Category Archives: Wonder

Create[d] World

Posted on
Reply

A few thoughts from the recent Create World conference of clever, creative people.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Panel on place and creativity – how does digital alter the way we think?

Architect Richard Kirk made the point that perspective drawing as a tool is only a few hundred years old, so we are yet to reap the full benefits of new additions to our creative lexicon, such as virtual worlds. Performance designer Anna Tregloan commented that some people can quite naturally translate a 2D image to imagine it in 3D space, but for others that will always be more difficult, so the theatre tradition of building a little model of the set may endure. Continuing the theme of how we translate human experiences into digital form, and whether we can learn to think in a hybrid way between digital and physical, creative innovator (?!) Hael Kobayashi described the process of making penguins dance for Happy Feet. Humans danced in a warehouse, each one wired for motion capture. A set of screens displayed the merger of their movements with the digital penguins, so the director and key creatives could see, in real-time, penguins dancing on an iceberg.

Keynotes on photography, animation and the active audience

Tom Ang‘s keynote was an entertaining blend of a romp through the history of photography, some behind-the-lens information about particular shots, and some philosophical observations about value and power in photography’s new world:

  • Photoshop has programmed us!
  • Boundaries of what is shareable have shifted.
  • The concept of the ‘still image’ is now a misnomer: they fade, zoom, slide – and fast. And the more abundant they become, the less we attend to each.
  • Because images are so abundant, there are no longer iconic images of world events. (I’m not convinced of this point. The process by which images become iconic has changed, but I reckon crowd wisdom will choose images over time. Note, for example, the twitter #ows discussion of iconic imagery, and the meme of the cop casually pepper-spraying seated protesters.)

Ian Taylor’s story of the success of Animation Research Ltd – and his team’s down-home methods – was awe-inspiring. But my strongest takeaway from his talk was the importance of taking your time to learn – ergo the immense value of free education. Which we no longer have.

As a longtime advocate for participatory approaches to cultural representations, I was very interested in Ernest Edmonds‘ talk on art and the active audience. My favourite parts:

  • Some early research found that babies less than one week old can learn – by controlling the turn of their head on the pillow – to switch a light on and off, and that once mastered, they become bored with it.
  • Our vocabulary for interaction is developing. For example, there are many different kinds of play: danger, competition, camaraderie, subversion, fantasy, sensation, captivation, difficulty, simulation. And so on!
  • Don’t assume that more is better. Performance and communication might be better with lower bandwidth. This is an intriguing point, and I wanted more from him on this. I wonder if he means, for example, that in some cases audio works better than video,   because it gets inside your head but doesn’t restrict your visual attention. Or that pixelated imagery like in Minecraft, works in part because it’s low-res, so the player can more actively/imaginatively inhabit the scene and the characters. In short, I suspect this point relates to the value of leaving space within a representation, for the audience to fill from their personal creative sources.

An audiovisual meditation on gold

Not your average academic conference, Create World includes a range of clever, creative performances. Of the four, this was my favourite – it’s an audiovisual meditation on the mineral gold, and it made my heart hum. (I recommend: go full-screen and use headphones or big speakers.)

The Solar Angel from abre ojos on Vimeo.

Other prezos

The quality of stream-session presentations was consistently good. I attended those on:

  • a multi-disciplinary creative technologies degree (Judit Klein, Auckland Uni of Technology)
  • iPads for music-making (Jamie Gabriel, Macquarie Uni)
  • an iPad app for assessing teachers of music, art and drama (Julia Wren & Alistair Campbell, Edith Cowan Uni)
  • EEG-mapping of artistic consumption and as artistic work (Jason Zagami, Griffith Uni)
  • a weather-data-generated sonic sculpture in Sydney (Kirsty Beilharz, Uni of Technology, Sydney)
  • kinaesthetic potential of educational gaming (Helen Farley & Adrian Stagg, Uni of Southern Queensland)
  • serious games (Tim Marsh, James Cook Uni)
  • digital research methods, including Wikipedia article-writing (Kerry Kilner, Uni of Queensland)
  • Playtime, an animated movie (Thomas Verbeek, Uni of Otago)
  • Ishq, an audiovisual work commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of its exhibition on Islamic art (Kim Cunio and Louise Harvey, Griffith Uni)

I presented – and have shared on the Museum’s Education blog – Gamifying relatedness: an iPad app-in-progress. Hearty thanks to Paris for his guest appearance.

Dialogic learning in museum space

Posted on
Reply

Ten years ago, some museums began to articulate their mission in terms of a dialogue with communities. In practice, that dialogue occurred mostly in the context of education and public programs; exhibitions tended to maintain a detached, authoritative voice.

