As a hastily-conceived and rapidly executed response to the global turmoil caused by COVID19, there was no time for building in reflective practice. Indeed, it only happened because so many people volunteered their time and talent to plan, and execute it. This document is a distillation of the debrief the four organizers held to capture what worked, what didn’t, and what might we do moving forward.

Part One: Timeline

March 20, 2020: I saw this tweet about the idea of a globe-spanning Drinking About Museums event.

Koven J. Smith on Twitter

@AVMikhaylova @am_ledesma @artlust @prairietrawler @AndreaMontielS @wrdodger @porchrates @lili_czarina @MirandaRHK @benfaster @ninaksimon @LoriLeeByrd One thing we talked about doing years ago was a rolling all day around the world #drinkingaboutmuseums that would just gradually move west across time zones. Perhaps the time is right for this now, because why not?

Koven and I had talked about this years earlier. Now, of course, the whole world was getting a crash course in videoconferencing.

March 22, 2020: A couple of days later, I blogged about it.

March 23, 2020: Within a day, a group of four (Ryan Dodge, David Nuñez, Koven Smith, and I) start talking about what it would take to pull something like this off. Between the four of us, we had quite a bit of experience with Drinking About Museums. Koven coined the term (along with Kate Livingston) back in 2011, I’ve been hosting one in Boston since 2011, and Ryan and David have also put in their fair share of organizing. But, online is different than in-person, and we knew that there was a lot we didn’t know. But we also all felt like the museum field needed some opportunities to get together as we were all sliding into virus-induced quarantines, working from home, layoffs and furloughs, and so much more.

Google docs and spreadsheets were created, we went back and forth on a date, and after talking about it amongst ourselves and seeing the feedback from the blog post, we decided to go with March 30, 2020.

March 25, 2020: Ryan assembles a sign up form for people interested in hosting an event, Koven whips up www.drinkingaboutmuseums.com, David offers up his Zoom account, and I send many, many emails, DMs, and texts to prospective hosts answering questions and trying to drum up interest. The results were gratifying: We had 54 people across the globe volunteer, many of whom were new to the idea, but wanted to help out.

March 27, 2020: Koven whips up a simple CMS-driven site that will allow us to list events in timezone order. Now it’s just a matter of getting the information out of Google Sheets into the site.

March 29, 2020: The site is up and running, and we’re all trying to keep the CMS updated as URLs and details come in and change.

Koven J. Smith on Twitter

Hey, kids! The preliminary schedule for Monday's #drinkingaboutmuseums Around the World is now up: https://t.co/85w6gvN1uR. Please be kind, as I had to build this site in like 24 hours and apparently don't understand how timezones work.

March 30, 2020: The first events take place in New Zealand. We have our first (but not only) encounter with Zoombombers, when kids with skull masks and MAGA hats show up and start being disruptive. Off to a great start! Australia comes on line after that, then there’s a dip in activity until Singapore, Doha, and then Moscow start up. Zoombombers crash the Moscow gathering, too and start sharing porn and obscenities. You can imagine the DMs and texts going back and forth frantically, as we learn about Zoom’s well-known security flaws and take steps to lock down the main room and provide hosts with info on how to secure their events.

Western Europe and the British Isles spawn a series of well-attended events that last longer than their appointed hour. Then a lull as 5PM marches across the Atlantic. Brazil hosts and East Coast US events start after that and multiple events carry on for the next six hours or so. The evening of March 30th for us was a whirlwind ride from event to event, checking in groups, hanging out a little and chatting with friends old and new, and trying to keep abreast of the social media.

By the time the event had ended, there had been somewhere around 30 different events (11 of which I went to) and the hashtag #drinkingaboutmuseums had reached about 101,000 people. We had weathered the griefers, and the community had come together to make the events their own. Here’s a brief sample of texts and tweets from that night:

Participant responses

Some quotes from participants:

“Love to do it again”

“If there are plans to have it all happen again in the next month, I’m happy to host again. If there are no plans, then I will probably figure out a way to just reach out to my colleagues and do something like it. People seem to really need the connection right now.”

“Feels like we just scratched the surface in the hour we were together!”

“After the session was over, I had more museum colleagues text me that they were sorry they had missed it as there wasn’t enough advance notice. I feel pretty confident that if there was another session, more folks will join in.”

“When I came back about 45 min after that, there was still a group of around 8 people still having discussions.”

“FYI the size of our call was nice. Small enough that it felt like getting drinks with your friends, but large enough that you didn’t know everyone.”

SuperHelpful on Twitter

Been thinking a lot about a topic we discussed during our #drinkingaboutmuseums meetup earlier this week, so I wrote a bit about it: https://t.co/XorT3iDCx1 ht @ninaksimon and @SarahCole813

Lucy Redoglia on Twitter

A belated THANK YOU to amazing friends who joined the #drinkingaboutmuseums session I hosted yesterday! A wonderful group of professionals shared thoughts on life in the time of COVID, pets, etc. P.S. Anyone else find Zoom screen grabs totally reminiscent of #BradyBunch??

Ewa Goodman on Twitter

⁦@davidnunez⁩ this moment was sooo totally worth it to stay up late in Europe and hang out with you guys #drinkingaboutmuseums at the East Coast #DAMaroundtheworld

Larissa Borck on Twitter

Love this #drinkingaboutmuseums initiative. Apart from from chatting about museums and cultural heritage institutions, you get to talk to people across the world and how they experience this global pandemic. Joined Singapore, Stockholm and Manchester so far.

Michelle Kuek on Twitter

And that's a wrap on the Singapore leg of #drinkingaboutmuseums and my first stab at hosting a Zoom meet-up! I am so happy Benjamin (China) and @Larissa_Borck (Sweden) joined us, I truly did not expected int'l attendees but it enriched the discussion to have their perspectives.

Part Two: Learnings

After the fact, I solicited volunteers to share their experiences of their events, and got about a dozen responses. People had substantial conversations, and the mood was often sombre. Topics included:

• Discussing what we are all going through; the global pandemic, museum closures, layoffs, having to figure out a brand new way to operate online overnight.
• The difficulties of working in split teams (some onsite, some WFH)
  artist on the call shared about the realities that artists are facing with residencies postponed, shows cancelled, difficulty in getting materials.
• how some have had to quickly learn video-conferencing technologies to help set it up for our older family members or colleagues, and how this period was especially challenging for the less IT savvy.
• Whether this will change our work practices for the better or will it revert back after the pandemic is over and all our gains to advance digital practices lost.
• People also shared links to tweets and articles in the chat.
• Compared social media triumphs
• What is in the force majeure section of contracts and the future of traveling exhibitions

Other learnings that hosts shared included:

• Event sizes ranged from 6 to 40+.
• Many people attended more than one session and jumped from room to room as the event progressed.
• Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, people felt there was a need, and this started to address it. Many responded that this seemed like an initial response that called for more.
• All the hosts who responded said they would host again, or do it on their own if DAM didn’t have a followup event. A couple have already occurred.

Separately, the four of us got together and discussed what our experiences had been, and we pretty quickly agreed on what aspects of the event hadn’t worked as well as we’d like:

• Letting hosts pick their platform made it a lot harder for us to know what was going on. We still don’t know exactly how many events happened.
• Time is essential. We got the first event off the ground, but it’s not an experience any of us are eager to repeat at quite that pace. We need more time to spread the word, more time to line up hosts, more time to adapt to the curves that get thrown at us.

Part Three: Recommendations

Based on all that feedback, we’ve put together a list of features we think a future event would want to have to be more successful and enjoyable for all who attend.

• A centralized process for managing virtual meetings going forward (ex. a Zoom room for Host coordinating). That way, we can help more attendees find the correct login details for their local meetup and advise hosts on best practices for minimizing the risk of Zoombombing.
• A more robust “Guidelines for Hosts” FAQ.
  - Include things like “introduce yourselves in the chat”
  - How to manage breakout rooms,
  - how to deal with zoombombing if it happens
• A training session with potential hosts.
• Have moderators sign up for a time zone shift, and then break into breakout rooms by locality or to manage crowding as needed.
• Info on Zoom Breakout Rooms:
  https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206476313-Managing-breakout-rooms
  Breakout rooms allow you to split your Zoom meeting in up to 50 separate sessions. The meeting host can choose to split the participants of the meeting into these separate sessions automatically or manually, and can switch between sessions at any time.
• Make the event more accessible. How to make the event more UD? Do we hold a text-only chat room for deaf colleagues? Closed captioning?
• How to enable closed captioning in Zoom:
  https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115002522006-Closed-Captioning-With-Zoom-Rooms
• Language Interpretation:
  https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360034919791-Language-interpretation-in-meetings-and-webinars
• Get more help. More on this below.

Part Four: Where You Fit In

(This is the important bit!)

We feel this kind of sector-wide community engagement is still needed and we’d love to make this a more regular feature of our lives. But we can’t do it alone, nor do we want to. Drinking About Museums has always been a community-led affair, and though the four of us got the first one off the ground, we don’t want to own it. We want us to own it. So, come help us figure out to improve the next one and make it even better!

