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Το περιεχόμενο παρέχεται από το Ian Elsner. Όλο το περιεχόμενο podcast, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των επεισοδίων, των γραφικών και των περιγραφών podcast, μεταφορτώνεται και παρέχεται απευθείας από τον Ian Elsner ή τον συνεργάτη της πλατφόρμας podcast. Εάν πιστεύετε ότι κάποιος χρησιμοποιεί το έργο σας που προστατεύεται από πνευματικά δικαιώματα χωρίς την άδειά σας, μπορείτε να ακολουθήσετε τη διαδικασία που περιγράφεται εδώ https://el.player.fm/legal.
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Museum Archipelago
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Το περιεχόμενο παρέχεται από το Ian Elsner. Όλο το περιεχόμενο podcast, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των επεισοδίων, των γραφικών και των περιγραφών podcast, μεταφορτώνεται και παρέχεται απευθείας από τον Ian Elsner ή τον συνεργάτη της πλατφόρμας podcast. Εάν πιστεύετε ότι κάποιος χρησιμοποιεί το έργο σας που προστατεύεται από πνευματικά δικαιώματα χωρίς την άδειά σας, μπορείτε να ακολουθήσετε τη διαδικασία που περιγράφεται εδώ https://el.player.fm/legal.
A tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral. Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.
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108 επεισόδια
Σήμανση όλων ότι έχουν ή δεν έχουν αναπαραχθεί ...
Manage series 2494498
Το περιεχόμενο παρέχεται από το Ian Elsner. Όλο το περιεχόμενο podcast, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των επεισοδίων, των γραφικών και των περιγραφών podcast, μεταφορτώνεται και παρέχεται απευθείας από τον Ian Elsner ή τον συνεργάτη της πλατφόρμας podcast. Εάν πιστεύετε ότι κάποιος χρησιμοποιεί το έργο σας που προστατεύεται από πνευματικά δικαιώματα χωρίς την άδειά σας, μπορείτε να ακολουθήσετε τη διαδικασία που περιγράφεται εδώ https://el.player.fm/legal.
A tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral. Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.
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108 επεισόδια
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×The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant. The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence. The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences. Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Post-War Germany and the GDR's Vision 00:59 The Planned City of Eisenhüttenstadt 3:00 Andrea Wieloch 03:15 The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life 03:56 Daily Life in the GDR 07:35 GDR History in modern Germany 14:43 Future Plans for the Museum 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️ Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨ A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsener. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. After World War II, all of Germany was in ruins. Almost nothing was left standing after 12 years of Nazi rule and 6 years of war. Mass migration, hunger, and homelessness defined the immediate post-war period as millions of displaced people sought to rebuild their lives among the rubble. For the newly formed German Democratic Republic or GDR, the chance to start over – and demonstrate the utopia of the socialist system – took on a great importance. The East German government saw urban planning as a way to both solve the housing crisis and showcase socialist ideals through modern, centrally planned cities built from scratch. I visited one of these planned cities about an hour and a half east of Berlin. Andrea Wieloch: Where we are sitting now was basically forest 75 years ago, and then they decided to plant a steel factory and a city around it. It was back in the days where there was really everything destroyed by war. An island of a real utopia with nice housing and facilities for everyone. So people from all over GDR came here and when the city was first founded, it was called Stalinstadt. So, “city of Stalin”. Stalinstadt, which started being built in 1951, is now called Eisenhüttenstadt, which literally means Iron Hat City for the steel plant. Planning and building a new city and a steel factory in a place that was just a forest during the Nazi regime was a sharp break with the past – the planned city reminds me of parts of Bulgarian cities also built in the socialist times, and unlike most places I’ve visited in Germany, I’m not immediately on the lookout for dark signs of the Nazi past. I can imagine the relief of this place for the first people who moved here. Maybe, for a moment, it did feel like utopia. Of course, this utopia didn't actually happen, no utopia has. But the GDR lasted about 40 years and those 40 years covered a lot of daily life. I'm here to visit a museum that puts the tension of utopia right in the name: the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. Andrea Wieloch: I do like the space in between utopia and daily life. That is my focus, that tension or ambivalence. And I'm frankly not really interested in utopia, I think, because it's a mind fabricated thing and I do like the blood and flesh kind of reality. This is Andrea Wieloch, director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. Andrea Wieloch: Hello, my name is Andrea Wieloch. I am a German museum professional and I am the director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. The museum – a kind of documentation center of everyday life in the GDR – is built inside a former kindergarten which opened in 1953. The central staircase still features the original, very colorful, stained glass windows by Socialist Realist artist Walter Womacka depicting children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. Wieloch says that a big part of the collection comes from a public announcement for people to bring in objects that they wanted to save. Today the collection has 170,000 objects of everyday life and of every aspect of GDR life. The permanent exhibition, which opened in 2012, called Everyday Life: GDR, uses these objects to give the visitor an introduction to politics, society and everyday life in the country. Right inside the entrance to the museum, under the stained glass kindergarten scene, is one of these objects: a rusty TV antenna. Andrea Wieloch: The antenna you see in the front is a really great example for a life hack, basically, because someone did it himself. People living in Eisenhüttenstadt could fashion an antenna to get western television broadcasts in part because of their proximity to West Berlin and favorable terrain. It started as something you could do if you were brave enough to do something forbidden, but by the 70s, it became a special privilege. Andrea Wieloch: One privilege you would get here but only starting in the late 70s was getting West TV and radio, which was forbidden. But they needed workers, so that was a privilege here, not in other parts of the country. Amazing. Well, it also illustrates, so before it was a privilege, it was a hack. And I feel, feel like that is the bridge between utopia and daily life. It's because , in a true utopia, there would be nothing to hack because everything is already perfect. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah and that's a two-way street. You go from hacking to utopia again, because of course in the 40 years that the GDR was existing, there were really waves. And you've seen upstairs the new exhibition we are putting on with plastic furniture, that was a wave of utopia again, in order to also make people not jealously look at the West, but really a propaganda to really tell we are able here, we are future, we can send a man to the moon as well, kind of, you know. The privileges associated with working in the Steel Factory is an example of the centrality of work in the way this utopia was structured. Andrea Wieloch: All aspects of life in the socialist society were organized around work. Which means your housing was organized around work. The way you made holidays, where you would put your children to kindergarten or school, how you would spend your free time. There were club houses all over the city. There were artists coming into the factories and the worker was very well taken care of in the socialist society. And here in that city, it meant you had a beautiful flat, you had all the facilities that would really enable you to be a good worker, be at work and not think of anything else. Wieloch was born in 1983 in the GDR, and so has a better memory of the period after 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR dissolved, and the process of German reunification began. Andrea Wieloch: I was six years when the Wall came down and I was living with my family at the Polish border, so really far away from what was happening. And I remember my parents sitting in front of the TV and relatives coming in and that it was something special, I remember that. But besides that, I'm more shaped by the reality of the 90s, mass unemployment and lots of friends leaving the area with their families in order to look for better places and a more prosperous life. The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life, and the way it presents the history of the GDR, is unique in Germany. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think we are talking about a very young history. And it's – I hope I get the word right – it's a contested history. It's one that is not set yet. Where we know no history is set, but as soon as people who can talk about the history aren't there anymore, we rely on what we by then have agreed upon. And there are very different ways in which the history of GDR got told within the last, let's say, 30 years. Wieloch says that she’d classify four types of museums that interpret the history of the GDR in modern Germany. The first is the entertaining museum, places like the slick GDR Museum in Berlin which caters to international tourists and highlights the most daring escape stories. Then there’s the museums, mostly founded by the government, which talk mostly about GDR's dictatorship and the oppression. The third is so-called “wild” or “amature” museums, where individual people, often not tied to any public institution, just collect the things they love and, of course, entangle their own memory into their collections. Andrea Wieloch: And the fourth place kind of is our museum, which to look into all this life and find the ordinary and the extraordinary there, but also ask about structures and about various perspectives. And that way we attract not only visitors from all around the world. We also attract the neighbors, the schools, scientists, artists. Usually we attract people who are who like to read in between lines. All of them are getting into a really nuanced, interesting dialogue and it's always happening. And for me, the most exciting is, and then I really step back and just listen, when people who have experienced GDR talk to each other and they kind of compare their memories and they are not fixed with it. They are very open and flexible and they really get into questioning really what happened there, and did we interpret it right, or was it state ideology, and that's really awesome to see. I think it's just a great practice for life. In my discussions with Wieloch, she underscored her feeling that many people from former West Germany haven’t taken the time to understand the experience of growing up in the East – and that museums like the GDR Museum in Berlin, while entertaining, aren’t helping. Andrea Wieloch: We are very accepted by people who experienced the GDR because there's always this discussion, is that a western view on eastern history or is that something more outweighed? I don't know if that's the real – balanced. Is it more balanced? And, yeah, that's what you find here. Yeah. A lively discussion. I noticed this lively discussion while I toured the museum. Groups of older people telling younger members of their family that the coffee thermoses were exactly the same ones in their kitchen or the ubiquity of one brand of baby powder. Because material culture under the GDR was much more narrow than it is today, it is likely that your uncle had the exact same motorcycle, or your dad had the exact same portable radio on display. I toured with my mom, who was raised in socialist Bulgaria, and she noted the similarities in the outfits of the “young pioneer” uniforms she used to wear and the graphic design of propaganda posters. Andrea Wieloch: I want to create a space that raises questions. That's also a safe enough space for you to take the creative risk and maybe think twice and think if I just correlate your own memory and knowledge with it and and then get into a conversation. That's the aim that we have here. Therefore, we invite different people and in groups with their own practices and questions in order to really enrich the conversation, because it's complicated and we like it that way. You know, it's it's ambivalence. Ian (in room) yeah. And it's also noticeably different from the way that the. media in the GDR operated because it's complicated was not the message. The message was actually it's simple and these are the reasons and if you are a pioneer and that means that you enjoy sport and you love to be clean and you love your parents and you love the workers and there is no, there's no ambiguity in there. And I think it's also what you've demonstrated is that you can also have that same kind of simplicity on the other side of the wall. And so creating a space where you say it's complicated is somewhat radical in itself. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think it is. And we all struggle with being okay with all the ambivalences and with not knowing the right or wrong answer. And it would be a mistake to paint the history here too sweet now, just because we don't concentrate on the repressive aspects. But I think it's for those people who experience GDR. It was their life. Just imagine someone comes to you and tells you the way you lived, you loved, you raised your children, you worked, you looked at everything is wrong. I think it's as damaging as to tell someone you're always right with things. The museum seems so effective at addressing the audience of people who are familiar with the GDR, that it makes me wonder how the museum approaches today’s young people who never lived through it. Andrea Wieloch: Yeah. You're putting the finger right into our most vulnerable spot because it's mostly like that. A family comes in of different generations and then one teaches the other. That's how it works in the moment. But that is a big thing. But actually the new generation is very interested. So especially also foreigners, there are less clichés or less prejudice that way and big openness. So yeah, I have the feeling the interest is rather rising because people who lived here for a long time, they also want to see something new and not always circle around themselves. There are plans for a permanent exhibition, with a target open date of 2029. The revamp would use some of the adjacent buildings as a campus with more room for programs and storage. Andrea Wieloch: And we want to, first of all, give you a closer look into to our storage. And then we would like to really take all those questions and practices that all our cooperation partners brought here and discuss them with the audience to have different displays for parts of our collection that show the collection and show you already what is that material world that we are collecting in the museum world, we are really in the peripheral area. So Berlin is close enough for us to have visitors from a metropolitan audience too. But it is also too far away to be gaining from the prosperous big city. So we are in a city that was ahead a 56,000 inhabitants now has 24,000 inhabitants. 40% of them are over 65. And we have a wonderful task to address a metropolitan or even international audience, and then also be relevant for the community we have here. So you asked me for children, I can tell you our program for dementia. So we're working with the school that educates people in the care sector. And they have 600 students. And with them we developed a program with all day, everyday objects and from the GDR. And they bring them either to the care homes or people from care homes come here. And we do a lot of programming around that target group. I think that's really my focus. The museum as a set of cultural techniques, a toolbox to know the world, to get a hold of the world, and to also find a consciousness around those tools that you're using. So it's still a long way to go and a lot of money to collect. But yeah, that's what we do right now. The everyday experience of the person plotting their daring escape was different from the person just trying to get by and they both were different from the worker content to set up a better antenna to enjoy western TV shows. But in the GDR at least, they may have all been drinking out of the same type of coffee thermos. And you can see it at the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology. While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust. Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Auction of the U.S. Constitution 00:43 Constitution DAO 01:36 The Role of Governance Tokens 02:02 Nik Honeysett 02:45 Balboa Park Online Collaborative 04:29 Museums and Crypto 05:24 Blockchain and Provenance 07:40 Smart Contracts and Museum Governance 09:56 The Outcome of the Auction 11:58 Museums as Trustworthy 14:00 Museum Archipelago Ep. 39. Hans Sloane And The Origins Of The British Museum With James Delbourgo 16:41 Conclusion and Future of Crypto in Museums 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️ Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨ A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 107. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript In November 2021 an extremely rare, first printing of the U.S. Constitution was available to buy at auction. While the item was special – only 13 copies existed according to the auction house – the bidders were the usual assortment of wealthy individuals. Auctioneer: “And now let's begin the auction. Lot 1787. The United States Constitution. We’ll start the bidding here at 10 million dollars. 11 million.12 million ” Except for one. Among the individuals trying to buy the Constitution was not an individual at all. It was a new kind of organization – a decentralized autonomous organization better known as a DAO. This organization, ConstitutionDAO, had formed just a few weeks earlier for this exact purpose – to buy the Constitution. I remember the memes – backers of the project posted images of Nicolas Cage in 2004’s National Treasure, drawing parallels between his character’s fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and this real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution. In the weeks leading up to the auction, thousands of people contributed money to ConstitutionDAO using the cryptocurrency Ether. That money funded the bid – the amount ConstitutionDAO could pay to try to acquire the constitution. What the contributors were actually buying was a so-called governance token: governance rights, the ability to vote on what to do with the Constitution, specifically, which museum to send it to, and what text would be displayed next to the document in the gallery. Nik Honeysett: The ConstitutionDAO is an interesting example of the public claiming back ownership of a document that, you know, really should be owned by the public. And I think, you know, that's the challenge for museums. This Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, California. Nik Honeysett: Hello, my name is Nick Honeysett. I'm CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, known as BPOC. We are a nonprofit, technology and strategy company located in San Diego's Balboa Park, which is a cultural park of about 30 institutions. And we provide a range of services on a shared service model. And we also work with museums across the U. S. and outside the U.S. largely providing digital strategy, to help organizations figure out what they should be trying to figure out as we enter a more prevalent digital world. The genesis of BPOC came in the early 2000s. Because there’s such a high density of museum institutions in San Diego’s Balboa Park, museums realized they could pool their resources and they wouldn't need to start from scratch to build each individual institution’s technology stack, Nik Honeysett: It's a very dense cultural environment. Some of the institutions are actually physically in the same building. There has to be an opportunity for us to do this collaboratively. To create a team of IT professionals that would provide IT support. So essentially a kind of separate IT service department that would serve the institutions. That they would pay for those services. So you were gaining the economy of scale. And so we did a lot of, in the early days, a lot of digitization, kind of collaborative digitization projects. We have a couple of collaborative infrastructure applications like digital asset management. And really the benefit is there's an altruistic need. So the larger institutions are offsetting the costs for some things for the smaller institutions. And we do serve some volunteer-only institutions and they have access to the same level of IT service and support that the larger ones do. While BPOC’s shared service model pools resources from lots of different museums, it still operates as a normal organization with a board of directors and a CEO making decisions and some sort of legal counsel and a sustained collaborative relationship with museums. The focus is technology, but the methods are more traditional. ConstitutionDAO, by contrast, was a spontaneous, decentralized effort to acquire a historical document that probably wouldn’t have been possible without crypto technology. I’ve been working on this episode about crypto in museums for years: I recorded this interview with Honeysett in March of 2022, two and a half years ago. Most museum people I know are reluctant to talk about crypto for various reasons: concerns about the massive energy use of some blockchains, how from the outside, it looks like speculative hype cycle, and – maybe most importantly – there’s a wide cultural gap between the centralization of museum power and the decentralized ideals of blockchain culture. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t sound too appealing if your job is to make sure the ancient vases don’t shatter. But I will argue that museums and crypto have some interesting overlaps. Museums and crypto both address the same fundamental issue: trust, and they seek to answer the same question: what happened? Blockchains keep an unchangeable record of what happened, stored not in a warehouse or a datacenter, but distributed without a point of control or a single point of failure. The first and most famous use for these blockchains is to power cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they can do a lot of things, like, for example, provenance. Provenance is the record of ownership and history of an item, tracking where it has been and who has owned it over time. Right now institutions like museums and auction houses handle provenance but maybe there are better ways. Nik Honeysett: Provenance is extremely important in the museum world and I think provenance seems to be the ideal application for blockchain. Here is the irrefutable, definitive, provenance of this work. And we saw a huge issue with provenance, which is the Nazi era provenance issue, you know, when a lot of works of art disappeared from the record because they were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. And there's been a lot of research to reestablish the true provenance of works of art and repatriate them, in certain circumstances. Collections held in the public trust need to be presented to the public. If you look at what really engages audiences, there are some emerging strategies that think about collection objects, as a sequence of experiences. The first experience is it was created. A painting was painted. The second experience is maybe shown in a show. The third is that it was sold to its first owner. And then it was transported and then it was acquired by a museum or whatever it is. So you have these sequences of experiences and the painting interacting with a whole set of things, again, all which happened in a particular sequence. Of course, somebody still has to write these experiences onto the blockchain as they happen and museums might be well positioned to do this. But if a future fascist regime steals an object, they would never be able to delete or destroy the record of who previously owned the object the way they can destroy a museum or its records. We have one more crypto concept to dive into before we can get back to the story of ConstitutionDAO. When ConstitutionDAO pooled resources, the money raised to buy a U.S. Constitution, the idea was to govern the organization using a set of smart contracts, code that runs on a blockchain. And that's why it's different from asking a whole bunch of people to contribute to a bank account that one single person owns. Sure, the owner of that bank account might feel that they must listen to the community of contributors, but nothing is technically stopping them from spending the money however they feel like. Legally, they could face consequences for misusing funds, but the money could still be spent before any legal action takes place. This is much different from a smart contract. You could set up a smart contract that ensures – technically – that the money cannot be spent unless 50% of governance tokens have voted in a certain way. The reason to have this code on a blockchain instead of just somebody’s computer is that there’s a much greater degree of certainty that the smart contract will be executed correctly when spread across thousands of computers: someone can’t just unplug their computer and the smart contract fails to execute. Nik Honeysett: I can see parallels in the museum world. A group of museums could come together to purchase a seminal work of art that would guarantee attendance at the blockbuster level and they would come together, they would purchase it and then they would share it. So it would be a work of art that would travel. The ConstitutionDAO, ultimately somebody has to receive that thing. So, this group comes together, they pool their resources, they secure ownership of this object. But then, someone is responsible for doing something with it. Yes, there's, it's kind of by proxy. So the group will vote on what they want to have with it. But at some point, you know, it translates to a physical series of actions. The organizers of ConstitutionDAO said they had interested museums lined up with various proposals on how to store and display the Constitution, including the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library. But they never got the chance. ConstitutionDAO got outbid, rather dramatically, by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin. Nik Honeysett: And so part of me wonders. It would have been, as fascinating as it was, it would have been much more fascinating. And I don't know whether the folks behind it were experienced enough to receive something as important as that and what they would be able to do with it. Ian Elsner: Right. I think at some point though, we will actually see that play out. I don't know if it's sometime this year, some other ConstitutionDAO will pop up for a different historical object, Someone would have to decide, okay, how do we ensure it during transport? And instead of that being a decision made by museums or other institutions familiar with historical stewardship, that might be put to a governance mechanism in the DAO. And, then all of a sudden it would be asking a huge number of people to decide together, to come to a consensus about what the best insurance policy is to take out during transport of the object, or however that works. Nik Honeysett: But, you know, and the challenge with that is that, that group, you know, that governance group needs to be informed. There's a danger of damaging the object if you don't understand what is required in transportation of an extremely valuable work of art, you run the risk of losing it. Ian Elsner: I'm kind of curious about, about how you feel, if you were to walk up to, to an object like a copy of the Constitution and, you saw that, okay, this is owned by a collection of people, not necessarily all Americans, but people who are united in their interest in owning a piece of this. But that's the only loose connection. How does that make you feel as a museum visitor? Nik Honeysett: That, you know, that's a really good question because if the public hold museums in the highest regard in terms of trust. They are one of the most trustworthy entities. And if that wasn’t the case, if you're looking at an object. I guess it's, you know, as I'm thinking about it, it's no different than a donor who has lent a valuable work of art to the museum. Your interaction with that piece is in the context of the museum with which you hold high trust and high regard for. So I guess the, the fact that that governing body had determined that the museum was the best place to, albeit temporarily, house that object, would make me feel comfortable, to know that something of such foundational historical value is actually in an institution that I know has the highest practices to preserve it. Ian Elsner: I'm glad you brought up trust because that's one of the applications of blockchain in general is that it allows for various systems to happen in a trustless environment. if the two of us enter into a smart contract, we don't have to trust each other. That the money will be distributed according to the terms of the smart contract, we just have to trust that the smart contract itself is trustworthy, And there's this sort of interesting tension between, between very trustworthy institutions and then this system which is designed for actors that don't trust each other. Nik Honeysett: It's interesting to noodle down on that. And so, Inherently, you know, people trust museums because, A, because museums tell them that they're trustworthy but B, you know, you can experience something and, and connect with your culture and your past and there's an implicit understanding that the museum is custodians of this thing and it's in his, you know, taking care of them and they'll see an object that might be hundreds of years old in pristine condition or something like that. My theory is that museums have had two overarching eras: the power era and trust era. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes of Museum Archipelago, the first public museum that we would recognise as a museum was The British Museum in London, which opened in 1759. The point of the museum was to showcase the power of the British Empire, to indicate that anyone in London could see treasures owned by the most powerful people in faraway places. Slowly and over centuries, perhaps much more recently than we’re comfortable with, museums have entered their trust era. Perhaps, museums are enjoying peak trust right now – scandals like museums naming buildings and wings after donations by the Sackler family, as well as the continuing holdover horrors from the time that museums were in their pure power era like decolonization and repatriation will slowly erode this trust. And the crypto world has so many scandals and general confusion that it’s certainly not trustworthy. Nik Honeysett: I think partly for the public to generally accept the trustworthiness of the blockchain, they need to more tangibly experience it. So right now it's just, it's a couple of words and people don't really understand it But the difference I think is that crypto technologies are built for a trustless world. Maybe, if we do start to see declining trust in museums, there’s some crossover appeal to bringing these crypto tools like blockchain-based provenance and smart contracts to the museum world. Nik Honeysett: Museums they hold collections in the public trust. They are duty bound to be transparent in what they do, but they are clearly not. There is a lot of behind closed doors things going on. That would be a fantastically interesting governance model where everything is completely transparent if you translate you know, mission to smart contract right? Nik Honeysett: So your mission is actually a smart contract with your community. What is the obligation that you set up in that smart contract that then , the public can hold you accountable for? We used to do this exercise, with museums and say, demonstrate unequivocally how your mission. Is being interpreted. Put some hyperlinks on your mission statement to where you've actually done what you said you did. But if that was open and transparent, that your mission was a series of smart contract statements that would be fascinating. Immediately after Ken Griffin won the auction, it was announced that this U.S. Constitution would be temporarily loaned to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was put on display as part of the We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy exhibit in July 2022. Since ConstitutionDAO would have also displayed the document in a museum, not much is different from the outside. ConstitutionDAO made the refunds available for all contributors to claim and disbanded. Sometimes an organization only needs to exist for a short time and just serve a single purpose. Museums should prepare for a world where a group of individuals, leveraging crypto technology, can plausibly – and maybe preferably – do things that were once only possible with museum institutions. There’s still a lot of crypto to talk about and in part two I’ll dive deeper into projects that overlap with museums. Until then, this has been Museum Archipelago.…
I remember visiting – and loving – The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) as a child. Opened in 1965, it’s an immersive space with cobblestone streets and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering into a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures. And I’m not the only one with fond memories. When the museum announced that the exhibit would not move over to the planned new museum down the street, the public reacted negatively. Dr. Ellen Censky, president and CEO of the MPM, describes the reasons why the museum can’t – and most interestingly shouldn’t – move The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. It’s a story involving cherished memories, the distinction between collections and exhibits which isn’t always at the top of visitors’ minds, and public trust. In this episode, we explore why the Milwaukee Public Museum decided to move (it’s the fourth relocation in its history) and Milwaukee Revealed , the planned new immersive gallery that will be the spiritual successor to The Streets of Old Milwaukee , which will cover a much larger swath of the city’s history. Plus, we get into the meta question of whether museums are outside of the history they are tasked with preserving. Image: Bartender in Streets of Old Milwaukee at Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Flickr user JeffChristiansen Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s 2015 Renovation 01:17 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s Visitor Experience 03:40 Dr. Ellen Censky, President and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum 04:10 The Decision to Move the Museum 04:45 AAM Accreditation 06:21 The Current Museum 07:42 Funding the New Museum 08:55 Milwaukee Revealed 11:14 Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11th, 2023 11:40 The distinction between collections and exhibits 12:45 “We owe future museum goers the opportunity to see something different” 13:44 Local Talk Radio Coverage 14:07 Museum Designers 15:29 Closing Thoughts and the “Next Best Thing” 17:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️ Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨ A warm feeling , knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 106. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript I first learned about the impending closure of the popular The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum, or MPM, back in 2015. The news came in the form of an email from a family member who had lived in the Milwaukee area her whole life. It was only a year after I started working in the museum world, and she was eager to talk to me – then a newly-minted museum professional! -- about what a colleague had told her: that Streets of Old Milwaukee, which had been there quote "forever", was about to close. She wrote, "I was upset since this was always one of my favorite exhibits (along with the bison hunt/rattlesnake diorama, of course)." A little later in the email she expresses a sense of relief learning that the exhibit wasn't closing permanently. The confusion turned out to be a renovation that would temporarily close the exhibit for about six months and reopen in December 2015. The panic faded a bit. The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which opened in 1965, is beloved for good reason: it’s an immersive space with cobblestone roads and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering through a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures. Visitors go in and out of inviting storefronts, old-timey police boxes, and a candy shop. I used to visit as a kid and I loved how it transported me. I couldn’t say exactly where it transported me, but it was exciting. I remember staring at a figure of a grandma – who everyone just called granny – in a rocking chair on a front porch and trying to figure out the mechanism by which she was rocking. Today’s guest, Dr. Ellen Censky, told me in 2015 when she was academic dean of the Milwaukee Public Museum, the MPM, on one of the first episodes of Museum Archipelago, that this attention to detail was one of the reasons why the museum punches above its weight. Dr. Ellen Censky: It's an experience that you get when you're here. It's this immersive experience. And so we really need to understand that as we move forward to make sure that as we enhance things, that we don't take away what people love. That skittishness over a beloved exhibit closing, or even changing, was apparent in the way that the museum presented their 2015 renovation plans. Listen to Al Muchka, then Curator of History Collections at the MPM, describe the renovation in an official video: Al Muchka: “Don't you change my streets of old Milwaukee. That ownership came through and we understood that. I mean, many of the people here in the museum that work here, we, we grew up here, so we understand the idea of this is our place. These are our things. So when people would call us to say, don't change my exhibit, we get it.” But that was 2015. Now, almost 10 years later, that fear has come true. In a few years, The Streets of Old Milwaukee will close for good – not just for a temporary refurbishment. And, predictably, the reaction has not been good. Dr. Ellen Censky: Hi, my name is Ellen Censky and I am president and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum. Today, Dr. Censky is president and CEO of the MPM. The Streets of Old Milwaukee is closing for good because the museum itself is moving to a new building and the museum says it can’t move the exhibit as it is since it’s literally built into the old building – and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t. So let’s explore each in turn. Dr. Censky says that the decision to move the museum was triggered by the American Alliance of Museums, or AAM’s accreditation process. AAM’s accreditation process is a set of industry standards that is effectively shorthand for institutional credibility. The MPM first gained accreditation in 1972 and the accreditation process should be done about every ten years. If a museum is not accredited, it might have difficulty winning grants or handling loan agreements for traveling exhibits. Dr. Ellen Censky: Back in 2016, as we were approaching reaccreditation for the museum, we were reflecting back on the past reaccreditation and in that reaccreditation, they had cautioned us that the condition of the building was not adequate for housing the collections. It was deteriorating to the extent that it could be causing harm to the collections. And, of course, That's what we are, is a collections based museum. And they said you need to do something about this. And, of course when we were thinking about reaccreditation which was coming up in 2020. The building continued to deteriorate. It had not gotten better. And it had built up a significant amount of deferred maintenance. The building is not owned by the museum. The building is owned by the county. And the county has financial challenges as they own many, many buildings and have lots of things that they need to take care of. And so building maintenance for the museum was just not a high priority for them. So we headed into this study to see what we could do should we invest in money. Putting money into this building to bring it up to AAM standards and thereby receive accreditation, or should we build a new building? The museum decided to build a new building. This annoyed me at first. Surely any maintenance fixes would be cheaper and – well – less wasteful than building a new building? I’m fond of the current building, on 800 W Wells St in Milwaukee. In addition to trying to figure out how the granny rocked, one of my formative museum experiences was noticing how the floor ramped down in the Living Oceans exhibit as we went deeper underwater. I remember feeling nervous as the lighting changed and I descended the depths. It’s all very cool and effective. But you can find videos online highlighting the poor shape of the building itself. Not so much on the exhibit floors, which again, are awesome, right down to the rattlesnake button on the Bosion Hunt diorama. But down in the basement collections storage area there’s an actual leaking wastewater sewage pipe running right through the room, artifacts wrapped in plastic to try and save them from the humidity, and stalactites growing from the ceiling due to moisture. I think a big part of the answer to ‘the why move to a new building’ question is in the ownership structure. MPM is a private, nonprofit company. Milwaukee County owns the building. Building something new is a much sexier donor pitch than maintaining something – particularly something you don’t own and particularly when there’s no guarantee of that maintenance continuing. Dr. Ellen Censky: We also reached out to donors, doing a study to see if donors would support putting their money into a county-owned facility. The end result of those studies was that donors were not interested to put money into a county owned facility because there was no guarantee that it would then be taken care of, given that it hadn't been up to this point. And they were also interested in supporting the project. a new building project. So at that point we headed down the road of building a new museum. And that new museum will be right down the road, on a site about a 12 minute walk away, on Sixth and McKinley Streets. Critically for the future, the new building will be owned by the museum itself. Milwaukee County will continue to own the museum’s collections but will no longer be responsible for the building costs, though it will still provide some annual funding for collections care. Any additional collections will be stored at a separate offsite storage facility that presumably won’t have the same issues. So now we get to why not pack up The Streets of Old Milwaukee and move it to the new location? Dr. Ellen Censky: The Streets of Old Milwaukee are built in. They're poured into… the concrete in the buildings is poured into the building. The cobblestones are set in place. We cannot pick up and move the exhibits. They are so built into this building that it's impossible to do that. And really, we shouldn't. It’s this ‘we shouldn’t’ that interests me the most – and honestly, I’m inclined to agree. Dr. Ellen Censky: The streets covers a tiny part of history in Milwaukee. It is a seven year period, 1898 to 1905. Our collections are much more expansive than that, and so what we are doing is we are having an exhibit in the new museum called Milwaukee Revealed, which is set in a similar kind of streetscape where you can walk through, but it is timeless, in that it is, it will have old buildings, it'll have new buildings, and we'll be able to share many more stories , in the museum in the new exhibit. The new exhibit, Milwaukee Revealed, will cover a much larger swath of Milwaukee's history, from the late 1700s to the present day. More people visit the MPM, and probably The Streets of Old Milwaukee, each year than the total number of people who lived in Milwaukee in 1900, which is one of the years the exhibit is set in. That kind of nostalgia really builds up. The exhibit, built in 1965, is about as distant from us in 2024 as 1905 was from those in 1965. But that’s the fundamental point: the layout of The Streets of Old Milwaukee was never a real street, it was an imagined street. What visitors love about it, what I love about it, is that it’s designed for present-day visitors, it’s designed to evoke a reaction. And oh boy has it. Here’s an interview on local news station Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11, 2023 responding to a MPM Facebook post that The Streets of Old Milwaukee wouldn't be moving over to the new museum. Steve Chamraz: This is Milwaukee. Susan Kim: We don't like change. Steve Chamraz: We don't like change in Milwaukee. Um, were you prepared? I mean, this started as a line in a newspaper story the other day and it just kind of snowballed into is Granny going to wind up in a dumpster when they demolish the old museum? Susan Kim: Aw, poor Granny! Steve Chamraz: Well, that's what some people thought. I think a lot of museum people, like me, draw a huge distinction between the collections (or the artifacts) and the exhibits (or display of those artifacts). I think of artifacts like Lego bricks. Artifacts are arranged in such a way to create exhibits. The models created from those bricks are the stories told. But we can make a lot of different models – we can tell a lot of different stories – out of the same Lego bricks. Gluing the model together forever so the artifacts can’t be re-interrogated or the story can’t be retold is not what a museum should be – and it’s also not how storytelling works. The same sets of story points can, the same initial artifacts can – and I would argue should – be told differently. Maybe it’s an arbitrary distinction to see the museum as outside of history, as somehow not subject to the same preservation as museums themselves are tasked with. But a museum is just a story. Dr. Ellen Censky: We are at a different time than we were in the 1960s. And we owe the future museum goers the opportunity to see something different and new. We've done workshops, we've done surveys, we've done, and we've been doing them, getting feedback so that we really could tailor things to what people were interested in. My goal is that when you come into the new museum, that you see things that are familiar, but they are reimagined in a new way. And so if you had a favorite object, your favorite object you'll find, but it will be interpreted and imagined in a different way, a new way. On the YouTube clip of that local news interview the least angry comments talk about the need to visit the current exhibits before it all disappears. It really doesn't seem like many people who cherish the current exhibit trust that the new exhibit will be good or will be worth the cost to the state to replace. These comments are echoed through the Change.org petitions to save the The Streets of Old Milwaukee, through the Facebook groups organizing to express their anger, and through local talk radio hosts like Dan O’Donnell that I’ve listened to while researching this podcast. Dan O'Donnell: Now, I guess a lot of people