bringing in outside creators became a way for the Met Media Lab to experiment with a broad range of new technologies within constraints of time, expertise, and budget, while tapping into new audiences.
Slide 9: So if we go back to our comparisons:
The Met Media Lab shares the MIT Media Lab’s spirit of experimentation, but lacks the kind of funding and access to big tech of its namesake.
Slide 10: Working within the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we see them forging their experimental path within an institution thought not thought of for its technology.
Slide 11: The Met Media Lab is part of a recent trend that I call “museum making.” Over the last few years, art museums have started to develop initiatives that invite audiences, from casual visitors to professional artists and technologists, to take the reins of creative production through experimentation with new technologies.
Slide 12: In my research, I’ve focused on three case studies, and those are the ones I’ll be talking about today. Last year, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA opened its Maker Lounge. It’s an in-gallery space in which visitors are invited to learn about and tinker with high and low technologies. As opposed to a maker space, in which members usually commit to participating for long periods of time, often with the goal of creating a finished project, this lounge is tailored to fit the drop-in mentality of the casual museum visit.
Slide 13: And on the other side of the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is wrapping up the first year of its Art + Technology Lab. In this program, artists apply for competitive grants of up to $50,000 to work on technology-oriented projects. They also receive in-kind support and mentorship from major technology corporations such as Google, SpaceX, or augmented reality company DAQRI. This is an image of artist Tavares Strachan talking with Gwynne Shotwell, chief operating officer of SpaceX.
Slide 14: My research has focused on art institutions because of the specific questions museum making brings up about what is aesthetically and culturally valuable. What does it mean for an art museum to encourage new forms of creative production, when that kind of production is not represented in the museum’s galleries or collections? More broadly, how do change and innovation happen in traditional cultural institutions?
Slide 15: My research has taken me on a journey: from archives where I uncover institution’s pasts, through hands-on participation in museum making programs, to discussing with staff about how they imagine their museums’ futures. In this talk, I’ll start with a historical lens, finding roots both in the history of museums as sites for art making and in the rise of hacker and maker cultures. I’ll then address two key things I’ve learned through fieldwork at the three case studies I mentioned before: the Met’s Media, the Peabody Essex Maker Lounge, and LACMA’s Art+Technology Lab. First, I’ll then dive how these museum technology programs are able to navigate limitations in order to make these initiatives happen. And finally, I’ll address a few things museums get out inviting audiences to work with technology.
Slide 16: Historian Lawrence Levine argues that in the 19th century, the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow as we understand them today didn’t exist. Audiences across all classes enjoyed cultural figures and forms such as Shakespeare and opera. These diverse publics were not limited as audiences, but also they were also creators: amateur art practice was a part of their every day life.
Slide 17: With this sort of historical landscape of arts engagement, it’s fitting, then, that since their founding, art museums in the U.S. have been sites for art making. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an example of an institution with a rich history of creative production. For example, soon after it opened, the Met granted permission to artists to copy works in their collection on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. In 1880, the museum established the School of Industrial Arts, providing free classes to artisans in skills such as woodworking and metalworking, and later ornamental painting and carving, architecture, drawing, and clay modeling.
Slide 18: Today, arts participation through amateur art practice is again on the rise in the United States, and subsequently museums are being reinvigorated as sites for art making for all ages and levels of professionalization. Some programs even take a page out of their institution’s roots: In December 2014, the Metropolitan announced that it would relaunch its copyist program, inviting anyone who applies to set up an easel to paint and draw directly from the works in the museum’s collection.
I’d like to suggest that museum making today fits within this larger history of art making in museums. But these technology-oriented programs are also stemming from another historical lineage, one that brings with it particular attitudes: that of hackers and makers.
Slide 19: The earliest computer hackers emerged at MIT in the late 1950s. Student members of the Tech Model Railroad Club would break into off-limits offices to use giant mainframe computers in the evenings, spending all night coding. For these hackers, programming computers became a way of life. Underlying their “hacker ethic” was a counter-cultural, anti-authoritarian leaning that is still central to our image of computer hackers today. They believed that information should be accessible to all and that coding is ultimately a creative endeavor.
Slide 20: The so-called maker movement builds on the attitudes of hackers. The maker movement, or maker culture, refers to a contemporary subculture interested in using technology for do-it-yourself projects, using strategies and technologies such as computer programming, robotics, and 3D printing, among others. But despite its roots, maker culture lacks the subversive agenda that fueled hackers. From its beginning—at least as a branded entity—the maker movement was not a grassroots movement, but rather led by a for-profit company. Many mark the official birth of maker culture in 2005 with the launch of Make magazine. Now, Maker Media also publishes digital and print books, produces Maker Faires—large “show-and-tell” convenings in which makers show off their projects—and operates the e-commerce site Maker Shed.