We’ll be hosting two Zoom sessions on April 15th, at 10AM EDT (UTC-4) and 10PM EDT (UTC-4) to plan the next GlobalDAM and figure out an organizational structure and process. If you’re interested in getting involved, the sign up details are below:

When: Apr 15, 2020 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAqcO-upjorE9anM-cG6NduLHub9XpYIV78

When: Apr 15, 2020 10:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpc-ygrzMrH9Rs45pXoDIL1X8BpVMTwBzt

We hope to see you there!

Stay strong!
Ryan, David, Ed, and Koven

It feels vaguely discomforting to write that, like I’m exposing some shameful truth about myself. But, sometimes you just have to own it. I love conferences; the stimulation of meeting new people, learning new things, and being deeply in the roles of both learner and teacher.

In November, I got a heaping helping. In the space of three weeks, I attended three very different, supremely impactful events. And being a narrative-creating kind of being, I’ve been looking for the story that links them and distills and synthesizes the powerful energies running through each. It’s been a hard slog. Each event in own right would’ve merited a lengthy recap, but coming in quick succession it’s been a bit like getting swamped by a wave and fighting to get back up to the surface just as the next wave hits you. I really do feel a bit battered, but mostly I feel grateful to have been in places where magic was happening.

MCN 2016: The Human-Centered Museum

Good conferences, the ones that push you and inspire you to think anew, are like mirrors. You see yourself, your practices, and your institution reflected through them in all their imperfectness. The Museum Computer Network held out a vision of museums as progressive forces for social good; for both their publics and their staffs. If you’ve never been, then the choice of “The Human-Centered Museum” as the theme might seem counterintuitive, but the Venn diagram of museum digital types and progressive practitioners has substantial overlap. Given the maturity and penetration of the digital realm into all aspects of museum work, it is unsurprising that the MCN community has turned its attention to more fundamental, humanistic issues. And they were intense topics; empathy, vulnerability, discrimination, racism.

MCN 2016 was an intense conference. I’ve never been at a professional event where there was so much crying. Not that there was a ton of it, but the fact that there was any is kind of amazing, and a testament to the kind of community MCN has decided to become. I’m sure we’ve all been part of organizations or events that espouse excellent-sounding values. What matters is how those values are made manifest — the culture. And MCN’s culture is deeply nurturing, vulnerable, and willing to honestly engage with what matters. Which is good, because 2016 has been one hell of a year.

For me, the conference was a petri dish of the kinds of interactions I know we as a profession need to be having at our institutions. And the instruction the speakers provided was just what I needed to witness. I was in sessions that started off with speakers asking the audience to agree not to share anything online so people could speak freely. I watched my peers get up in front of rooms full of strangers to share personal, sometimes painful, stories that have shaped them. The Chatham House rule was invoked in another, and other sessions featured curators, and directors (the occupations most often maligned in museum digital events) sharing their perspectives on where our work intersects and what their experience of working with us is like. The challenge to the attendees is how to bring that culture home and adapt it.

Seph Rodney said in his write-up for Hyperallergic that everyone he talked to seemed convinced that “insights into innovations in their particular corner of the museum field were to be found in this gathering.” If I had to try to give a one sentence recap of what my time in New Orleans was like, it’d be, “What are you doing to make things better?” Over and over again, I felt like speakers and sessions were challenging me with their examples to step up. Actually, that sentence could be modified two ways that’d be equally accurate, “What are you doing to make things better?” and “What are you doing to make things better?”

The takeaway: “We need to talk.” And we do.

Alibis for Interaction Masterclass, 11 November, 2016

Malmö, Sweden

Interaction Alibi: A rule, object, or change of state that allows a human to interact. This idea is central to designing for participation. An alibi might be a role, a rule, a narrative, a game, a mask, an instruction, an introduction. An interaction alibi helps you understand what you’re expected to do, feel safe trying something new, and trust that the outcome will be worth your time.

Alibis for Interaction was a one day event that designed to provide creative practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines with “experience design tools to use today.” I went to Alibis to conduct interviews with some of the speakers for an upcoming PEM exhibition on play and contemporary art. The interviews were compelling and will make valuable additions to the project, but the event itself had a much more profound impact on me. In terms of immediately useful terms, theory, and practices, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a better professional event. The delight of being in a thoughtfully designed space was intense, and the opposite of how workplaces feel much of the time, where so much is transmitted by osmosis, taken for granted, or left unsaid.

Alibis fundamentally realigned my perception of myself as an experience designer. I don’t know where I internalized the idea that “design” was something that happened only in certain specific contexts with specific people, but it was clear that I had. Alibis demonstrated how everything is a designable surface if you’re willing to spend the time to design it. And Huizinga‘s concept of the “magic circle” could be applied to much more than games or play environments. A meeting could be a magic circle. So could the lunchroom. Or an exhibition. An experience designer will look for the designable surfaces in the world and see that virtually everything is.

“Culture is the manifestation of values.” — Jan Gunnarson

One idea that reinforced what I’d heard in New Orleans was Johnanna Koljonen’s admonition to make active choices, and to particularly challenge traditions to solve whatever your problem is. And the problems that people kept bringing up were institutional culture problems. Gunnarson’s definition of culture as manifestation helped me tease apart what was at the core of my deep-seated revulsion for most mission and values statements. Without recognizable manifestations, values have a tendency to be bullshit; feel-good words that change nothing. Translating them into a culture–actually acting on those values–is the really challenging part. Experience design is really community design and everyone’s experience of the “things” we design is our community’s (or institution’s) culture.

Whenever the YouTube videos go up, you should check them out. Sebastian Deterding’s talk on hacking meetings will make your day.

The takeaway: We accept too much tradition unquestioned, and take too many designable surfaces for granted.

Clash of Realities Conference on the Art, Technology and Theory of Digital Games

November 14–16, 2016 Cologne, Germany

Clash of Realities was an international academic research conference on game design; the artistic design, technological development, and social perception of digital games, as well as the spreading of games literacy. A different group from PEM was here to conduct video interviews. I didn’t get much chance to attend sessions, but the two events I was were worth the trip.

I was excited to hear about “Star Citizen — Open Development as a Disruptive Game Design Practice” by Ortwin Freyermuth. Indulge me in a bit of back story for those of you not immediately captivated by news of pending sci-fi games. The past couple of years of geeky space opera game news have been dominated by two titles: “No Man’s Sky” by Hello Games, and “Star Citizen” by Cloud Imperium Games. “No Man’s Sky” promised an incomprehensibly vast universe of procedurally generated worlds to explore. It also featured a very closed development process, steeped in secrecy, announcements, and missed deadlines. When the game finally launched, and the gaming world got its hands on the game, the reviews were…meh.

Star Citizen adopted a radically different model. It’s the largest crowdfunded computer game to date. Backers have provided more than $125 million in contributions to build the game, which is still in it’s alpha phase. Star Citizen is being created with the input of 1.6 million active “citizens”. Cloud Imperium’s experiences to date will probably seem unsurprising to folks who design participatory experiences. Building a passionate community has allowed Cloud Imperium to test out the game universe more thoroughly than they could’ve in secret. It has also forced them to be extremely responsive to their community in ways that a traditionally-developed title wouldn’t have to do until the game was released.

The big shocker for me, and what I think is the greatest endorsement for working in the open was Freyermuth’s casual statement that it was still undetermined how much, if any, of the current alpha universe would be transferred into the final release version of the game. In other words, he was saying that the universe that 1.6 million people had invested time, money and effort into might get completely abandoned if they decided it was better to start over for the release version. The early adopters and most fervent advocates of the game might have to start from scratch like everybody else.

That this idea could even be considered, let alone spoken in public speaks volumes to the relationship (and therefore trust) Cloud Imperium has cultivated with its audience. And I covet that kind of relationship. It stands in stark contrast to the typical closed model museums practice, where the community is an outside entity, to be kept at bay until we’re ready to part the curtain and let them quietly in.

The real highlight of the conference for me was Eric Zimmerman’s keynote, “Clash of Opinions: A Discussion on Games, Design, and Culture”.

He took the conference theme, literally excerpting phrases from everyone’s abstracts, then handed them out on cards. He then asked us to join up in small groups, posed two part questions about gaming that had blanks in each half, and had us break into groups to try to find pairs of cards that answered those statements. People who felt moved got up and read their answers and Eric responded to their answer and how it related to the state of the field today and invited the audience to weigh in.

He essentially remixed the conference by making it a card game, the audience remixed it again through the answers they picked to the questions, and then he brought it back around to where it started; the big ideas. And isn’t that what a conference is supposed to be about? You get together to parallel process the big things, break them down into manageable chunks and jointly reassemble a shinier, fuller understanding through discourse?

It was an incredible piece of game design and experience design. The way he used the designable surfaces of a conference keynote, the magic circle of audience members coming up on stage to read their answers, the audience riffing off those.

The takeaway: Game design is infiltrating everything. And it has a lot to offer us.