As a significant site of informal and social learning, how can museum exhibitions also be dialogic?

poster for the exhibition 'Captive lives: Looking for Tambo and his companions'

This question was central to my PhD research, and I’m revisiting it since an article I wrote in 2001 was recently republished in Ethos, the journal of the Social Education Victoria. In it, I explore the possibility of self-reflexive museum exhibitions – approaches and techniques by which curators and designers can engage visitors in history but also in its making. Specifically, I describe a model exhibition (‘Captive lives: Looking for Tambo and his companions’), and offer suggestions for how the Australian War Memorial could engage visitors more actively in the process of making that site meaningful.

Since it is now much more common for museums to deploy technologies for co-creation, or indeed, to use high- or low-tech means to be participatory – in the parlance popularised by Nina Simon, I am surprised that this article remains so relevant. Is it that exhibition curators and designers – those at the heart of museum representational practice – yet resist the dialogic tum?

If you fancy a slightly longer-than-bloggable read, here’s the a scan of the printed article (PDF 2mb).

Stone head at the Australian War Memorial

Stone head at the Australian War Memorial

A museum of collective vitality

Posted on
Reply

What are museums for?

One answer to this question comes toward the end of Orhan Pamuk’s epic novel, The Museum of Innocence, as the anti-hero Kemal visits thousands of museums in Europe, Asia and America. He’s planning to open his own house museum in tribute to Füsun, the forbidden love of his life – he’s been collecting objects he associates with her for years, from her cigarette butts to the ceramic dogs on her family’s television set. Pondering the purpose of collecting, he comes to the simple conclusion that museums are time compressed into space.

Looking at it from the direction of visitors rather than collectors… within the space of the museum we decompress the assembled material – expand it to witness something of the flow of time – what happened, how, and what it might mean. But is knowledge and understanding the end point?

In another take on their purpose of museums, New Curator describes museums as the city’s lymph nodes, immersed in its central nervous system, providing immunity against its ills. This model suggests a purpose beyond the (co)production of knowledge and understanding. Here, museums play a role in maintaining public health and happiness.

I’d like to reconceive of the National Museum of Australia in these terms. If a city museum can contribute to a city’s vitality, then a national museum can contribute to a nation’s. And now that we have a new director keen to take the museum into the future and willing to engage with contemporary issues, it is timely to reconsider its purpose. Could it be to promote our collective health in both social and environmental terms?

What would such a museum look like? It would certainly host celebrations – of admirable qualities of people and country. But it would also work to heal historical wounds, to tend to our collective psyche and our ecology. It would enlist visitors as active collaborators in witnessing, in recognising, in empathising, and provide means for us to respond in constructive ways. In this way, the National Museum would cultivate our collective vitality.

All quiet on the GLAM-wiki front

Posted on
Reply

Two months on from the groundbreaking GLAM-wiki conference, where cultural workers and wikipedians met to consider mutual benefits of a partnership (I blogged about it here), I have been gathering some thoughts on the recommendations – and will post them soon. Strangely, very few people have publicly commented, notable exceptions being GerardM (a Dutch wikipedian), Liam himself, and (briefly) Mia Ridge, a London-based digital cultural worker. What’s with the silence?

Is there a good reason why no Australian cultural workers have commented publicly, or are you, like me, puzzled by the eerie quiet?

In my view, even cultural workers very pressed for time should be thinking about it, because that page of recommendations is an important work-in-progress. Why? Because everyone who works in a cultural institution is responsible in some way for enabling members of the public to access and engage with cultural heritage. I can’t think of a cultural institution whose mission is not to extend and enhance access to and engagement with cultural heritage. And from my perspective, the GLAM-wiki conference buzzed for the very reason that a partnership between the cultural and wiki sectors holds such promise.

If wikipedians and cultural workers could collaborate effectively, both sectors (and let’s face it, the public) would benefit immensely, as Liam suggested in the abstract for his presentation to Wikipedians about the GLAM-wiki conference:

[Wiki] projects have fantastic coverage – both breadth and depth – in popular culture but the same cannot be said for ‘high’ culture. [...] if we hope to produce ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ then we need to address this gap. Where this information resides is in the world’s museums, libraries, archives and galleries and we must begin to work with these institutions – for our mutual benefit.

In other words, the wiki community is hoping to get hold of significant knowledge that is currently hidden from popular view because it resides only in cultural institutions. And for cultural institutions, their collection material could gain the popularity of Wikipedia.

