Digital Access and Museums as Platforms

Caroline Wilson-Barnao

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000454727
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Arte
• Thema: Studi museali

Digital Access and Museums as Platforms draws on interviews with museum practitioners, along with a range of case studies from public and private institutions, in order to investigate the tensions and benefits involved in making cultural collections available using digital technologies.

Taking a media and critical studies approach to the museum and raising questions about the role of privately owned search engines in facilitating museum experiences, the book questions who collects what, for whom objects are collected and what purpose these objects and collections serve. Connecting fieldwork undertaken in Australia and New Zealand with the global practices of technology companies, Wilson-Barnao brings attention to an emerging new model of digital ownership and moderation. Considering the synergising of these institutions with media systems, which are now playing a more prominent role in facilitating access to culture, the book also explores the motivations of different cultural workers for constructing the museum as a mediatised location.

Digital Access and Museums as Platforms will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of museum studies, art, culture, media studies and digital humanities. Weighing in on conversations about how technologies are being incorporated into museums, the book should also be useful to practitioners working in museums and galleries around the world.

1 Introduction

From the analogue to the digital museum

DOI: 10.4324/9780429298691-1

Introduction: platformisation of the museum

This book considers how museums have been radically reimagined by digital devices, social media platforms and ubiquitous networked communication enfolded into everyday life. The museum is increasingly operating in the context of the ‘sharing economy’ and ‘participatory culture’, where platforms and devices facilitate new forms of sociality (Bruns 2008; Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013). By acknowledging the inherent differences between the core missions of the art gallery, library, archive and museum, this book is concerned with their evolving role and their transition from essentially government or private institutions towards infrastructures of ‘civil society’ with new accountabilities (Blakenberg and Lord 2015: 22). The book argues for the adoption of a critical lens through which to regard this shift to the new media economy and puts forward a framework for examining these changes in the following chapters. However, the focus is not only on new technologies but also on the place of the museum in the public sphere. These once-authoritative formulators of predominantly heritage culture have been enlarging their practices beyond the exhibitory, educative and participatory to embrace making their space more social and inclusive.

At first glance, museums and their allied iterations as galleries, libraries and archives continue to curate exhibitions to educate and entertain their on-site visitors. Physical museums still perform that important civic function, and viewing an exhibition in the twenty-first century remains an experience involving artefacts housed in ‘cabinets of curiosity’ as they were in the 1600s, but now more publicly visible (Bennett 1998: 346). Pressure to democratise from the middle of the past century led cultural institutions to realise the need to engage with their audiences if they were to retain currency and remain financially viable (Witcomb 2003). These transformations have accelerated as the museum has increasingly embraced digital media technologies to permit visitors with smartphone in hand to experience its cultural offerings, bringing about an interactive and participatory turn (Henning 2017). The trajectory of change is ongoing as global audiences can now readily access and freely interact with high-resolution images of collections that are made available in the online domain.

In this sense, museum collections are no longer housed exclusively within institutional walls nor are they only sites where visitors engage with each other and objects. Contemporary users, accustomed to social and streamed media sites where they connect, comment and rate, have prompted cultural institutions to rethink how they go about harnessing the digital to engage visitors and project relevance. High-speed internet, virtual reality (VR), three-dimensional (3D) scans and artificial intelligence (AI) make personalised visits possible, enabling audiences to access some of the world’s greatest collections remotely, while on-site visitors use apps and interactive guides, post photographs to a range of media platforms and employ search engines for additional content about exhibits (Wilson-Barnao 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020). User data are then aggregated to feed into algorithms, which create the potential for museums to measure the impacts of culture and afford new means by which to make sense of collections.

Regardless of their funding sources, museums rightly possess a public ethos that is potentially altered by the entanglement of cultural offerings with the digital economy, and this ethos is a primary focus of this book. The museum has long been depicted as in service to society that ‘acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment’ (ICOM 2019: Statutes, Article 3, Section 1). Having drawn upon this characterisation for almost 50 years, the peak body the International Council of Museums (ICOM) sparked international debate when it recently put forward an alternate definition that eschewed a colonial context. The revised designation incorporates a remit to uphold ‘social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing’ in addition to working ‘in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world’ (ICOM 2019). The museum, as it is envisaged by ICOM, is not defined solely by the artefacts held within its virtual or physical spaces; rather, it is obliged to ‘hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people’ (ICOM 2019). The re-envisioned institution is acknowledged as embodying ‘democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures’ (ICOM 2019). It is precisely this aspiration of the museum to facilitate broad access and critical conversations that make it a particularly worthy focus of study in a digital era.