So after all that, and a long flight home, the pile of receipts from four countries in four currencies, what sense can I make of it? The statement that finally tied it all together for me was one I heard at my Quaker meeting, “Let us teach by being ourselves teachable.” That’s really what links the November events; the recognition that we have a lot to do, a lot to challenge and ask “Is this really the best way to do our work?” We have a lot to teach and share, but we will only ever be able to do it better by recognizing how much we have to learn and being OK with our imperfection.

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Being teachable was originally published in theuxblog.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Authors

Lesley Kadish —Lesley Kadish was born a redhead in summer in Texas and migrated north at eighteen to avoid further sunburn. After graduating with a degree in historic archaeology from Grinnell College, she once again found herself at the mercy of the sun when she accepted her first job in digital cartography for the Museum of Northern Arizona. In subsequent years, she has worked as a curator for the Minnesota Historical Society, a digital project lead for the Espoo City Museum in Finland, and currently as a Fellow in the Smithsonian Accessibility Program, and a researcher with Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS). Lesley’s most current work evokes this body knowledge to theorize and explore multi-sensory learning in museums. Despite splitting her vacation time between Minnesota and Finland, Lesley continues to find a way to get a sunburn. And she is always in search of her elusive Texas heritage.

Ed Rodley — Ed Rodley is one of the original CODE|WORDS conspirators and worked in museums since he was eleven. He is currently Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, where he manages a wide range of digital media projects. Prior to that he was senior Exhibit Developer at the Museum of Science, Boston. During his career, he has developed major exhibitions on the Soviet space program, Leonardo da Vinci, Egyptian archaeology and Star Wars. He’s developed audio tours, multimedia tours, websites, and contributed to books like CODE | WORDS: Technology and Theory in the Museum and Mobile Apps for Museums: The AAM Guide to Planning and Strategy. He blogs on museum topics at Thinking About Museums. Ed’s current interests include taking a philosophical can opener to museums’ approaches to content creation, exploring multisensory approaches to museum experiences, and storytelling in the digital age with all its new affordances and constraints.

The Initial Prompt

“Immersion” is one of those words that gets used a lot, and can be difficult to pin down. The idea of feeling completely engulfed by an environment is a powerful one for experience designers, and the benefits of immersion and learning outcomes is well-studied.

This month, Lesley and Ed discuss their interest in multisensory experiences in museums. Lesley and Ed were introduced after Lesley’s fascinating “Digital Accessibility and the Senses” session at MCN2015. Both are interested in the complex interplay of simultaneous sensory input, the embodied experience of the senses, and of immersion.

Our Correspondence (as it evolves)…

______________________________________

ponderings to begin

Lesley to Ed, Jan 21, 2016

Ed,

Moving things around in the house of mind. Back burner moves forward. And time opens to put together the previously discussed conversation thread… It was begun right after our talk, as you can see below.

So we just had an introduction conversation (really nice to meet you) and it turns out we both have degrees in anthropology and historic archaeology. You were like, “ya, there’s lots of us hidden around.” That got me thinking about the framework that sort of secretly shores our work. This combination of material culture (USABLE materiality), archives, (touchable, waterlogged, stinky, handwritten) and the natural ELEMENTS (from over-air conditioned special collections rooms, to dirt in the mouth excavations.)

I believe you said you worked with Eastern water people (ship builders and whalesmen?). My people were the desert dwellers…I worked in Hopiland and Salt Lake City. And the historic folks I researched (19th century Latter-Day Saint missionaries) lived in these same places as me, many years before. They were also Easterners, which made them completely out of their element in the desert; they were starving, devoted, and awkwardly reliant on their native Hopi “hosts”.

Researching their life’s work meant understanding their purpose and their resolve. And doing that meant I had to picture these men walking on rock mesas in frozen Cincinnati leather shoes. It meant considering what songs they had in their head during boredom, or what smells could have made them tear up in longing for a hot dinner. The landscape, their handwriting, the actual weather…. it all mattered to me. They could not have imagined a lady redhead would be peering back into the archives of their lives, but they certainly considered themselves history makers.That’s what I love about historic archaeology: this tension between self-conscious expression & unintentional autobiography. Writing this, i’m thinking, historic archaeology also was so much about the body. Including the imagined body of the historical person, and the body of the researcher. And it was also full of imagination.

In our call, you talked about immersion, especially as it related to making exhibitions like the wonderful boat/painting room. Immersion expands with imagination and the senses.

I’m curious, how has your own background impacted your bodily experience of the senses, of imagination, and of immersion? What works have inspired you? And what do these lovely words, imagination, immersion, and senses, point to in your thinking? I’d like to talk and think about a practical application where they are engaged. I want to drill down into what makes these things so compelling. Maybe an exhibition we can each visit and muse on together. Interested?

I hope this finds you well!

Warmly,

Lesley

______________________________________

JetBlue 278 BOS->LAX

Ed to Lesley, Jan 22, 2016

Lesley!

What a great surprise to find in my email this morning! I’m stuck on a plane heading for LA, and deep in that dissociated state of being neither here nor there. I too enjoyed our initial conversation so much! I’ll have to thank Don Undeen for giving me the hard sell to go to your session at MCN.

I’ve often wondered about what’s behind the number of archaeologists who go into museum work. It’d be an interesting study (for somebody who’s not me) to undertake. There are the obvious reasons; like lack of positions, the generally dismal state of being a modern academic, and the desire to not live in your car forever and be able to go to the doctor occasionally if needed. But I think there is something to the idea that archaeologists, by inclination, are very materially focused, determined sleuths, and embodied practitioners in a way that make them well-suited to museum work. I still know the way that earthenware sherds taste different than stoneware. I want to touch everything, and smell it.

The other trait I’d add to your list, though, is that to even consider a career in archaeology you have to be comfortable knowing you’ll always have an incomplete picture and be happy to live in the lacunae.

It’s kind of appropriate for me to be writing this from a plane, because “my people” as you called them were 17th and 18th Atlantic sailors, transient folk who left little behind except in worst case scenarios. The idea of being intimately familiar with and completely unable to survive in one’s environment (Swimming was a skill rarely taught until the 19th c and most sailors of the period couldn’t) never fails to haul me up short when I imagine my people. And working underwater requires you to be familiar with your own body in a way that you don’t have to be on land. Am I breathing too hard? Can I finish this before I run out my tank? Where’s my buddy? What’s she doing? It requires presence.

There’s also a tremendous physical powerlessness to working underwater, where even a moderate current can make it difficult to stay in one place, let alone work. This powerlessness also resonates with my people. My sailors were all selling their bodies in return for wages. The work was hard, the wages terrible, and the conditions appalling. And the system was stacked against them in so many ways that it’s no wonder that some of them slit their captains’ throats and raised the black flag. We owe the term “strike” as a labor stoppage to the London sailors who struck the sails on their ships in 1768 and brought London’s commerce to a halt to protest working conditions and wages. So, in many ways, their archaeological record is slanted towards oppression, disaster, and death. Which is only a small slice of their lived experience. Are you familiar with Auden’s poem, “Archaeology”? I’ve always loved the coda at the end of the poem.

“From Archaeology
one moral, at least, may be drawn,
to wit, that all
our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,
being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.”

The whole poem gets at the essence of what I think I’m aiming for in the immersive experiences I’ve developed and want to develop; being able to immerse the visitor in an unremarkable moment in some other time and/or place. I am reminded of a conversation I had once with Ed Harris (of Harris Matrix fame) about how the way we look at things skews our views. He was talking about site profiles and how we tend to fixate on boundaries, where one deposit ends and another begins. The boundaries may be where something stopped or start, but the deposits, the undifferentiated areas in between, is where the people did most of their living. The boring bits are actually the ones where most of those lives happened. One of the reasons I think our Impressionists’ studio boat worked was that it captured that kind of quotidian air and gave visitors room to extend their senses into the space and learn what they could.

So, how do I think my background has impacted how my embodied experience of the world? Hmm, good question. I can’t pass a building without seeing the bricked up windows, the doors added at a later date. I see the holes where something has been removed, and I want to add it back in. On beaches, my eye goes immediately to the human objects. I can’t help trying to mentally reconstruct the building that stood over a cellar hole, or the ship that rose up around the pile of ballast stones you often find covering the wreck sites of sailing ships of my period.

JetBlue 404 LGB->BOS

Mon, Jan 25, 2016

I was having drinks with a colleague and former intern last week, and was reminded of a project that has a lot to do with how I think of of immersion. So, forgive me while I segue into Col. Francis Thompson Colby’s gun room which exists in reconstructed form at the Museum of Science, Boston. The Colonel (1882–1953) was quite a character. I find it impossible to research people without coming to love or hate them, and Francis Colby, “Frannie” to his few friends, was an eccentric I came to feel quite close to. He had a privileged upbringing in Boston; the right schools, Harvard (of course), and then law. He tasted the outdoor life, and never lost his taste for it. In the early days of World War I, he raised money from his friends and social circle and went to Belgium and started his own ambulance company. By war’s end, he served with seven armies, won bunches of medals, and become an officer in the U.S. Army. Army life took him all over, but East Africa was his soul’s home, it seems. He made frequent hunting trips for the rest of his adult life, until WWII brought him back into active service. After the war, he returned to the Boston area, and furnished his home with a lifetime’s worth of souvenirs of his military and hunting career. Frannie was a collector and amateur photographer and filmmaker, too.

