Practice Makes Perfect

Week 8: Collective Storytelling
Tenement Museum Visit, 4/7/08
C. Hilmoe

Readings:
Collective Storytelling and Social Creativity in the Virtual Museum: A Case Study, Elisa Giaccardi.
Storytelling: The Real Work of Museums, Leslie Bedford.

Points from the readings that are relevant to observations made during Tenement Museum site and website visits are quoted or paraphrased below:

Motivating Participation:
Narrative engages the listener’s ability to make meaning of an object or event by embodying the tangible and intangible.
Narrative inspires internal dialog that results in a sense of connection.
Stories harbor authenticity.
Object Theatre: Stories bring objects to life without necessity of hands-on experience.

Sustaining Participation:
A listener will fill in gaps in a story or relate the story to his or her own experience. They will make the story their own; create their own meaning.
Using stories as objects taps listeners’ imaginations and sense of play, strengthens cultural identity and sense of belonging. In this way, telling and listening to stories help start a conversation that grows over time.

Outcomes/Act/Impact:
In the act of contributing to, telling and listening to stories, diverse members of a community can become unified and act in a unified manner.
Stories help bring out the universal; reveal the universal through the particular.
Storytelling can help the process of social transformation or cultural change, especially when multiple platforms are combined into a system that motivates and sustains participation.

“Museum” Design:
Need to invent new museum models and interaction spaces that act as catalysts for innovation rather than approaching technology merely as something to be added onto existing practices (Giaccardi).

My Commentary:
The readings relate closely to my own inquiry into the potential of stories and “museums-without-walls” to unify or transform communities or to create a greater sense of belonging or connection within them. Stories promote going out into the communities affected by or targeted by a museum exhibit, whether from an online platform or in on-site workshops, events, etc. Stories make it possible to go out into these living spaces where context can leverage more meaning than is typically possible from inside the walls of a traditional museum.

The case study of the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lambardia (MUVI) presented by Elisa Giaccardi suggests a system of interdependent programs rather than content management is required to turn a collection of stories (objects, artifacts) into something dynamically related to a community’s past, present and future (instead of a static collection of nostalgia).

Giaccardi calls for a “new approach to museum management and a new communicative competence toward the audience.” She thinks in terms of a new “form of virtuality [that] entails new forms of social creativity and museum construction, and [that] produces cultural objects that were previously unimaginable. ……The audience — the local community – [is transformed] into an active heritage, and [becomes] the main actor in the construction of the museum. …previously unknown facts come to light, role of “fantastic” can play in relation to the emergence of truth.”

The MUVI system used photographs, stories (audio, written?) and a local radio program. Alliances with other organizations were crucial to pulling this off.

At the Tenement Museum and Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), online and on-site exhibits really seem to incorporate the idea of storyteller, but are less adept at leveraging the story listener for purposes of creating the exhibit and making it a living entity. In other words, the conversation seems truncated.

In the Veteran’s exhibit at BHS, interactivity/technology is utilized more as an add-on (sensors to activate, database content to view) to traditional didactic or discovery methods than as part of a system designed to spur social transformation or cultural change. According to the curator, one of the vets sometimes visits the exhibit, engaging visitors in conversations. I wonder if excluding this element from the formal programming was intentional, for instance, for financial reasons.

At the Tenement Museum, the on-site tour format (1-hour length, space???) and individual educator discretion/ability seem to limit the degree to which the visitor/listeners can dynamically add to the experience.

I am left with a big question: Is it the function of museum vision, logistical feasibility or the pocketbook that stops these two great museums from taking their program to the next step, leveraging the meaning elicited by their exhibits to help visitors explore more explicitly or tangibly opportunities for cultural change or social transformation? The exhibits seem to point visitors in that direction without offering any platform on which to act or participate further.

Granted, there may be activities and goals along these lines that I am not aware of. Or maybe perspectives within Museum management or executive boards consider this approach uncomfortably close to taking a stand.

My own manifesto for experience design, based on readings and site visit analysis during ITP Cabinets of Wonder class, is a work in progress. This version is incomplete and needs to be edited, but it sets me on my way towards a very important exercise and professional product.

Experience Design Manifesto, Cynthia Hilmoe

Click here to read a Community Arts Manifesto prepared by participants in a March 2008 conference at Maryland Institute College of Arts.

Week 4, Cabinets of Wonder

New York Hall of Science
Photo: Doing Things — Did the Mars Rover Do What I Told it To Do?
Children’s Museum of the Arts
Photo: Making Things — Comfortable in Confusion
February 17, 2008

While the Hall of Science seemed to be analyzing wondrous things through the spectacle of the interactive, CMA seemed to be instilling a sense of wonder through the spectacle of personal uncertainty, imagination and adaptability.

The CMA was about MAKING according to each kid’s own inspiration and imagination. In my mind, I contrasted this with other museum experiences. National Gallery of Art, as a child, was about listening to the docents and “behaving ourselves,” speaking in hushed whispers, following two-by-two in line. The NY Hall of Science was about diffusing excited energy, often running or loping from one interactive station to another, and DOING whatever the buttons and mechanical knobs allowed.

The CMA was about EXPRESSING. The only didactic presence was brief, step-wise instructions for making a self-portrait; for playing with the green screen; and for stating the mission, which gave permission to all who entered to make this their own experience. Spontaneity and serendipity seemed to be the flavors of the day. I could see myself return, as a child, feeling safe to make whatever I liked without judgment. In contrast, the Hall of Science, while entertaining, was predictable.

These excerpts from a extended journal entry were prompted by four intense weeks of field trips and critical analysis of museums culminating in visits to the NY Hall of Science and Children’s Museum of Arts. This journal entry goes beyond the required gestalt and observation to document what had become a rather personal reflection of museums and my experience of them. This topic goes to larger questions I am asking because of the reason I came to ITP and the work I hope to do afterwards. As such, it became longer than I’d expected. I apologize to anyone who finds this entry indulgent, but time does not permit editing before putting it on the blog.