Slide 21: What has proven to be compelling about the maker movement is how it includes virtually all disciplines within its rhetoric of innovation. Make magazine founder Dale Dougherty wrote:
When I talk about the maker movement, I make an effort to stay away from the word “inventor”—most people just don’t identify themselves that way. “Maker,” on the other hand, describes each one of us, no matter how we live our lives or what our goals might be. We all are makers: as cooks preparing food for our families, as gardeners, as knitters.
Slide 22: Maker culture has entered popular discourse as the movement increases in attention, often discussed in relation to the movement’s implications on business, government, and education. In June 2014, Obama hosted the inaugural White House Maker Faire. Recent years have seen increasing advocacy for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields, across all levels of education. It’s within this context—a discourse saturated with rhetoric of technology’s power—that art museums have begun to invite creators to experiment with new technologies.
Slide 23: Hackers and makers are but a part of what some might call a participatory attitude that has become widespread in the last fifteen years. The term “participatory culture” was popularized by media scholar Henry Jenkins to describe a new cultural landscape in which amateurs take the reins of the production of media. That many museum thinkers have adopted this participatory ethos over the last decade probably does not come as a surprise to you. I did a search of the Museums and the Web 2015 site for the word “participatory” and yielded 48 results.
Like museums of the nineteenth century that offered art-making opportunities in keeping with the broader culture of amateur arts practice, museums today recognize the greater participatory zeitgeist and incorporate such strategies into their own offerings.
Slide 24: While art museums exhibit a very particular kind of visual art that follows the conventions of the contemporary art world, increasingly, more generalist audiences are blurring the boundaries between art, media, and technology. The maker movement encompasses all kinds of creators, from robotics builders to knitters; STEM has made room for art in the acronym STEAM.
Slide 25: Platforms like Etsy and Kickstarter have emerged as new marketplaces for creative production, agnostic of labels such as “art” and “technology.”
Art museums are adopting the tools and strategies of creative technology today for many reasons. On the one hand, it is easy to see a parallel between artists and hackers, both groups dedicating themselves to the enactment of counterculture through creative production. But in practice, tapping into the contemporary tech ethos isn’t all that radical, as the maker movement rushes into the mainstream.
Slide 26: In her book Status Update, Alice Marwick critiques the coexisting, but contradictory, ethos within the current world of tech. If early hackers championed anti-institutionalism, Silicon Valley soon borrowed some of these cyber-utopian beliefs to form what’s been called the Californian Ideology: a paradoxical combination of technological determinism and libertarianism. By framing themselves through the hackers, Silicon Valley gives itself an anti-establishment veneer while maintaining—and perhaps even masking and profiting off of—its capitalistic privileges.
Taking Marwick’s analysis into account, it is unsurprising that art museums are aligning themselves with the attitudes and rhetoric of the contemporary technology world. Museums have always embodied a similar paradox: As institutions whose dual mission is to educate, and to collect and preserve art, they are caught between supporting creators and deciding which of these creators are worthy of being displayed on their walls.
Slide 27: So we’ve just explored why museum making is taking hold now; another major question I’ve been addressing in my research is how museum making happens. These programs vary from emerging from grass roots places to high up in the institution; but either way, often, these programs are hoping to experiment with technologies that museums don’t normally work with. We also know that museums are made up of a lot of departments and individuals that, at times, have somewhat competing perspectives and goals.
So then how do museum making initiatives, with limited funding and technological knowhow, and in the face of a potentially tricky institutional climate, happen?
Slide 28: Let’s return to the Met Media Lab, which has this really fantastic origin story: it started in a really grassroots way, a two- or three-person enterprise championing its cause within a huge institution. Unlike my other two case studies, the Met Media Lab doesn’t have the luxury of having a public space. In fact, to get this space featured here, Media Lab manager Don Undeen basically squatted in an abandoned office space—what had previously been an image library, and then turned into a storage space when the images had been digitized. And to furnish the space, he keeps an eye on the museum's Surplus Furniture website, an internal resource in which museum departments exchange equipment they no longer need.
Slide 29: Another major strategy has been to partner with the experts. The first time the Met Media Lab invited outside audiences to create was during their 2012 hackathon, held in conjunction with 3D printing company Makerbot. Makerbot provided printers and tapped into their community of creative technologists; these participants learned about objects in the collection from museum curators, then scanned objects, remixed 3D models on their computers, and printed out new works of art.
Slide 30: All three of the case studies I looked at really relied on partnerships with the world of tech to make these initiatives happen. The Peabody Essex Museum has worked with the MIT Media Lab, bringing in project demos for their opening day.