He was also an only child from a small family with few relatives, and fewer friends, and in classic Yankee style, very close about his affairs and money. When he died in 1953, the Museum of Science received a surprise; a gigantic bequest, with the stipulation that his trophy room had to be preserved at the Museum. He’d talked with the Director of the Museum a few times, and hinted that he was thinking of making a bequest, but nothing specific. The Museum dutifully packed up all the Colonel’s stuff and brought it down to Boston and painstakingly reconstructed the room where it still stands. It’s packed with unlabelled, unmarked, and unknown trinkets. His WWI photo albums alone probably comprise 2–3,000 images. When you’re standing inside, the room is thick with ghosts that refuse to speak.

Have I recommended Susan Stewart’s “On Longing?” It’s a fabulous philosophical examination of the role souvenirs and collections play. Beautifully written stuff, with a ton of food for thought for people who work with objects. One subject she touches on throughout the book is the innate “foreignness” of objects to our experience of living, which is what I think the French charmingly refer to as “the malice of objects.” “The experience of the object lies outside the body’s experience — it is saturated with meanings that will never be fully revealed to us.” A central feature of museums is precisely this phenomenon, the display of objects that are foreign and opaque to us without the intervention of narrative. Stewart says, “Although the transcendence of such objects allows them to endure beyond flux and history, that very transcendence also links such objects to the world of the dead, the end of organic growth and the beginning of inaccessibility to the living.” Inaccessible, indeed!

One of the many trophies in the room is a damaged road sign that reads “Dixmuide 7k, 5h”. From the albums, and Colby’s known movements, it seems clear that he was around Diksmuide in 1915, and probably picked up the sign on one of the roads leading into the bombed-out town. Diksmuide was flattened by the end of the war, and the albums are full of candid snaps of rubble-strewn streets, jaunty officers with riding crops and mustaches, and nothing to tie them into a narrative. One of the best points I took away from Stewart was her description of the role of the souvenir and it’s proxy status for something incapable of being captured. “[W]e need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”

I can imagine that for Colby, that Dixmuide sign stood in for being a young officer in a great army engaged in a titanic conflict, the feeling of boots in mud, the smell of burnt houses and dead horses, the bending over and touching cold metal, rough with shrapnel holes, the sound it being tossed into the ambulance, the color of the sky that day. All the things that couldn’t be captured that he needed to commemorate come to reside in that sign, and by not passing that narrative on, the chain that links the object to the lived experience is irreparably sundered. And we’re left with an object.

So how do you conjure those vanished materialities? That’s what I’m interested in immersive experiences. I want my senses to tell me that story instead of just reading it. I can remember a Roman show from my registrar days that included a simple bowl from the workshop of a C. Clodius Proculus, and the jolt it gave me to see the potter’s thumbprint in the underside and to press my gloved thumb against it and feel that my thumb was bigger than his.

Tell me more about your idea for visiting an exhibition and musing on it? I’m super interested!

Best,

Ed

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Lesley to Ed

Jan 26, 2016

Ed, you MUST be exhausted. I wish y’all Boston had gotten some snow so you could hibernate under the melt too.

Wonderful message; thank you! i’ve read it through a couple times and there are several nuggets i am squirreling out.

There’s good stickyness around “vanished materialities.” As a geographer and GIS mapmaker, I used to trouble about maps in similar ways. GIS, as you know, is traditionally employed to analyze large, tangible things (traffic flow, crop yield, settlement patterns), not small, intangible things (morning light at a tram stop, glances in a grocery store). And so I spent years trying to build and theorize ways to capture the “personalities, emotions, values, and poetics of a place” (cartographer David Bodenhamer’s words). But turns out its HARD to force complex multi-dimensionality of a space (or an object) into a textual, or flat, or traditionally intellectual framework.

-fast forward 2 hours-

I just went back to something i wrote several years ago but never did anything with. It’s about places of wild and unusual heritage. I’ll grab some ideas that have been sitting there on the shelf catching light at certain times of day. And i’ll get back to you with them in relation to the words you sent from the plane. mmmmm feeling hungry now for this material(ity). Thanks for reinvigorating me!

…and re:the idea of visiting the same place and talking/writing after… it is appealing to me because there’s something to push off of; there’s the same visual in our heads. We could take a couple words and visit a place separately and then respond to the cues/words from that exhibit/space. I could see it as the start to a CODE/WORDS conversation.

Hope you’re resting a bit and reading fiction,

Lesley

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Ed to Lesley

Jan 29, 2016

Yeah, vanished materialities are a good thing, and I think there’s something that ties it to immersion; the immateriality of sensory inputs and the physicality of stuff. I’d forgotten all about that conversation with Harris until I was writing you. Amazing what gets lost…

Re the visiting separately and talking: you’re on! Maybe we can figure out a place we’re both likely to visit in the next few months. What’s your travel schedule like? I’m in CA at the end of March, but otherwise staying pretty close to home.

Ed

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Lesley to Ed

Feb 8, 2016

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Ed to Lesley

Feb 10, 2016

Here I am sitting on the train, listening to your message through my headphones and typing on the laptop at one of the central tables in the lower deck of the commuter rail car. To my left, North Station trundles past. To my right, one of the usual characters who ride the train home is laying on the seat next me, incessantly clicking his lips and whistling, sort of like he’s speaking Xhosa. The joys of the empty reverse commute. He’s probably come off the all-night shift at the post office. The conductor has to remind him every time to keep his feet off the seats, but he forgets almost immediately and starts nestling into the seat, like he’s getting ready for bed.

Listening to your voice in my ears I can easily place the rest of you in the seat opposite me, smiling, looking sleepy and drinking your tea while you tell me your thoughts. Having an audio to listen to rather than text is both a treat and a pain. The download is flaky and skips until I go back and start over again. But once my headphones are on and you’re speaking, I’m immersed. The sound of your voice, the background noise, and incidental sounds, all envelope me in a way that letters on a screen don’t. One thing that I am very interested in are the unique characteristics of our sensory apparatus. We are so predominantly visual and language rich when it comes to describing how things look, yet it’s relatively easy to simulate blindness. We are impoverished in our language to describe sound, even though it’s almost impossible to simulate deafness. Why can’t we can’t “listen away” the same way you can “look away”? The correlation between our ability to focus and our ability to ignore is pretty interesting! How many times have you closed your eyes in order to visualize something?

I imagine there’s some evolutionary component to this. Ears are always scanning for sounds of danger, noses are telling you about the environment, while eyes are darting constantly around, focusing on points in space. Our brains stitch together a composite image from the stream of sensory data coming into to our eyes, but it’s a lie that feels real. I’ve thought it deeply symbolic that the spot where our eyes focus is the place we really don’t see, since our optic nerve, not rods and cones, is right at the back of the eyeball. We rapidly shift our focus slightly to fill in that blind spot, but it’s always there. Some senses wash over us and others we consume in tiny, intense bursts.

When I was a wee museum thing, we junior volunteers used to congregate in out of the way places where the grown ups wouldn’t be. For lunch, that meant the stage of the big auditorium that wasn’t often used. We’d go to the cafeteria, get our burgers and then scurry off to the basement and do pre teenish things like read sci fi books, and play games. While I can’t recall the faces of my cohort, I can recall the periphery in great detail; the curtains, the old ceiling lights, the tile and wood of the stage. And I can recall the smell. I *know* what that place smelt like, though I’d be hard put to describe it to you in a way that carried any specificity. Dust, old wood, that museum basement smell of cabinets, specimen jars, taxidermy. I can feel how the heavy stage curtain felt. Forty years later, I can still hear the immense quiet of that empty auditorium and our folding chairs squeaking on the stage.

You mentioned that you were going to LA soon, which gives me an idea. When I was in LA recently, I visited LACMA and think two of the exhibitions there might appeal to you. The Rain Room is up through Apr 24, and there’s a Diana Thater exhibition there through Apr 17. One is very experiential, the other very visual, both immersive. I’ll be back in LA in March, so I could revisit both with our conversation in mind. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on them.

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Lesley to Ed

Mar 23, 2016

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Ed to Lesley

Apr 14, 2016

Lesley,

How fascinating that you had such a reaction to the Rain Room! My initial impressions were so different. I felt a kind of schizophrenia the whole time, as though I was having two separate set of reactions simultaneously, and toggled back and forth between them pretty much at will. The energy of being in line to do the Thing, with all the other seekers was energizing and my anticipation mounted with every group that the guards let enter. The educator in me was saddened that nobody was working the line, since it was such a ripe opportunity to engage with a literally captive audience. I had purposely not looked anything up about the room so I was going in as untainted by prior knowledge as possible. And then it was our turn.

And what an “experience” it was. On one level I was floored. A room full of pouring rain, but no puddles on the floor, and no clouds! It was like the artists had distilled and bottled the essence of “rain”. I immediately read the black and white emptiness of the space as the typical container for experiencing contemporary art. I was in an art place and the art was happening all around me, in response to me and my movements. I was no passive observer, but part of it. I felt a sense of agency that most contemporary art denies me. Magical. The obligatory selfie followed. The part I enjoyed the most was trying to link up my exclusion zone with a friend’s, to join my isolation zone to theirs. I spent every second of my allotted time in the space and left regretfully.