Museum studies scholars have referenced digitisation as defining the creation of a ‘post-digital’ museum and the ways in which mediatisation is intrinsic to its evolution (Parry 2013: 24). This is evidenced through what Parry (2013: 24) refers to as ‘structures of legitimation’ within the museum that align its goals to digital formats by embedding the digital into its exhibits and overall operations. The contemporary museum interacts with devices, platforms, screens and networks in a range of ways, transforming the space of the museum and the social encounters that take place in relation to it; however, it is distinguished from the media by its physical and material aspects (Henning 2006). This is especially important if we are to regard the museum as a ‘third place’ (Oldenburg 1999), an environment that sits between home and work, or public and private, where people come together both physically and digitally, and that fosters community debate. It is naïve to suggest that the institutional structures that are now scaffolded by digital media platforms remain unchanged by these alliances. Digital platforms are a means through which audiences engage with and enjoy the museum. As museums intensify their move from analogue to digital, new exhibition contexts and practices blur the boundaries between the experience of the museum and the construction of public identity by audiences on social media platforms (Wilson-Barnao 2016). What complicates matters further is the fact that museums are becoming more integrated with media platforms, which impacts how they engage with the public and operate as institutions. Platformisation and access are key notions used here for thinking through the refashioning of cultural institutions under the terms of an expanding digital economy. Media platforms are designed to maintain user interest through the production of content that renders visitor activities into data for third parties. Nieborg and Poell (2018: 1) use the term ‘platformisation’ to describe ‘the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around’ them. The concept of museums as platforms (and its converse), thus, draws attention to the ways in which digital ecosystems contribute to the museum as a public sphere. On the one hand, museums are taking on the attributes of interactive and participatory global media platforms, which offer significant connective functions to users worldwide. On the other hand, by providing museum access, media platforms are recalibrating how the museum operates.

From this standpoint, there is a disparity between museums with transparency and accountability requirements producing cultural content versus geographies of distribution that are reliant upon commercially owned platforms and subject to different dynamics. Given the adoption of core logics that reshape these institutional structures (Dijck and Poell 2013: 2), there is a shift occurring in traditional understandings about the organisation of the museum and its visitors. This affects its characterisation as a civic environment capable of facing the challenge of acting as an inclusive space for all in a digital era and how this might align with the broader set of obligations outlined by ICOM (2019). The overall aim of this book is to present a critical appraisal of the ways in which the museum is being platformised and to explore the move towards a datafication of cultural visitors within the wider ecology of social media.

Participation, publicity and the public sphere

One example of aspects of these emerging relationships is The Obliteration Room by Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama, featured at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QGoMA) in 2014. An installation comprising a domestic scene was constructed within the gallery, where visitors to the room were handed sheets of coloured stickers and invited to ‘obliterate’ by placing dots on top of everyday objects, walls and floors. Social media feeds filled in a posting frenzy throughout the summer with images of people adding colourful stickers to a white space. Visitors repeatedly recorded their on-site experiences on social media, alerting others to the exhibition in a more compelling way than any advertising campaign by making the participation of ordinary people visible. The experience of this art installation and the documentation of it via smartphone on social media acted as a highly engaging form of peer-to-peer promotion, where the engagement with the artwork by the viewer constituted the affective labour of generating sociality around the work in the gallery and then creating and circulating images of that sociality (Clough 2008). As audiences applied the adhesive dots to The Obliteration Room and circulated pictures on social media, they performed a type of publicity work for the institution.

This reflects a global trend towards non-traditional museums with pop-up exhibits, such as New York’s Museum of Ice Cream, which encourage audiences to take photographs of their experiences and share the images on social media platforms such as Instagram. In these spaces visitors are unambiguously invited to interact with the artworks and objects by taking pictures. Similarly, Artvo, with sites in Melbourne and on the Gold Coast, describes itself on its website as a 3D ‘trick art gallery’ that offers visitors ‘priceless photos’ and ‘unbelievable scenarios’ (Artvo 2020). It is promoted as a ‘refreshing’ space where ‘museum staff … encourage you to take as many photos and selfies as possible’ (Artvo 2020). When visiting Artvo, the audience moves through different rooms expertly painted with varying scenarios. Audiences then take photos of themselves participating in the exhibit as they surf a giant wave, climb bamboo with a panda bear or enter the departure point for what resembles the train station where students enter Hogwarts in Harry Potter (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1 Selfie stations are a common way for museums to encourage visitors to share their experiences with social media networks, where families playfully engage with exhibits by having their picture taken.

Source: This image was taken at Adderton House & Heart of Mercy in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

This approach of a digitally enhanced experience that appears playful, innovative and collaborative would seem to be anathema to the traditional physical museum, embedded in serious curatorial scholarsh...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: from the analogue to the digital museum
• 2 The logic of open access to culture
• 3 From sensory to sensing museum
• 4 From museum to platform
• 5 Negotiating museums as platforms
• Index