Technology in visual culture: Transforming the museum experience

In this 9 Feb 10 session I taught for the module on the MA Museums & Galleries in Education, held at the London Knowledge Lab, we first made the following distinctions:

Different types of museums adopt different epistemological positions:

• History museums relate learning to cultural identity;
• Science museums view learning in terms of abstract scientific concepts; and
• Art museums link learning to direct aesthetic experience.

In addition,

• History and science museums are more likely to use facsimiles and technology in the service of conveying ideas, whereas
• Art museums retain a devotion to the authentic at the expense of telling a complete story

A distinction must also be made between

• museums based around collections of artefacts, and
• ‘science centres’ which employ interactive exhibits to convey scientific concepts.

We split the discussion about technology into three parts:

Computers in the museum

started out for collections management. See Ross Parry's Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change for history.

• Museums arose during the Renaissance to structure knowledge, through the emblematic pairing of object and text; physical spaces were seen as frameworks for arranging ideas.
• Parry considers the museum itself as a medium, following McLuhan (1964) who stated that media send their own messages, distinct from the ‘content’ they carry
• Technology was originally designed for the world of work, hence ‘desktop’ user interfaces are inherently unsuited to museum learning

Computers in exhibits

Technology in/as art

The Internet

Web 1.0

Both the Internet and the museum are meeting grounds for socialising and learning, mystery and wonder.

While ‘browsing’ may be common to both museums and the Internet, in museums visitors ‘browse with their feet’ (Semper 1998:120), whereas in front of a computer, physical activity is restricted to a small set of hand movements in manipulating a keyboard and/or pointing device (ibid., 122; Borysewicz 1998:111).

Since the Internet took off, both online and on-site visits have increased: Internet users are 91 percent more likely to visit a museum, and visit 2.6 times more often than non-users.

Web 2.0

A discourse of democratisation has arisen around the rhetoric about constructivism on the one hand, and 'user-generated content' mediated by digital technologies on the other.

Mobile technologies

put the virtual world directly into visitors' hands at the place of encounter with artefacts, and can extend the visit in ways which go beyond sketchbooks and postcards from the museum shop.

This can include helping to re-contextualise artefacts, for example in virtual re-creations of original contexts (Mintz 1998:25), or in explorations of artefacts' design and use (Reynolds and Speight, 2009). Like text labels, technology can prompt visitors to look more closely at artefacts.

Audio/multimedia guides

Visitors' devices

Mobilearn: older/expert users didnt like, but used audio as start point for discussion

Augmented reality

While digital technologies make possible ‘virtual realities,’ museums and zoos are already artificial constructions, and both museums and technologies employ artifice to create a sensation of the real, immediate or authentic.

Studying technology in the museum

Gottlieb, et al (2004) Access in Mind: Enhancing the Relationship to Contemporary Art. ICHIM, Berlin.

Kaptelinin, V. and Nardi, B. (2006) Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pierroux, P., L. Bannon, V. Kaptelinin, T. Hall and K. Walker. (2007) A Framework for Designing for Visitors' Augmented Activities in Museums. ICHIM 07, Toronto, CN, 24-26 Oct 2007.