On the other level, having the guards usher a group of people into a stark unadorned chamber that was essentially a big shower gave me a moment’s pause. The black plywood walls, the piercing spotlight and the guards at either end yelling instructions at us made it feel a bit like a Cold War spy movie to me. All it needed was barking dogs and someone shouting in Russian or German to be complete. My group fanned out immediately, I think so that we could reach individually experience the effect of the room not raining on us. It made me feel insulated and isolated. To be immersed in something and simultaneously excluded from it was interesting and a little sad. I didn’t feel this nearly as much as others, since I seemed to get rained on quite a bit. Maybe it was the black jacket, I dunno. I do know I got wet. I wished I could get wetter, though. Because that’s what rain does, right?

After listening to your experience and reflecting on my own is it, I realized something. My feeling of being let down by Rain Room was partly a result of a prior experience with not getting rained on one June day in 2013. I’ll tell you about it. It was a changeable day weatherwise. It had been raining but suddenly ceased. The sky was active and busy. Clouds came and went, sun burst forth suddenly. It was stormy and blue sky all at once. Leaving work, I strolled outside along a brick walkway flanked with young trees on either side, leaves drooping under the weight of all the recent rain. As I walked along, the sky did another sudden pivot as clouds vanished and glaring sun jumped out. At that same moment, a wind picked up and shook the trees. For a few seconds I was treated to the strange sight of a bright blue sky covering everything while it rained under all the trees, the drops beautifully backlit by the sunlight. I was standing out in the open and dry, but everything under the normally sheltering trees was getting soaked. The rain in the Rain Room took me back to that afternoon, and I found it wanting. Is that Rain Room’s fault? No. But it still left me a little cold somehow.

I look forward to talking on Monday, and hearing more.

All Best Regards,

Ed

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Ed to Lesley

May 22, 2016

Lesley,

I’ve been remiss in sending you a final epistle to try to wrap up this long, strange trip we’ve taken. Attached please find my rambling, loopy attempt at a free-form spoken answer to the question of what about immersion attracts us so much as experience designers. I hope it makes sense. I resisted the urge to write it all out and read it to you, since that would’ve defeated the purpose. I hate to listen to myself, so I’m not going to review it. Is this akin to how writing makes you feel?

The nugget I have taken away from our epistolary romance is that I think there are least two kinds of immersive experiences; the full-on simulation kinds like our Impressionist Studio Boat (which is being reconstructed at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh!), and the “increased awareness of your embodied nature” kinds, like the Rain Room. I think both kinds of experience appeal to me because they acknowledge the whole visitor and avoid the “museum visitor as disembodied brain” syndrome that sets up the rational vs the emotional/spiritual.

I’d love to know what new insights you’ve had from our talks.

All Best Regards,

Ed

P.S. If you’re interested in the Rodin show I mentioned, here’s a great review from Sebastian Smee.

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Lesley to Ed

Jun 7, 2016

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Lesley to Ed

Jun 24, 2016

Ed,

I’ve been thinking and writing through this email for a couple weeks now. As you know, I struggle with text. Part of that struggle is the isolating nature of writing. I know we’ve been ‘conversing’ but it still feels like we’re each in a vacuum. So here it goes…

In an earlier message I mentioned that I wanted to go back to something I was thinking about years ago. And thanks to this conversation, I’m taking the opportunity to revisit it. As you know, I used to live in Helsinki on a Fulbright year abroad. My flat was in the Töölö neighborhood, just a block from the Baltic, and walking distance to this tiny shack of a coffee shop called Cafe Regatta. Cafe Regatta is Old. It’s been in the same spot for over 120 years, though not always as a cafe. First it was a proper fishing shack, then a Coca-Cola joint for the 1952 Olympics, then a boat house, and finally it became a cafe in the 1980s. I loved going to Regatta; it felt like “my spot” amidst a year of foreignness. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but Regatta has a texture. Even now, I remember those visits with my whole body. Aesthetically, it’s like opening a curiosity cabinet. Inside, it’s tiny; there are maybe five tables. And the walls are literally covered with everyday, old Finnish objects: there are dangling ice skates and rusted tea kettles, a weathered map of Töölö, a portrait of Mannerheim, a Victorian-era nude. On the outside, Regatta resembles a traditional Finnish summer cottage: it’s red, gabled, and has a wood pier with a boat tied to it. But that’s not all. There are hand-painted signs littering the place, to teach foreigners a little Finnish, while stating the obvious for locals. For example, the painted sign on the little rowboat reads, “Tämä on Vene” (This is a boat). It’s humorous. The sign above the counter lets everyone know that refills pay five cents. (Not ‘cost’ five cents. They actually pay you a nickel.)

But here’s the thing, Ed. Despite its age and silly aesthetic, Regatta isn’t just some kitschy old coffee shop trying to make a buck. It is a thriving place of centralized retreat. I was just as likely to share a table with Swedish men playing cards as refugee Eritrean teenagers eating pulla. One Finnish woman was quoted in the newspaper as saying that Regatta was the only place she could find moments of brightness amidst the darkness of her depression. On a given August day, 1000 people might show up for coffee and mustikkapiirakka, but the place still feels intimate and inviting. When I talked with the owner, Raine Korpela, about this, he told me that he intended it this way. “There are many so-called ‘lonely people’ in Töölö,” he told me, “and more and more people living in Helsinki who don’t have cottages to go to. I want Regatta to be open to anyone, any day, to feel like they are at a mökki (summer cottage) … not alone.” Korpela ensures that Regatta stays open 365 days a year, even Christmas and Midsummer. This is important in Finland. For most Finns, a summer cottage is not just a place to vacation. It’s an architectural embodiment of physical and mental health, a place where you can go to take sauna and be in peace with nature and your inner world. Understanding traditional Finnish culture and history kind of necessitates spending time in a mökki. And understanding contemporary Helsinki and 21st century Finnish humor equally necessitates having coffee in Regatta.

As a history museum person, Regatta is totally compelling to me. While museums are reinventing themselves to stay meaningful and relatable, Regatta has lines out the door. It is genuinely popular, patently historic, and conspicuously scrappy in its marketing and approach. This scrappiness is a kind of genuine collective improvisation that, while designed, can’t be fabricated. I have to wonder, is Regatta’s popularity a manifestation of a paradigm shift taking place in museums — a suggestion that perhaps the most engaging curation of history and heritage is happening away from its authoritative interpretation? Or is history an aesthetic in and an of itself, a sensorial backdrop, enabling a different kind of learning? Regatta is NOT a museum (Korpela is a businessman). But it is a heritage space that has emerged over time with (arguably unintentional) core functions similar to that of a museum: it displays/preserves collections, shares Finnish culture, and provides meaningful public space for interaction and contemplation. Sure, we might be able to make the same case for a local bookstore. But there’s something about Regatta that brings me back to it as a place to reconsider these words we’re volleying. That texture counts for something, and now I’ve got new language for naming it.

Immersive. Multisensory. Vanishing Materialities. These are words that no doubt evoke the scrappiness of everyday life, especially at Cafe Regatta. Sitting in a crowded cafe or standing on a windy pier, it’s easy to see ‘real life’ as immersive and multisensory. (The materialities at Regatta aren’t vanished, they are layered. In the coffee stains and lingering smells, and compounded by every new visitor who comes into the place.) But in the context of museums, “immersive” and “multisensory” somehow become discrete tools. Tate’s Tony Guillian has this great quote: “Museums are somewhat antithetical. We take the object out of its context, then employ teams of people to add it back.” Part of what Tony’s talking about, I think, is that self-conscious addition of the ‘other’ senses into otherwise visually-curated exhibits. Because museums are typically designed for frontal interaction (our eyes are in the front, aren’t they?), we augment with constructed spaces like the tornado basement, to add back the ‘real life’ context. Of course, museums are as ‘real’ as bookstores and coffeeshops, with their own vanishing and layered materialities (the smell of old space + cleaning supplies, the texture of the carpet + humm of HVAC), but we minimize all that to meet the needs of conservation, education, and focused attention. I think that sensorial ‘white-washing’ is antithetical to the comfort (and maybe even creativity) we seek in museums. Personally, I want to see more of the real layers and vanishing materialities in my galleries. Even if it’s just a square of wall that shows the color of the previous exhibits’ paint jobs. Before we ‘add’ any new senses to the mix, we should consider how these additions might interact, counteract, or reify the existing sensorial domain and the ideas we want to get across. But we also need to allow museums to own their own sensorial scrappiness.

There’s sure a lot of pressure to being human in a museum: stand right — not too close! Don’t eat, bring a sweater, use your eyes, pay attention, keep your shoes on. How we respond to this multisensory and immersive environment prepares us to learn in certain ways. Our bodies pick up cues before (and in different ways than) our cognitive selves do; which is part of why museums turn to immersive and multisensory tools in the first place! They do more than just give visitors that ‘real world’ feel and context. They tap into ways of knowing/being/feeling that are sub-lingual and pre-cognitive. So when I walk into Regatta and I feel that texture, it’s my body both responding and learning. Luckily, the “lessons” I learn about Finnishness and ‘being welcome’ are not at odds with the ambient sensorial space. This is not always the case in museums, right?