So how come – and despite the wiki community’s enthusiasm – the cultural community seems so lukewarm? As cultural workers we might see the obstacles; but we can still seek the goal.

Is it that staff of cultural institutions don’t see the potential? Could it be that we have popularity ‘issues’? Or as a collective, are we simply (still) anti-Wikipedia? I’m curious to learn what others think.

Memorable moments of the MA conference

Posted on
1

So… Museums Australia conference 2007 has happened. For me, the bloodrush of the session-to-session dash was a welcome relief after sitting still for an hour and a half, so I enjoyed the multi-venue approach. And how good was it having an umbrella in your conference pack?

I also got a lot out of the presentations, and hereby present my list of memorable moments. (I’m leaving out the part where we learned about the reproductive cycle of giant squid, although I’m happy to share that too, on request.) I’d call this a list of favourite quotations except they’re mostly paraphrasings.

  1. There is no longer any excuse for failing to consult with Indigenous people about museum practices – Jackie Huggins, historian/author from the Bidjara and Birri-Gubba Juru peoples
  2. The Faith Bandler–Pearl Gibbs alliance is a critical part of Australian political history – Professor Marilyn Lake, historian at La Trobe University
  3. Museums should develop a sabbatical approach to research – David Pemberton, Curator–Zoologist at Tasmanian Museum & Gallery
  4. Zoos are worryingly bereft of intellectual curiosity – David Hancocks, consultant/author
  5. You can demand plain English where you can’t demand good writing – Jennifer Blunden, consultant

Feel free to add your own items to this list.

Wondrous art

Posted on
4

Donna Ong, 2006, Secret, interiors: chrysalis

chrysalis5

This artwork makes me wonder. Is it a childish experiment, like giving your doll a haircut, not knowing that in her case it’s forever? Or is it more sinister – a cruel act of punishment, played out on dolls in lieu of a real adversary? Or could the act of pickling represent preservation, even protection?

For me, its ambiguity is appealing.

secretinteriors-chrysalis2

How do you respond to it?

A good exhibition is…

Posted on
2

What constitutes a good exhibition? Last week I attended a seminar on this topic presented by Stephen Foster, an adjunct professor at the Australian National University, and former general manager with responsibility for content at the National Museum of Australia.

It’s a deceptively simple question. To answer it, you can draw on exhibition development guidelines, or you can think about the kinds of things people say in reviews, to come up with a list of criteria for evaluation. It seems a valuable exercise, and long overdue.

What I found interesting about the criteria tabled at this event was that, although some of them were about visitors’ experience, there was no mention of what those Assembling here might consider central to the mission of museum exhibitions – educational value. I’m not thinking here about how well an exhibition lends itself to having a non-formal education program built around it. I mean that an exhibition is itself a program for informal learning.

In that sense, a good exhibition is one that constitutes a good learning program. And for me, whether an exhibition/program is satisfying or deadly dull often depends on whether it involves its audience in the process of meaning-making – rather than simply presenting one thing after another, after another. To rate well in my book, an exhibition needs to generate a dialogue with its visitors. How it does that depends on the:

  • content of the exhibition
  • creativity and nous of the exhibition developers

But for me, an exhibition should have some kind of in-built audience participation. So that’d be my two-cent answer to the question. (To keen readers seeking a higher-cost rumination on this theme, I offer my doctoral thesis.)

One thing to clearly emerge from the seminar is the need to cultivate a culture of critique around museum exhibitions, comparable to – if distinct from – that around fine art, books, and film. The current paucity of critique contributes to the uncertainty over what constitutes a good exhibition.

In that light, here’s an idea: perhaps we should take inspiration from art mobs. Perhaps Collections Australia Network should offer to publish unofficial audio guides to Australian exhibitions. I’d like to see that. And my hunch is that an unofficial guide would add value to an exhibition or, in other words, help constitute its goodness.

History Summit in cloud-cuckoo land

Posted on
8

Over the weekend, I read the transcript of the Australian History Summit that Education Minister Julie Bishop convened after Prime Minister John Howard criticised school history as ‘fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’. The summit agenda was to revive the narrative approach to teaching history, and to agree on the main currents and big themes in Australia’s national story.

For me, whether a historical narrative is necessary – and even what gets into the narrative – is less critical than the issue of historical enquiry. If students are encouraged (as they have been since the enquiry-driven approach of the latest curriculum), to come to their own conclusions by researching, reading and evaluating a range of sources, then it matters far less what picture their teacher paints about the past. The narrative is a starting point. But the work of history students happens after that, as students examine the evidence and begin to form their own narrative.