Slide 31: And of course, LACMA’s program is predicated on relationships with major corporations, which has brought it funding and connects professional artists with technology experts.
Slide 32: But just as museums look outward, they also must look inward, developing strategies to work within the institution. For example, for the Met Media Lab, staff become important resources for creative technologists working on projects. Over the course of the semester, interns develop what the Lab describes as “prototypes and artistic provocations that fuel conversation and new ideas.” They do so in conjunction with museum staff who can serve as mentors—whether a curator who can provide expertise on an art historical period or a media archivist who gives them access to archival equipment.
In order to make this happen, Don Undeen of the Met has cultivated relationships across the museum, identifying folks who are excited about working with creative people. In a way, he’s redefining what we mean when we say the museum is a public resource: it’s not just the collection that we connect to our audiences, but also the knowledges of staff at all levels.
Slide 33: In my final short section I’ll talk about what engaging with creative technologies might bring to a museum.
Slide 34: But first, I want to turn to the Peabody Essex Museum. At any time, a 3d printer is likely whirring in the corner. One shelf houses books with titled like Disruptus, Hacking Electronics, and Fabricated. iPads are scattered in various locations. But for all of the technology inscribed in the Maker Lounge, you’ll notice kids are usually engrossed in a very non-technical activity: creating objects out of simple materials. This is in part a limitation of its location—the Maker Lounge is in an unfacilitated gallery, and so expensive and potentially dangerous high-tech equipment can’t be left unattended. But this also points to another idea: Museum making initiatives like the Maker Lounge are ostensibly about technology, but often, their benefits and outcomes lie outside of the world of tech. In an interview, the Peabody Essex Museum’s Juliette Fritsch told me, “We’re not technology specialists, we’re learning specialists.”
Slide 35: And I think that’s important to keep in mind. We don’t have to be the MIT Media Lab, producing the whizzbang innovations of the future.
If we’re not necessarily producing crazy new technologies, what do museums get out of having audiences create with technologies? For the Maker Lounge, technology becomes a way to make creativity accessible to people who find art intimidating. Underlying the Lounge is the idea that technologies prevalent today are just another manifestation of the creativity captured within PEM’s collection.
Slide 36: I’d also argue that the hacker and maker attitudes infused in museum making programs bring a sense of playfulness and irreverence not commonly associated with museums. I attended one workshop at the Met Media Lab in which a team used 3D models of works in the Metropolitan’s collection to make stamps. These stamps were to be used on dog poop that owners neglected to pick up, thus rendering waste into something beautiful. I thought the project was both poignant and hilarious. A playful attitude lightens the seriousness and intimidation factor of museums, making these sites of authority slightly more welcoming to audiences.
Slide 37: But I don’t think it’s just audiences that benefit from this technology ethos; museum making programs bring a dedication of flexibility, brought from the world of technology, into museum staff practices and institutional decisions. For example, flexibility is key to the success of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab. The goals of the Lab are deliberately open-ended: artists can engage with corporate advisors if they would like, but are not required to; artists can produce a work of art, or just focus on research; and any tangible works of art produced are entirely up to the artist’s jurisdiction.
And both LACMA and the Peabody Essex technology spaces are open to the public and seen as places to witness the creative process on view. Here we see here is a paradigm shift, transforming museums from sites that exhibit objects to sites that exhibit processes. By underscoring flexibility and process, museums must also concede a bit of control; they can’t be as pristine as they’re used to.
Slide 38: To summarize: We’ve seen that creative technology programs have precedents in both museums as sites of artmaking and in hacker and maker cultures. We’ve seen that museum making can expand how museums define what’s culturally valuable by including new forms of creative technology-based production, but that museums do so in part to maintain their authoritative status. We’ve seen that museum staff have taken on unusual strategies to build capacity for these programs within institutions that have limited funding and technological knowledge. And we’ve seen that even though museum making programs aren’t able to compete with technology production in the for-profit sector, they do bring a technology ethos of playfulness, experimentation, and flexibility into the museum.
Slide 39: My area of research has focused on how audiences are invited to create with new technologies, but I’d like to complicate this notion of what it means to be an audience. One of the most important things I’ve found in my research includes how these technology programs, which focus on experimentation, flexibility, and process, have influenced how museum staff think about their own work. I’d like to suggest that some of the most important audiences for museum making are actual museums themselves.
Slide 40: Audiences often think of museums as static institutions. But in fact, they’re made up of many individuals who work together, who come from a wide variety of backgrounds, who not only have their own institutional goals, but also personal goals. I chose the term “museum making” to describe this trend because not only are individuals coming to museums to make objects, but museums are constantly being made—or remade—themselves.