I get it; we have to scrub down galleries to prepare them for another exhibit and new stories (complete with freshly vanishing materialities). But when we do, a richness is lost. A seriousness enters. Like the Rain Room, I can sense what is meticulously engineered — and it feels uncanny. From my last year of experimenting with senses in various kinds of museums, I’ve found a depth and diversity to the ways people want to experience museums. But one thing rests assured across the board: when greeted with an experience that mirrors their humanity, scrappiness and all, people recognize it on a bodily level, and they respond accordingly.

Signing off,

Lesley

Immersion, the Senses, and Embodied Experiences was originally published in A Series of Epistolary Romances on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

CODE│WORDS is an ongoing effort to gather and harness the discourse occurring among the museum technology community, the quantity and quality of which have grown and matured tremendously over the past decade. Conversations online and at conferences regularly tackle challenging questions regarding the identity of museums, their roles in society, their responsibilities to serve a global public, and the nature of collecting, preservation, education, scholarship, primary research, and ethics in a digital age. CODE│WORDS aims to explore ways to spread new ideas, and to engage the global community of museum professionals in exploring how we respond to challenges and opportunities digital technologies present.

Ultimately, we wish to explore how our ways of ‘being in the world’ are changing in response to digital technologies, and what this means for museums and the cultural heritage sector.

Our first eponymous experiment, which ran from May 2014 through September 2015, can be found on Medium in the CODE|WORDS publication.

The solicited essays are also available in book form from MuseumsEtc. Several of the essays were revised and updated for this edition. A portion of the proceeds generated from using the above link go to the Museum Computer Network Scholarship Fund.

A Series of Epistolary Romances

Epistolary: Relating to or denoting the writing of letters or literary works in the form of letters: an epistolary novel

Romance: a novel or other prose narrative depicting heroic or marvelous deeds, pageantry, romantic exploits, etc., usually in a historical or imaginary setting.

The second CODE | WORDS experiment is called “A Series of Epistolary Romances”. Like the first experiment, it is designed to generate and facilitate online discussion about topics of import to the international museum community. This experiment will endeavor to privilege the discursive, conversational element that the original project was unable to generate. “A Series of Epistolary Romances” is comprised of twelve pairs of authors who will correspond with each other over the course of at least a month about a particular topic of interest to the community.

These “letters” will be posted online on Medium, and be accessible to the public. Over the course of a month, the two authors will share their views about their topic, elaborate on each other’s ideas, critique, and hopefully bring each other (and the community of readers) to a fuller understanding of their views on the subject. We currently see there being a series of twelve pairs, with a new “romance” commencing every month.

As a culmination to each correspondence, an online face-to-face conversation will be held between a group of professionals and the authors, which the larger museum public will be invited to watch and submit questions for. At the end of the month, all the discourse will be aggregated and appended to the correspondence, so a record of the whole conversation is captured and presented in one place.

Each Romance will share a similar structure:

• An intro to issue, its relevance, and context setting by the editors. The author bios will be included as well.
• The series of letters
• Google Hangout On Air/Twitter chat/Facebook comment period
• Storify (or equivalent) of commentary appended to letters.

A Series of Epistolary Romances: CODE | WORDS 2.0 Instigators:

Suse Cairns, John Gordy, Daniel Meyers, Ed Rodley, Rachel Ropeik, Jenn Schmitt

Welcome to “A Series of Epistolary Romances” was originally published in A Series of Epistolary Romances on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Dutch artist Theo Jansen has spent the past 24 years creating wind-powered kinetic sculptures he calls Strandbeests. These walking constructs gather wind energy to propel themselves across the beaches of Scheveningen and can walk, store energy, and detect atmospheric changes now. Jansen works at an interesting intersection of art, engineering, and science and his artistic practice is deeply influenced by biological metaphors. He refers to his creations as “creatures” and the ubiquitous PVC wiring conduit he builds them from as the “protein” of Strandbeests. They become “fossils” once he stops working on them, and new beests inherit traits from older ones, “evolving” from earlier forms. Jansen thinks a great deal about survival.

The Web has provided him with a global audience for his site-specific creations. There are approximately 14,000 YouTube videos of Strandbeests in action. You can finds versions of his creations in robotics labs in Berkeley and Cambridge. You can order build-it-yourself kits from Japan, and now you can even order 3D printed Strandbeests directly from the artist. Success, right? For now. But, Jansen is looking even further ahead, to the future of his creations after his death. Ask Jansen about the future of Strandbeests and he will tell you that the survival of his creations beyond his lifetime is now possible through the “viral” propagation of digital files that contain the “DNA” of his creations. The Internet has brought him not only an audience, but also a new means of reproduction for his Strandbeests. This sharing of digital DNA might seem counterproductive to a working artist, since it will make it easier for others to copy his work, potentially reducing the value of “authentic” Strandbeests. For Jansen, the long-term benefits outweigh any potential short-term loss of control or revenue. Jansen’s interests lie in creating art and exploring ideas around the nature of life and living systems. Given finite time and resources, he chooses to prioritize the making and let the rest go and grow however it will.

Being promiscuous, but discriminating

Museums would do well to learn a thing or two from Jansen, and focus more on the creating and spreading the “digital DNA” of our shared cultural heritage and less on controlling access to those assets. This is a call to be both more promiscuous and more discriminating in what we share and how. I know that sounds contradictory, but bear with me.

Museums’ current survival strategy is not unlike those of creatures that have evolved on remote islands. We have gotten very good at passing on one model of “museum” from generation to generation. We may have developed elaborate plumage and interesting displays, but these mask the underlying sameness of the idea we pass on. As long as the larger ecosystem evolved slowly, museums could adapt and keep pace. The global internet has shattered that isolation for good, and in the new ecosystem our current reproductive specialization will not continue to serve us well. Insularity — the tendency to look inward, ignore the larger world and produce institutions that are increasingly self-referential, self-pleasing, and obscure to the billions of potential museumgoers — is a strategy for extinction.

For Jansen, encouraging others to build on his idea of Strandbeests is a reproductive and evolutionary strategy. His best hope for the survival of his creations beyond his lifetime is to let them loose for others to tinker with. Survival (and further evolution) lies in spread. Cynthia Coburn gave a fascinating talk at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning conference in 2014 on scale and spread. If you’re at all interested in dissemination of ideas, it’s worth reading. One thing that struck me from her talk and the paper from which it was distilled are that we tend to be imprecise about what we mean when we talk about “doing more!” Unpacking that, Coburn finds that there are “fundamentally different ways of conceptualizing the goals or outcomes of scale. We identify four: adoption, replication, adaptation, and reinvention.” For this essay, I’m most interested in the fourth outcome. This way of thinking about spread Coburn describes as, “the result of a process whereby local actors use ideas, practices, or tools as a jumping-off point for innovation.”

If we’ve learned anything about species evolution, it is that those species that are most inventive at the reproduction game are also most often the clear winners at natural selection. The same holds true for museums. Survival lies in the widest, most promiscuous spread of the cultural seeds we steward and create. Think of the Internet as a new landmass risen from the sea. It is rapidly being populated by all sorts of ideas and content. There is both room enough and need enough for museums to colonize that land.

Ideas having promiscuous sex

promiscuous — indiscriminate, without discrimination. From the Latin pro — “for” and miscere “to mix”

I realize I’m being a bit provocative in claiming “promiscuity” — with all its sexual connotations — as a virtue, but it’s apt. In its earliest sense, promiscuous meant “things mixed together.” In this sense, to be promiscuous is to be for mixing things up. For me, being promiscuous means spending more effort on creating and spreading, and less on trying to control access. A central part of the missions of successful museums in the present century will be, as Will Noel puts it, “to put the data in places where people can find it — making the data, as it were, promiscuous.”

Trade in ideas is possibly the distinguishing variable that separates humans from every other species. Evidence for trade amongst humans is ten times older than the earliest evidence of farming. Matt Ridley, the author of The Rational Optimist, gave a great TED talk in 2010 where he claims that the engine of human progress and prosperity has always been, and continues to be, “ideas having sex with each other.” The ability to share ideas, combine them, and recombine them in new ways has been humanity’s key to survival and evolution. Sharing, not technology, has been the key. That’s an important point to keep in mind. Technofetishists (many of them well-financed) would have us believe that new technologies will solve all humanity’s woes. Early humans used the same lithic technologies, unchanged, for almost a million years: 30,000 generations of making and using the same tools for the same jobs. We’re no longer using Acheulean hand axes, because humans developed the ability to trade things and concepts, and that has led to where we are now. For museums, the situation is analogous in many ways to the Paleolithic. Continued evolution will require us to think differently, develop new tools, and most importantly, trade our goods as widely as possible.

Who‘s out there?

It may seem like a step into the unknown, but museums are not alone in exploring this territory. It’s all well and good to talk about promiscuous sharing, but a marketplace of ideas requires somebody else to be there. Who is the audience for the assets museums might share? They are legion.