Interestingly, some participants looked down their noses at the ‘Wikipedia generation’ of students, as if Wikipedia is not a great place to go for an introduction to most historical events or topics – check out the History of Australia page. If history students are seeing that as the be all and end all of their research, then that’s clearly a problem: whatever narrative they produce, it will not be informed by research or analysis. But the principle of starting with a coherent narrative overview is fine. (Hang on, wasn’t that the point of the whole summit?) So why be so condescending toward students?

Anyway, so I was keen to find out how the summit dealt with the issue of historical enquiry. Was the discussion of narrative content framed by recognition that students need to develop skills, and use primary sources?

Despite many mentions of historical skills, and clear recognition of the need for rich teaching resources, there was only one mention of primary sources. In the last session of the day – ten pages after afternoon tea – Inga Clendinnen said:

I want to be sure we have moved well away from the notion of learning history to doing history. We need analysis of some primary material, because you learn from doing history, not by being taught it. It is a critical discipline.

If I had been invited to the summit, I reckon I’d have uttered a hearty cheer at that point. Maybe that just confirms my position outside the ‘sensible centre’. The point is, she was immediately chastened by Gregory Melleuish:

I think what Inga said is fine if you are training a postgraduate historian who will become a professional historian. But when I look at my daughter and her friends, quite frankly, that is up in cloud-cuckoo land.

Well, if Inga is in cloud-cuckoo land, I’m right there with her. And so is Jenny Gregory, who pointed out (Inga Clendinnen persisted for a while but Gregory Melleuish was adamant):

it is very easy to present students with a set of documents about a particular event which gives different viewpoints and then give them the opportunity to analyse, to look at the evidence and come to a conclusion.

Indeed.

I could go on here. I could list a bunch of links to primary sources on the web. Or I could speculate on whether the lobbying by the museums sector and the Australian Society of Archivists (to which Geoffrey Bolton referred) had any effect. But I’d rather hear some other views. Comment, anyone?

Idle and disorderly namesake

Posted on
Reply

At work the other week, my friend Kate was glancing over an index to the Argus newspaper, 1870–79, when she spotted my name – Catherine Styles – in relation to a court case involving Catherine and four Chinese men. The charge was “idle and disorderly”.

Intriguing! My Dad’s from Victoria. It’s possible this Catherine was my great great grandmother. What else did the paper report? Off I went to the National Library to learn more. Turns out she was Catharine, not Catherine like me. But the indexers got the rest right.

On 17 June 1872, the paper reported that in the city court, she and four others were “accused of being idle and disorderly persons without lawful means of support”. The house they’d been found in, on Little Bourke Street, “was the resort of Chinese and European thieves, who went there to sleep and smoke opium”. Hm… so she was in a house where people slept and smoked opium. And she had no lawful income – she was poor.

There was another other remnant of the life of Catharine Styles in that report. She was “going to be married to a Chinaman next week”. Well, that was if they set her free in time. The last line of the report states that she was remanded in prison until the case could be heard.

On 21 June 1872 Catharine Styles appeared in court again, along with Ah Quong, Ah Wan, Lun Tack and Ah Long. Ah Quong was charged with keeping a house frequented by idle and disorderly persons. All the others were accused of being idle and disorderly persons frequenting the house.

Apparently, the men had been found smoking opium in the house. But what did Catharine do to get arrested? A Detective Hartney ‘said that prostitution was carried on to a terrible extent in Little Bourke Street’. So my namesake lived on a street where prostitution happened. From the report, it’s not clear where the voice of a witness stops and the reporter’s own voice begins. But whoever is speaking, no one is saying that Catharine Styles was caught doing anything wrong. One witness was ‘astonished at the frightful immorality’ in the area, and the following sentence reveals something of the intersection between race, gender and class, but nothing of Catharine’s situation or actions:

The females, who were generally young, – some mere girls – got more money from the Chinese than they did from the Europeans, and were common to large numbers living in one house.

The next sentence of the report suggests that Catharine was one of these girls, but only because it directly follows on from the last:

The friends of this young woman Styles, who was living in Ah Quong’s house, had tried to reclaim her but without avail.

Maybe Catharine earned money for sex, or maybe she didn’t. Certainly, she was young and poor. Maybe she was happy, in love, her heart set on marriage to her Chinese lover. (Can you tell I tend to be optimistic?)

She didn’t marry the next week. Along with Ah Long, who had only been out of gaol for 15 months, she was ‘let off with three months’ imprisonment’. The others got six each.

We looked up the registers of marriage in Victoria, and found no evidence that Catharine Styles ever got married. Ancestor or not, it was nice to learn a bit about her – to attend to her. I hope she found happiness.