Promiscuity connects museums to maker communities. Community interaction and knowledge sharing are often mediated through networked technologies, with websites and social media tools forming the basis of knowledge repositories and a central channel for information sharing and exchange of ideas, and focused through social meetings in shared spaces such as hackspaces.

This latest eruption of interest in self-guided learning and doing has a long, distinguished lineage. Computer hobbyists, ham radio enthusiasts, and even the model railroad enthusiasts at the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, who gave us the modern meaning of “hacking” could claim to be “makers.” They were all communities of interest who came together to explore their passions and help each other out. The difference this time is the spread that the Internet makes possible. The 2012 Bay Area Maker Faire drew a crowd of 120,000 attendees over a weekend. “Making” with a capital M is now a firmly established subculture, and part of a growing economic sector.

Promiscuity allows museums to be participatory culture advocates. Henry Jenkins may have coined the term “participatory culture” in 2005, but the idea of a world where individuals are producers of culture, instead of just passive consumers, has been around a long time. I’ve got a dog-eared paper that I’ve toted around for years with a quote from the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihályi which reads, “Creating culture is always more rewarding than consuming it.” As someone who’s worked the cultural/creative sector my whole life, I know the truth of this statement. What might the world look like if we not only preserved and exhibited examples of human creative expression but also more actively encouraged that creative impulse in everyone we serve?

This kind of digital promiscuity also nicely aligns museums with the Open Culture movement. “Open” is already on track to supplant “participatory” as buzzword of the year, with good reason. The proliferation of groups supporting and encouraging openness in the cultural/creative sector is impressive. Wikimedia, Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, free software advocates, open-source software advocates: the list gets longer all the time.

The virtues of promiscuity

So, if all of these factors are agitating for openness, transparency, and agency, how do we make the business case for promiscuity? Some of the virtues of promiscuity include:

The promiscuous spread of digital assets is a key factor in delivering on museums’ missions to educate, inform, stimulate, and enrich the lives of the people of the planet we live on. Merete Sanderhoff, in the excellent Sharing is Caring lays it out clearly,

“Digital resources should be set free to form commons — a cultural quarry where users across the world can seek out and find building blaocks for their own personal learning.”

The more we sow these seeds of culture and the more effective we are at seeing those seeds take root, the more likely museums are to see cultural ideas persevere in the constantly-changing world.

Promiscuity is one way to demolish the perception of exclusivity that has dogged museums for longer than I’ve been around. I realize that this virtue is by far the most painful, because it would force us as memory institutions to lay bare lots of things of things we’d rather not have to deal with: legacies of imperialism and colonialism, tensions between indigenous peoples and more recent arrivals. The history of the relations between Native Americans and museums is not the most cordial, at least in part because the perception that some museums are probably hiding things they don’t want tribes to know about is almost impossible to counter. Promiscuity offers a way to end that particular debate.

The “global village” the Internet has created is real, and now it is possible for a museum of any size to have global reach, provided they have anything to share. As Michael Edson pointed out in his introduction to Sharing is Caring, 34% of humanity is now reachable online. That’s 2.4 billion people who might be interested in your content.

One of the most interesting and infuriating changes in attitude that the Web has wrought is the expectation of finding everything. Not being visible online now is the equivalent of not existing. Promiscuous sharing of digital assets is a way for your audience to know you exist. As Will Noel says,

“(P)eople go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. Digitization is a way to address that issue, in a way that with medieval manuscripts, it simply wasn’t possible before. People go to museums because they go and see what they already know, so you’ve got to make your collections known. Frankly, you can write about it, but the best thing you can do is to put out free images of it. This is not something you do out of generosity, this is something you do because it makes branding sense, and it even makes business sense.”

“To be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free.” — Will Noel

Discriminating?

discriminating — able to note or observe a difference; distinguish accurately: to discriminate between things. From the Latin discernere, from dis- ‘apart’ + cernere ‘to separate’.’

So promiscuity has value to museums. Being successfully promiscuous, though, requires some fine discrimination of the sort that museums have not traditionally been good at.

It’s not an either/or proposition

The value of museums doesn’t change from being about physical things to being about digital things. It expands from the physical to include spreading digital information about those assets. When I was a newly-minted museum professional, I distinctly recall seeing the slogan for the 1989 ICOM conference: “Museums: Generators of Culture” and thinking simultaneously, “Yes!” and “Yeah. In your dreams!” What was unthinkable in 1989 seems perfectly reasonable 25 years later. The Internet allows museums to be promiscuous on a global scale, seed a global cultural commons with the highest-quality building blocks from across the entirety of human endeavor, and finally be able to deliver on that 1989 aspiration. As Michael Edson pointed out in “Dark Matter”, the first CODE | WORDS essay, “it’s tremendously exciting to think about what we can accomplish if we begin to work with true conviction in the areas of the Internet that are less familiar to us and more familiar to our visitors.” It’s mission creep of an unfathomable scale, with all the ramifications that entails. The question museums have to ask are, “Is it worth it for us?” and if so, “How do we proceed?”

It requires us to disambiguate the digital from the physical

Huh? Disambiguating the digital from the physical (to steal yet another phrase from Koven Smith) is essential to being able to see the issue clearly. In his MuseumNext 2014 keynote and subsequent blogposts, Smith warns against the peril of the skeuomorphic view of digital museum assets and the challenges of being authentically digital. Mapping real-world strategies and structures onto the digital realm is not a recipe for success.

Skeuomorphism has uses. I had the privilege of working on a couple of projects with major film studios during my career, and one of the tenets of science fiction filmmaking friends at Industrial Light and Magic shared with me was that to be successful as a film experience, sci-fi had to be backwards-looking. Everything new and interesting had to have some real-world analogue it referenced, so you, the audience, could understand what it was without having to be told. Thus, spaceships that move like airplanes, weapons that function like swords and firearms, and aliens that act like humans. As a storytelling tool, it’s great. As a business strategy…

Creating digital analogues of our existing museums is a straitjacket that will not serve us well going forward. Making a virtual museum (in addition to sounding hopelessly 90s), regardless of the technology underlying it, fails to take into account the reality of how people consume digital content. They don’t go to museum websites. Jon Voss of HistoryPin made the statement that you have to meet people where they are, not where you wish they were. Museum websites, the traditional place for museums’ online presence, are not those places, so plowing resources into making bigger, swankier ones is a waste of resources that might be deployed in ways that actually reach a global audience.

It’s not about adding screens

Just as dragging the physcial into the digital is unhelpful, so is carelessly layering the digital on the physical. David Starkey, in an article in The Guardian called “Museum of the Year 2014: what makes a winner?” , extolls the virtues of the Mary Rose Museum for eschewing digital interpretation in the museum and not “whoring after strange gods in museums with every sort of technological device.” And he’s got a point, to a point. There are plenty of examples of digital technologies being employed to fix perceived problems with museums’ physical operations that would’ve benefited from some additional discrimination in the scoping phase.

The collections metadata ≠ the collection

Digital information about collections is not the same as the physical objects in that collection. Here is where I think museums need to be much more discriminating about what they limit access to in the name of preservation, and adapt a mindset and workflows that treats digital assets as part of the cultural commons to be birthed and shared, unless there’s a compelling reason not to. Giving away a digital image of a specimen or art object is not the same as giving away the object. As Seb Chan wrote in announcing the Cooper-Hewitt’s upload of their entire collections database to the code sharing site GitHub,

“Philosophically, too, the public release of collection metadata asserts, clearly, that such metadata is the raw material on which interpretation through exhibitions, catalogues, public programmes, and experiences are built. On its own, unrefined, it is of minimal ‘value’ except as a tool for discovery. It also helps remind us that collection metadata is not the collection itself (emphasis in original).”

It’s not about “putting the collection online”

Let’s be clear that what I’m talking about is not “Let’s put the collection online” by making a database with a web interface. Access is important, but a web portal is an oracular cave, dark and mysterious. You go into the dark place, ask your question, and the Sibyl answers. Hopefully, it makes sense. Sometimes, it’s a very detailed answer, sometimes not. But the seeker never has the ability to appreciate the collection as a whole, or to interrogate it in any ways other than those chosen by the architects of the CMS and the portal. And they’re black holes to indexers. Google, Yahoo! and Baidu have no way of knowing what lies beyond your search box, and in a world where findability equals existence, this is death. Actually it’s worse, it’s annihilation — being made into nothing. Not a great strategy for proving relevance.

“We have to look out for the museum’s reputation” is one reason I’ve heard repeatedly for restricting access to assets, be they images or a dataset. The argument goes something like this: by making people ask for access, and charging them for the costs the institution incurs to produce this digital asset, museums discourage casual misuse of these assets by outside parties. This gatekeeping is necessary, and for the privileged few (mainly art) museums with famous collections, this provides a revenue stream that often pays the salaries of those gatekeepers. So, my theoretical position about promiscuity suddenly turns into people’s jobs and livelihoods, which is where things get messy. But this kind of access control is anathema to both the Enlightenment ideals that underlie the museum enterprise and the nascent global culture we could become an indispensable part of.

A nice thing about selling access is that it’s quantifiable. You can create reports about how much money licensing brought in, how many requests were processed and fulfilled, and so on. The more promiscuously one shares, the harder it gets to measure. Harder, but not impossible. Image spread can be tracked, download statistics and pageviews can tell you something, and as more museums get more promiscuous, I’m sure other metrics will be developed to help us quantify the success of our efforts.

But just because something is amenable to measurement doesn’t make it the best thing to measure. On a larger scale there is, to me, a certain logic in promiscuously sharing as the best way to create the most opportunities for the kinds of epiphanies museums can generate. As Rob Stein asked at the Museum Computer Network conference in 2011, “How do we measure for epiphany?” If museums are in the business of inspiring, even changing people, then Stein’s call to track and measure alumni creativity in “Museums… So What?” becomes even more important. David Gerrard, Ann O’Brien, and Thomas Jackson from Loughborough University in the UK proposed a way to study this at the Museums and the Web 2014 conference. Their “Epiphany Project: Discovering the Intrinsic Value of Museums by Analysing Social Media” represents just one approach to measuring what matters.

And if we don’t? Merete Sanderhoff lists three problems this inability to be promiscuous creates:

1. By putting up impediments museums are pushing users away from authoritative sources of information.
2. We are missing out on the the opportunity to become hubs for people. The social gravity that museums could generate is largely unrealized.
3. By not using these new tools that are at our disposal, museums undermine their own raisons d’être.

Kristin Lyng of the Meteorological Institute of Norway writes, “Freeing data can be compared to letting your child go out and play in the playground. You’re letting go of control, but you know that it’s best for your child to be able to play out in the open.” Or, as a participant said in Kristin Kelly’s 2013 Mellon Foundation report on image sharing, “We have lost almost all control, and this has been vital to our success.”

Who’s reaping the rewards of promiscuity?

Museums releasing large sets of images

Kelly’s Mellon report surveyed 11 major museum image sharing projects. One of the key findings was that for all these museums, the decision in the end was a mission-driven decision. In this day and age of funding challenges, pressures to be more business-like, and increased competition, it’s heartening to see beginnings of a groundswell. The common trope of “Museum X announces release of ___,000 images from its collection for public use!” is hardly noteworthy anymore, yet continues to generate both public interest and media attention.

Museums releasing collections datasets

The Powerhouse did it in 2009, followed by Cooper-Hewitt in 2012 and then the Tate later that year. Read the announcements of each, they’re interesting justifications of promiscuously sharing. What’s really interesting, though, are the reuses of these datasets, because they point at something important. By giving people access to the collection, you give them the ability to ask questions of the museums’ work that we inside these museums might never think to ask. Florian Kräutli’s visualization of Tate’s collecting history was not only a new way to look at Tate, but also uncovered flaws in how Tate’s collection data were organized (40,000+ works by J.M.W. Turner?) that a collections manager or information architect could overlook or rationalize. Putting it out in public both surfaced the issue and provided impetus for addressing it. Mia Ridge’s attempts to explore Cooper-Hewitt’s collections data uncovered painful truths about the messiness we tolerate in our data. Like a bedroom we never let anyone see, collections metadata are all too often kind of a mess.

The act of placing them out in the wild, to be seen and used, opens up our datasets for people to ask questions of them we’ve never thought of. John Russick wrote in “A Place for Everything”, the ability to interrogate the Chicago History Museum (CHM) collection dataset might allow people to ask questions not just about the objects in the collection, but the collection as a whole, and by extension, the museum itself. And what they might find might not please us,

“CHM’s collection is supposed to be a tool for understanding the city, but perhaps it is primarily a tool for understanding the museum. Our idiosyncratic collecting history would likely be revealed as racist, sexist, and driven by the ideals and lifestyles of the privileged class. But what if we shared that map with everyone? What if the entire city could see what is and what is not in the museum? What if they could fill in the missing parts? Could we both confront our nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of inclusion and representation and begin to rectify the shortcomings of that limited vision?”

The Rijksmuseum

The 800-pound gorilla of promiscuous sharing is the Rijksmuseum’s Rijksstudio platform, a one-stop shop for image asset use and reuse. As part of the massive digital effort that led to the Rijkstudio, the museum also developed and released and API to their collections information that has scores of developer subscribers. Taco Dibbits, the director of collections at the Rijksmuseum, has said that letting the public take control of the museum’s images has been crucial to encouraging people, and encouraged them to explore the collection more deeply than they might in the museum’s galleries. “The action of actually working with an image, clipping it out and paying attention to the very small details makes you remember it.” He also made considerable waves in the cultural sector when he said in response to a question asking what if someone did something as inappropriate as put a Rijksmuseum Vermeer on toilet paper. “If they want to have a Vermeer on their toilet paper, I’d rather have a very high-quality image of Vermeer on toilet paper than a very bad reproduction.” How times have changed.

Promiscuous ≠ easy

Being promiscuous will not be easy for the sector. It will require approaching our work in new ways, taking on a greater responsibility, and counting our digital audiences as unique and different from our physical ones. Resources will need to be applied and reapplied to deliver these assets to the commons we could become integral to. I think it’s worth it. Given finite time and resources, promiscuous sharing is a way of finally delivering on the ambitions of those Enlightenment thinkers who dreamed of universal knowledge diffusion. There’s already an audience out there, one potentially numbering in the billions, who might use the content we set free. The technologies exist to make it possible for any museum to stake out a place in the commons. And museums are already beginning to tentatively step out into this new territory.

UPDATE 7/8/14: Many, many typos were corrected through the kind, ruthless editing of Susan Timberlake (@STimberlakeMuse on Twitter) at the MIT Museum.

References

Prologue

Theo Jansen — Strandbeest. http://www.strandbeest.com

YouTube videos of Strandbeest http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=strandbeest

Gakken Strandbeest kit http://otonanokagaku.net/english/magazine/vol30/index.html

3D printed Strandbeests for purchase http://www.shapeways.com/shops/theojansen

Being promiscuous, but discriminating

Cynthia E. Coburn, Amy K. Catterson, Jenni Higgs, Katie Mertz, and Richard Morel, “Spread and Scale in the Digital Age: A Memo to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation” 2013

Ideas having promiscuous sex

TEDBlog The wide open future of the art museum: Q&A with William Noel http://blog.ted.com/2012/05/29/the-wide-open-future-of-the-art-museum-qa-with-william-noel/

Matt Ridley, TED.com “When Ideas Have Sex” http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex

Who‘s out there?

The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html

The 2012 Bay Area Maker Faire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_Faire

Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/NMLWhitePaper.pdf

Wikimedia http://www.wikimedia.org

Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org

The Open Knowledge Foundation https://okfn.org

The virtues of promiscuity

Merete Sanderhoff (ed) “Sharing is Caring: Openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector” http://www.smk.dk/en/explore-the-art/free-download-of-artworks/sharing-is-caring/

Discriminating?

Michael Edson “Dark Matter” https://medium.com/@mpedson/a6c7430d84d1

Koven Smith, MuseumNext 2014 keynote “Becoming Authentically Digital” http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/1446

– “The Museum as Skeumorph” http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/1452

David Starkey “Museum of the Year 2014: what makes a winner?” The Guardian, 4 July 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jul/04/museum-year-what-makes-winner

Seb Chan, Cooper Hewitt Labs, “Releasing the collection on GitHub” http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/releasing-collection-github/

Rob Stein, “Museums… So What?” https://medium.com/code-words-technology-and-theory-in-the-museum/museums-so-what-7b4594e72283

David Gerrard, Ann O’Brien, and Thomas Jackson, “Epiphany Project: Discovering the Intrinsic Value of Museums by Analysing Social Media” http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/the-epiphany-project-discovering-the-intrinsic-value-of-museums-by-analysing-social-media/

Kristin Kelly “Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access (A study of 11 museums)” http://msc.mellon.org/research-reports/Open%20Access%20Report%2004%2025%2013-Final.pdf/view

Who’s reaping the rewards of promiscuity?

The Powerhouse Museum’s collection dataset http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/download.php

The Cooper-Hewitt’s collections dataset http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/releasing-collection-github/

The Tate’s collections dataset http://www.tate.org.uk/about/our-work/digital/collection-data

Florian Kräutli’s visualization of Tate’s collecting history http://research.kraeutli.com/index.php/2013/11/the-tate-collection-on-github/

Mia Ridge’s attempts to explore Cooper-Hewitt’s collections http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/exploring-shape-collections-draft/

John Russick, “A Place for Everything” https://medium.com/code-words-technology-and-theory-in-the-museum/a-place-for-everything-6bb881c2cbe3

Rijksmuseum’s Rijksstudio platform https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

Taco Dibbits, quoted in Nina Segal, “Masterworks for One and All” The New York Times, May 28, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/arts/design/museums-mull-public-use-of-online-art-images.html

Rijksmuseum’s collections API paper from Museums and the Web 2012 http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2012/programs/the_rijksmuseum_api.html

The Virtues of Promiscuity was originally published in CODE | WORDS: Technology and Theory in the Museum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.