sort of naively believed that a lot of the old favorite exhibits would in some form migrate over, Things like the Streets of Old Milwaukee, which is probably the flagship exhibit. the Milwaukee record, which is a local website. Did an excellent job in sort of digging into this and looking at the museum's own frequently asked questions about the upcoming move to conclude definitively no. And you know what? We don’t know if Milwaukee Revealed will be any good, if it will be a worthy replacement for The Streets of Old Milwaukee. The museum has released renderings of the new gallery and descriptions of feelings it will evoke in visitors. These renderings are familiar to me, not because I’ve seen them before, but because I usually join a museum project when it’s at this stage. My day job is producing exhibits for various museums, many times new versions of what has come before. The vocal backlash to The Streets of Old Milwaukee closing reminds me that I need to think about my work in the context of that bigger picture. When I'm in a meeting where exhibit designers are talking about how to best serve the visitor experience, I have to remember that museum-goers might have already soured on the process and on the changes long ago. Even the official messaging, on the MPM’s Facebook page responding to a question about whether the museum would move The Streets of Old Milwaukee, focused on this museum insider excitement that I don’t think translates well outside the museum walls. It said, quote, “As you can imagine, making something new and refreshed, yet familiar and cozy is a fun challenge for our design team!” But there’s always change. The current museum on 800 W Wells St is the fourth location of the museum. The first was in 1882 in rooms of the old German Academy building, the second a few years later in the Industrial Exposition Building, and the third in what is still Milwaukee Central Library. And the new building was built in 1963. Dr. Ellen Censky: And when you look back at the, in the 1960s, at the newspaper articles, you, you would think you were reading what was going on today. “They can't move!” It is really nice to see how meaningful these museums are to my Wisconsin family, and to the general public. And it’s true that we can only look back like this because the new versions were good. I'll let Dr. Censky have the final word on this. Dr. Ellen Censky: A lot of people early on would say to me what are you bringing to the new museum? What are you bringing? And early on, before we had done any of our planning, I couldn't say, and all I could say is that we are bringing the ingenuity that is the history of this museum. forward to that new museum. And that is the way we honor our past, is by continuing to strive to do the next best thing. Because that's what people who did this, they were doing the next best thing. And it's our obligation to honor that and carry that forward. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera , a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had. Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions. Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums. Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Computer Interactives in Museums 01:00 Dr. Morgan Rehnberg 01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini 02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville 03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums 05:00 Solving Your Own Problems 06:30 Exhibitera 07:45 “A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit” 08:30 Built-In Multi-Language Support 09:30 Open Source Exhibit Management 10:30 Why Open Source? 12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. I’ve spent most of my career building interactive exhibits for museums. These are all visitor-facing: touchscreens for pulling up information or playing games based on the science content, projection walls for displaying moving infographics, and digital signage for rotating through ticket prices or special events. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Well I think most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad. And I don't think that's because they were necessarily bad when they were first installed, but major exhibitions can last for 10, 15, 50 years, and it's often quite difficult to go back and retrofit and improve something like technology as time goes on. This is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. Rehnberg offers that long-term maintenance is the reason most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad – and that is kindly letting us programmers off the hook for the other reasons why computer interactives can be bad. But I agree with him. When I build an interactive exhibit for a museum, I’m optimizing for opening day, and generally leave it up to the museum to maintain it for years after. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Hello, my name is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg and I'm the Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. I actually started my journey in science. I did my PhD work in astronomy. And I worked as part of NASA's Cassini mission, which studied Saturn for many years. And it got to a point where we sort of dramatically crashed the spacecraft into Saturn. And I realized at that point that I was going to need to find something else to do. And kind of thinking back,I realized that I had been having more fun when talking about the work that we were doing than actually doing it. So I started to look and see how I could turn that into a career, and I ended up in Texas at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and spent five lovely years there, including the time during the pandemic. And as the world started coming back,, I felt like it was time for a change of scenery and made the switch to Nashville. And I've been thrilled to be here at the Science Center for just under two years now. Like many science museums, we focus on families with young kids, full of hands-on exhibits, exploring all the areas of STEM. And we serve the public, we do field trips, we run summer camps, all the things that science museums do. But we do it with a team that's maybe a little bit smaller than you would have at some of the big museums, in cities like New York or San Francisco or Chicago. And that team size becomes relevant to the long-term maintenance of computer interactives. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Here in Nashville. We have touch screens that we installed in 2008 that still do everything that they did then, but what the world around them has done since 2008 has changed a lot. And so while the experience is the same as it always was, the expectations of visitors coming in are quite a bit different. On the back end, most of the computers running in museum galleries are general purpose computers, normal PCs running Linux or Windows. Similarly, the interactive exhibit software running on them are often built using game development engines like Adobe Flash or Unity. There are advantages and disadvantages to building on top of these platforms. On the one hand, museums get to benefit from the rapid iteration of consumer technology. On the other hand, these tools that were not designed for the museum environment, so there are all sorts of situations where you end up working at cross-purposes with your tools. A good example: any general purpose computing environment needs to have an easy way, in fact many easy ways, for a user to close an app. However, in a museum's touchscreen setup, you wouldn't want visitors to be able to close the exhibits, so you have to invent ways to prevent that .And every time Windows updates, you might have to do it all over again in a different way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a museum server room, satisfied with a job well-done, only to notice that a smart kid on the gallery floor has figured out how to close my interactive software and has pulled up a game of solitaire. And let me tell you – solitaire is the best case scenario. If that computer is connected to the internet, things can get a lot worse. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I think a lot of us who work in medium or larger museums forget that by number, the vast majority of museums in this country or anywhere in the world have staffs of one or two or three and have budgets measured in, you know, thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars. Those places are never going to be able to afford the sorts of bespoke custom software that you might see at Boston Museum of Science. They're just never going to have that. But they shouldn't be left in the 20th century of all we've learned about the value of interactivity in museums. So while working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the covid pandemic, Rehnberg started looking for a solution. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: As I was looking at sort of this big idea of what could be a piece of software that would solve all my problems.I started looking at that and sort of subdividing those problems. And one category of problem was wanting to have new touch sensitive, visitor facing things. And I didn't have the money during the pandemic to hire a vendor to redo all the things everywhere. The second piece of it was how can I, with greatly reduced exhibit technician staff, manage all of these things with the least amount of effort. Because I know if I have one tech who needs to cover the whole building, they can't spend a bunch of time debugging a thing after a visitor has smashed the screen 50,000 times and frozen the computer. Those two parallel ideas have lent themselves to the structure of Constellation. Constellation is the name of the free and open source exhibit control software that Rehnberg developed. Today, he calls it Exhibitera, but you still might catch him referring to it by its old name. And those two parallel ideas have turned into a suite of tools that a museum can use to build their own interactive exhibit software, and the control server, which is how museums can control the apps within the exhibit. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: All that guest facing stuff, you can use that all on its own. You basically install it on a computer, start configuring what you want your content to be, and then you can just set your computer to boot that every time the computer boots. So instead of building interactive exhibits using engines designed for game development, museums can build interactive exhibits using tools designed with the museum’s needs in mind. Exhibitera has several common exhibit types built into it, like an info station, a media browser, and a timeline. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: One of the big focuses has been that it shouldn't just be technical people who can produce these things. And so a big focus has been creating ways for people to use apps they already know to create apps that are guest facing. For example, with our timeline application, the way you make a timeline is you just open up Excel and you make a spreadsheet. You make a column of dates, you make a column of event names, you make a column of file names for a picture, and then Constellation just ingests that and makes this beautiful touchscreen timeline. A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit. An educator we have here on staff should be able to have an idea and create at least a prototype, if not a complete exhibit, just using Word and Excel and those sorts of things. And they get turned into these beautiful guest facing experiences that at first glance, a visitor is not going to know the difference between that and something that a science center might've paid a hundred thousand dollars for. Too often when building bespoke custom interactive media, accessibility is something that gets tacked on at the end. But for museums using Exhibitera, accessibility features are automatically built in. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: One of the things I'm really proud about is we've built in just a tremendous amount of accessibility at the core. So any one of the apps that uses language allows you to set up your language in an arbitrary number of languages. So it's not just English. You can say, I want English and Spanish and Arabic and Chinese and German. And if that's your audience, it'll support all of those simultaneously. And it provides a nice little dropdown to switch languages. And then it also provides variable text size support by default in those applications. And those are things that I think we all agree are key aspects of professional practice to make our exhibitions as accessible as possible. It shouldn't be like a thing you have to remember to add on when you're building something. It should just be built in at the core and that's what we've tried to do with Constellation. But then there's this thing called Constellation Control Server. And the idea here is, let's have a central server that communicates with all of the other Constellation components in the exhibit. And can help me remotely diagnose and remotely repair these things. So if one of those exhibit pieces has stopped checking in, I get an, I can see that on my dashboard and I can easily press a button from my desk to reboot that computer, cause maybe the app is still running, but I got a call in from somebody in guest services saying a kid's playing solitaire on the computer. Without this software, a smaller museum might have a staff member walk around every morning to turn on each computer one by one. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: When I come in in the morning, the building basically just turns itself on in the morning and shuts itself down at the end of the day. And Constellation provides this really powerful scheduling system that allows you to set these schedules that vary day to day. So every Monday, you know, we close at three and every Saturday we close at five and so forth. Exhibitera was built to support as many devices as possible, from the touchscreens from 2008 to Android tablets to mini pcs. There was never any doubt for Rehnberg that he would release this system as open source, for free – the problems that Rehnberg faced mirrors the problems faced at many other museums. Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: My background, having come from the world of science, was just really informed by the culture, this wonderful cultural open source that exists in science. I was working on studying Saturn and analyzing data, the code that I was using to do that had legacies of decades. I could go back and look at the changelog and see, you know, NASA engineers who were working on the same code in the 1980s. And that's what allowed me as a 20 something kid starting out in science to do these things that otherwise I would have had to reinvent from scratch. And I just got such an appreciation for the value of having something supported by the community as a way of opening more doors to that community. If we all agree, and I think most people would, that having digital elements in installed exhibitions is just like a standard professional practice, then you shouldn't have to fork over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what is standard professional practice. It still might be the right thing to do to hire a third party company, and I've had great experiences working with those companies before, but it shouldn't be the only option. Today, Exhibitera is being used in Fort Worth and in Nashville and several other museums But anyone can use it. I set up a little exhibit in my office on an old PC and just marveled at how many museum-specific features are just built-in . Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I really think long term, the biggest opportunity is to bring this level of digital interactivity to places that haven't been able to afford it before. And so I'm excited about this podcast because I think there is just this huge sea of places that want to be able to be the modern museums they are in thought also in physicality. And so far, just haven't had a good way to connect with those folks. Because I think, big museums, this will always be, at best, one thing in the play of many solutions that they've integrated together. But for a lot of smaller places, I think there's an opportunity for Constellation to really become a standard for the way in which they are engaging digitally, with their audience inside the building. This has been Museum Archipelago. I have two quick announcements about Club Archipelago, our bonus podcast. I've been having a lot of fun making Club Archipelago, which is kind of a mirror image of Museum Archipelago. While the main show examines the landscape of real museums, Club Archipelago is the podcast that examines museums through the lens of popular culture, like movies and video games. We've built up quite the collection of episodes from the Night at the Museum series to Toy Story 2. And honestly, I think more people should listen. So I've just added a seven day free trial to the Patreon. You can sign up, listen to as many episodes as you can and cancel before the trial is up completely absolved of any guilt. Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club. And finally I'm discontinuing the sticker rewards of the Club Archipelago membership. It's just too much of a logistical challenge to ship things from Bulgaria. And I want to focus all my time on the much more scalable podcast production. But if you're interested, regardless of whether you're a club member or not, just send me an email and I'll let you know where the closest museum is, where I've left a pile of stickers for you to collect. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.…
The Murney Tower Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits. Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee. In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones. Image: Murney Tower Museum Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Understanding the Landscape of Small Museums 02:38 Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor 03:00 Murney Tower Museum 08:29 Overcoming Challenges with Digital Solutions 09:46 What Big Institutions Can Learn from Small Museums 09:54 The Power of Local Connections in Small Museums 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 104. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Let’s say you sorted every museum on earth in order by the number of yearly visitors. At one end, with yearly visitor numbers in the millions, would be large, recognizable institutions – places like the British Museum in London. There’s a cluster of these big institutions, but as you go further along the ordered list of museums, the visitor numbers start to drop. At some point during these declining visitor numbers, you reach small museums. Exactly where in the order you first reach a small museum doesn’t really matter – one definition of small museums from the American Association of State and Local History is simply: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.” You could do the same sort by number of staff members or by operating budget – the effect would be more or less the same. The point is that once you reach the threshold where small museums begin, you still have the vast, vast majority of museums to go. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: You just realize how many small museums are there in the world. Unbelievable numbers, right? They're everywhere and they hold such an important space in local cultural landscapes. Even if I dare to say more than large institutions. The sorting exercise illustrates a long tail effect – each small museum, while attracting fewer visitors individually, collectively hosts an enormous number of visitors. There’s just so many of them. The long tail effect was coined in 2004 to describe economics on the internet: the new ability to serve a large number of niches in relatively small quantities, as opposed to only being able to serve a small number of very popular niches. But unlike the economics of the internet, where distribution costs are minimal, small museums face the challenge of fulfilling nearly all the responsibilities of larger museums without any of the benefits of scale. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What fascinates me most about small museums is despite being so small, they offer almost everything you can find in a large museum, Ian. So do they have collections and do collection management and care? Yes. Do they curate exhibitions? Yes. Do they offer public programs? Yes. Do they organize special events and do marketing and digital engagements? Yes. They make these things happen. This is Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor, who studies small museums in her academic practice, and works at one. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Hello, my name is Simge Erdogan-O'Connor. I am a museum scholar and professional, currently working as museum manager at a local history museum called the Murney Tower Museum located in Kingston, Canada. Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a city of about 150,000 people and the Murney Tower Museum is Kingston’s oldest museum. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: It will turn 100 years old next year. The museum itself is based in a 19th century military fortification, which was built by the British government as a response to a territorial dispute between England at the time and the United States. And the building itself is called Murney Tower. So the museum, taking its name from that building, but also being based in this building, is very much about that history. Why this building was constructed, what's its relationship to broader Canadian, British, American relationships in the 19th century, but at the same time, the museum is very much about the local history of Kingston as well so we are very local in our focus. No matter how you define a small museum, Murney Tower is a small museum. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: We hold about 1300 objects in our collection and we are seasonal. We are only open to the public from the end of May through September. And I'm the only full time staff member that the museum has, which can also show, I think, many people what small museums are in terms of operational capacity. And then we almost entirely rely on volunteers, interns, and seasonal staff members that we hire in the summer. Ian Elsner: Right, I was going to make a joke about your, your staff meetings being super quick, but I guess you do have to have meetings nevertheless. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: But sometimes I make a joke about that too Ian, meaning, yes, of course, we have board meetings, I constantly have interns, every semester through universities, and in the summer I have three full time staff members. Regardless, sometimes I'm like, I'm the gatekeeper, I am the security guard, I clean the museum, I run the museum, right? I do all of these cool things, like I write the strategic plan, but then there are times that I'm on call waiting for a maintenance person to come to the museum and I just need to be there to open doors to him. Ian Elsner: I can already see the challenge of having one person do all of those things that you described, but what are some of the other challenges of a small institution or your small institution specifically? Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Simply because a big part of Ian, my professional, academic, personal life is concerned with this question of challenges, right? Whether understanding those challenges or finding solutions to those challenges. All my colleagues mention in any conversation that are very common to museums worldwide, big or small, and these challenges certainly affect my own institution as well, like the challenges of colonial and elitist legacies of museums, issues of reconciliation, repatriation, or funding limitations, or reliance on government funding, or contemporary challenges like COVID 19. So all of these challenges that are very much common in the museum world. But then when I look at his lens of small museums a little bit further, I identify in two major challenges that are much more specific to small museums. The first one is limited staff resources. I know I already mentioned that, but I still want to explain that a little bit further. While you have 40, 50, or hundreds of people doing these things in a large museum, you have only, like in my case, one or two people carrying out very similar activities in a small museum. This is a huge challenge because, yes, you can maybe carry these out in some form and capacity, with several people. But how can you make these activities really effective and impactful, with only a few people? This is a very important challenge that does not exist in large institutions. And there is a second challenge related to this, is what I refer in my own practice as this incapability mindset. And I found myself in this mindset when I started my work in a small museum four and a half years ago, it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. This limitation creates a mindset both in the institution as an institutional mindset but a mindset also in staff members and team members that's very much based on incapability. So you find yourself being almost conditioned, Ian, inherently to think small. Right? And this way of small thinking poses such a huge challenge to actual capacity of these small museums to grow and to make something meaningful. And, for example, you want to create a new website. You have the idea. You're excited. And what's the first thing you think? Oh. But I cannot hire a webmaster. I don't know coding and I cannot hire a website designer. I will never be able to make that happen. Or you want to create new exhibits, new exhibitions, nicer panels. And then you're like, but I cannot hire a graphic designer or exhibit designer. I don't know graphic design. And this kind of, this creates a chicken and egg situation where an idea comes and instantly a door closes. , this is another huge problem, Ian, simply because it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. And then the moment I did, I realized a huge potential. Small museums could do the things they want to do. They can do it, right? Maybe not in a big scale, but you can still make these things happen. You can find a way to make these things happen, but it starts with that mindset. And that's, I think, a huge challenge that exists. The manifesto writes itself – small museums, not small ideas. Having only one staff member or not being able to hire somebody to make a website are downstream of not having enough resources. And it’s not obvious how a small museum could take advantage of internet economics because there’s no way to get enough scale such that the marginal cost of each visitor approaches zero. But there is a way to take advantage of internet economics on the production side. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What you said about the internet or digital world is actually, it's a solution to these two problems in a way that I mentioned meaning there's so so many digital resources out there that you can really run a museum on a budget. Of course you cannot hire a webmaster, but there's so many custom made website platforms that allow you to build your own website at a very low cost and quite easily. There are digital design platforms like Canva graphic design, which has free subscriptions to non profits and they allow you to create really beautiful designs and two platforms, quite frankly, that I'm using in my work. You can leverage that digital world, take advantage of it and then make these things happen at such a low cost. And then on the flip side, it also opens all of this range of audience engagement, allowing these museums to go out of their localities and becomes something bigger, like you said, at no cost. This is what we have been doing, like using social media, internet, and YouTube. Last summer, we were visited by 12,000 visitors, which was very impressive for us. And 7,000 of those visitors were local or international tourists. And they got to know us through the internet. So I'm now curious, what, what can big institutions learn from small institutions? Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: I'm so glad you brought that up. The first thing, Ian, that I really believe, and I'm really, really, really passionate about this, when it comes to small museums, is local connections. I think the biggest impact of small museums is their local connections. How they leverage these local connections to create local impact, but potentially global impact. And I think this is something that larger museums can really learn from them. These museums, they already hold a very important place in the local landscape, local memories, and local stories. So they have a greater potential to connect with local audiences in a much more efficient and quicker way. And the way they connect with their local audiences is something I think large institutions could really learn from small museums. Because I know large museums that I work with on different capacities, they of course have local initiatives, community initiatives, of course they do, but I think that really understanding local connections and local concerns and histories, it's much different in a small museum, the way the small museums work that out. And I will give you an example again because I know what I mean could be a little bit vague sometimes. Back in 2020, COVID time for all of us. At the Murney Tower Museum, we really wanted to do something to address the needs of people living in Kingston during the global pandemic, especially find a way to address their issues of social exclusion and isolation and foster connections in our community. So we launched a local photo contest. We placed ads on local newspaper, TV, and basically we asked people living in Kingston to go back to their cameras, check their photo albums, and then check their childhood albums, and then check their family albums to see if they could find Murney Tower Museum, anywhere, right? And if they did we ask them to find the story behind it and send those pictures to us. So over the course of three months, I think we collected about 120 Incredible, Ian. Photos from 1920s, photos from, yeah, like 1940s, It also speaks to the advantage of the scale that small museums are operating on, because it's so much less interesting to have that same idea with a big institution. If the British Museum says, everybody send us your images, I'm sure you'll find some great images, but the scale actually isn't meaningful because of course people were going to the British Museum 50 years ago. But having it be that local connection of actually we have 120 pictures and like, I really see that point. The bigger the institution is, the less interesting that exercise is. It's, yes, absolutely, and the connection part of it becomes much stronger, and it in a way becomes much more intimate. It allowed us to leverage this local connection and I think large museums can really take that local focus from small museums. I think sometimes they can be lost in their big ideas and big collections and big audiences, which are equally important, I get that. But I think sometimes it starts with their neighborhood. Look at your region first, to create something global and bigger, go from there, much more focused perspective, rather than coming from something global or large and big into small. This has been Museum Archipelago. I have two quick announcements about Club Archipelago, our bonus podcast. I've been having a lot of fun making Club Archipelago, which is kind of a mirror image of Museum Archipelago. While the main show examines the landscape of real museums, Club Archipelago is the podcast that examines museums through the lens of popular culture, like movies and video games. We've built up quite the collection of episodes from the Night at the Museum series to Toy Story 2. And honestly, I think more people should listen. So I've just added a seven day free trial to the Patreon. You can sign up, listen to as many episodes as you can and cancel before the trial is up completely absolved of any guilt. Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club. And finally I'm discontinuing the sticker rewards of the Club Archipelago membership. It's just too much of a logistical challenge to ship things from Bulgaria. And I want to focus all my time on the much more scalable podcast production. But if you're interested, regardless of whether you're a club member or not, just send me an email and I'll let you know where the closest museum is, where I've left a pile of stickers for you to collect. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.…
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Museum Archipelago
Computing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty , Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones , Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main reasons to start the Oral Histories of Museum Computing project . The first museum technology conference was hosted in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prescient event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums” was mostly focused on the cutting edge: better inventory management systems using computers instead of paper methods. However, it also foresaw the transformative impact of computers on museums—from digital artifacts to creating interactive exhibits to expanding audience reach beyond physical boundaries. Most of all, speakers understood that museum technologists would need to “join forces” with each other to learn and experiment better ways to use computers in museum settings. The Oral Histories of Museum Computing project collects the stories of what happened since that first museum technology conference, identifying the key historical themes, trends, and people behind the machines behind the museums. In this episode, Paul Marty and Kathy Jones describe their experience as museum technology professionals, the importance of conferences like the Museum Computer Network , and the benefits of compiling and sharing these oral histories. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums 00:43 Thomas P. F. Hoving Closing Statements 01:41 Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University 02:11 Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School 02:18 Museum Computing from There to Here 04:08 The First Steps of Museum Computing 04:52 Early Challenges in Museum Databases Like GRIPHOS 07:00 Changing Field, Changing Profession 08:48 The Oral Histories of Museum Computing Project 11:32 Reflecting on the Journey of Museum Technology 14:12 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 103. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript On April 17th, 1968, less than two weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the first computer museum conference was coming to a close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This conference was hosted by the recently-formed Museum Computer Network, and had a hopeful, descriptive title: A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums. At the closing dinner, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving acknowledged that “for some these three days have an unsettling effect” and that “these machines are going to put us on our toes as never before” but summarized, “the whole idea of a computer network is generating momentum, and is forcing upon museums the necessity of joining forces, pooling talents, individual resources, and strengths.” Paul Marty: When I tell students that there is a group that has been meeting annually since 1968 to discuss problems related to the use of computers and museums, they find that hard to believe. That seems like a long time ago, and I guess it is a long time ago. But museums were always on the cutting edge of trying to figure out how to use this technology. Maybe not everybody was on board, but there was always somebody who was pushing that story forward. This is Paul Marty, whose work focuses on the interactions that take place between people, information, and technology in museums. Paul Marty: Hello, I'm Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University. Professor Marty, along with his colleague Kathy Jones, are collecting stories of the people behind the computers behind the museums as part of their Oral Histories of Museum Computing project. A selection of stories from the project will be published as a book. Kathy Jones: Hello, my name is Kathy Jones, and I'm the Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School. The key question that both Jones and Marty want to answer is how did we go from there to here? Paul Marty: How did we go from a world where curators were saying there will never be a computer screen in our galleries, to a world where when you're setting up a new exhibit the first thing you ask is where should we put the iPads? How do we go from a world where we will never share digital images of our collection on the internet to a world where there are hundreds of millions of open access images in the public domain on the internet by museums? To answer that question, Jones and Marty looked to their own experiences going to the many museum computer conferences that came after. But they both underscore how remarkably prescient that first meeting proved to be. Kathy Jones: That first Museum Computer Network meeting I just want to emphasize the importance of meetings, even that early and now of bringing new ideas to the field. everything evolved based on the technologies that we had at hand. And museums weren't the first to adopt something like a scanner or to do multimedia, but as soon as we saw the possibilities, we certainly began to do that. Paul Marty: I actually just pulled up the table of contents for the conference proceedings for the very first Museum Computer Network Conference. And, there were a lot of papers in there sort of predicting what the future of computers in museums were going to be. And of course most of them were focused on inventory control and this. But there were also people talking about computer graphics and what that was like at the time. J. C. R. Licklider who is the the founder of ARPANET, which is , the original backbone of the internet, was there and spoke about the current state of computer graphics technology in the late 1960s, and , he was predicting a world where there would be digital images of museum artifacts, where people could have an interactive art museum where you would use digital computer images of artifacts. And it took a while for us to get there, but it's wonderful that people were thinking that far ahead in the 1960s. Computers first entered museums as a form of inventory management. Edward F. Fry summarizes in his 1970 review of that first conference, “the rapid increase in the size of museum collections in the United States has in fact reached such a point in many instances that a more efficient means of cataloging than that of the standard index card file has become a desperate necessity.” Paul Marty: Remember the final scene at the end of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? So many of the Smithsonian warehouses look exactly like that and it's really easy to see how things could get lost there for a very long period of time. You have more stuff than you have staff and time to deal with. The early inventory management systems were limited to only a few variables and lots of manual work, as Kathy Jones learned when she started her career at the Florida Department of State. Kathy Jones: I worked on a mainframe computer to be what they called the keeper of the Florida master site file. That was a large database, or is, that keeps track of all of the archaeological sites and historical properties in the state of Florida. Kathy Jones: It was a database called GRIPHOS, and it was used by archaeological groups, the State Historic Preservation Office. There was nothing visual about it, not even images or things like that. It was hardly relational, and every field was just about 80 characters. I mean, this is so long ago, Ian, that we had to use punch cards to do the data entry and then have them read per computer in batch form. Pretty archaic. GRIPHOS stood for General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies – I can’t get enough of the direct naming conventions of this early computer history – and it was actually published by the Museum Computer Network, the organization that hosted that first conference in 1968. Paul Marty: So GRIPHOS was the database system that ran on mainframe computers developed in the 1960s and disseminated by the Museum Computer Network. And part of the goal of the Museum Computer Network was to help museums learn how to use GRIPHOS to organize information about their collections. Kathy, I don’t know if you wanna talk about what it was like at the conferences… Kathy Jones: It was the first attempt at standardizing information, and that was because we had limited fields and limited values, but it did lead to a profession-wide attempt to standardize how we describe all types of information. So not just the art world, but also the history world or the object world. The early systems for cataloging collections were rather rigid, which meant that the museum staff had to get inventive to bridge the shortcomings. This process would repeat itself. Kathy Jones: As the field changed we were looking at what the public needs were, we began to discuss early on where we would fit in the museum. What was our role now? Initially, it was a behind the scenes type of thing with registrars, museum registrars mainly, having to learn a new skill set. Having to be somewhat digitally based, and doing their job now with new technology. Then in the mid-1990s and later we could add imaging to that set. And we had to learn about scanners and what they might do to the art, or how we could use them safely and efficiently to process the image, because we're a visual field. And then we got into multimedia, and both, , in the gallery and online, and another skill set emerged. Paul Marty: You went from physically plugging in computers and wires to figuring out how to present information in a way that can be used by people inside the museum, that suddenly people realize, “hey, there's people outside the museum with all this information as well.” And then this can also become used in exhibits in the galleries and then eventually online. Paul Marty: It's just been a constant process of the museum technology professional having to keep up with those changing technologies, keep up with the increasing demands that keep getting put on them. They have to figure out how to use new technology to accomplish new goals. I think that this entire profession has evolved over the years to tackle these problems. Because when museums started doing this, there, there wasn't, you couldn't go to school for this.There wasn't a job title for this. Kathy talked about registrars. You were organizing the information on paper files behind the scenes and somebody said, “hey, look, we can do this better and faster if we start using a computer here.” And you're the one who had to figure out how to do it. As museum technology professionals themselves, Marty and Jones realized that shining a light on this type of work would be a good basis for their next project. Paul Marty: Kathy and I have worked together on a number of projects in the past. We published a book together back in 2008. We had been meeting to work together on another book for a long time and we had been meeting regularly once a week or so and chatting about different project ideas and I guess it was 2019 when we first started talking about an oral history project because among other things, we were inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Museum Computer Network, and they had done some work trying to capture some voices from the field and some of that history there, and we realized that there was a great need for that particular work. Paul Marty: We were also very interested in the question of how do we shine a light on the behind the scenes activities of museum technology workers? Most of the people who do this job, you don't see their work. You see the end product of their work. You see the database, you see the website. You don't see what they're doing behind the scenes. Like most information technology workers writ large, not only is your work invisible in the sense that if you see me working, I'm probably doing something wrong, but the system that you built is also supposed to be invisible, right? It's supposed to be like plumbing. It’s difficult to work a job where if your work is visible, that means something has gone wrong. And so we were really trying to help both preserve the history and shine a light on that behind the scenes work that so many people don't see. When I’m not doing Museum Archipelago, I work as a computer programmer making interactive exhibits in museums. That should put me neatly into the category of museum technology professional — but I have to admit that I made it to this part of the interview before realizing Marty and Jones include people like me. Maybe it’s just a slight aversion to the term “museum technology professional” which has the clunkiness of those direct naming conventions of early computer history. Maybe it’s actually the perfect term. Marty and Jones invited about 120 professionals to participate in their oral history project, successfully compiling 54 oral histories from individuals whose careers focused on bringing technology into museums. Listening to the stories in this collection, which feature some past guests on Museum Archipelago, I’m struck that the types of problems museum technology professionals solve mirror my own experiences: computers in tight places on the gallery floor that nobody realized needed to be manually rebooted every few days, custom software running long after any who remembered what its for left the museum, and the wire that isn’t long enough to run from the exhibit floor to the server room. Kathy Jones: “What we're doing also lends credibility to that invisible work and really does shine a light on it, bringing it out for the field, but also Paul and I both teach. So it brings it right to our students in a way that I think is important. I, in my museums and technology class, post podcasts for different topics so that my students can hear from Jane Alexander or other people in the field about what they're doing. And I mentioned Jane Alexander because she has been able to really raise the visibility of what she doesfrom the server room to the boardroom. And I think it's so important to see that we can have a voice, that we could be, if not part of th e C suite, that we're getting pretty close to being there so that other people understand what it means to be digital in the museum world now and not take it for granted.“ Paul Marty: We captured stories that people never heard before. These were the people who were making the magic happen behind the scenes. To get their perspective on that was just absolutely amazing. We didn't want to tell a chronological history of the field. That's been done. We are at center identifying the key historical themes and trends that cut across the past 60 years and really drove the field forward. And then telling that story, using examples. In the words of the very people who who did that work. Which is remarkably similar to what Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving predicted back in 1968 – that the only way to roll with the momentum that computers in museums generate is to get all the humans together, sharing resources and expertise. After all, no museum is an island. Paul Marty: One of the things that I think surprised me as we went through and gathered these stories, analyzed these stories, was how positive and enthusiastic everybody was about the work that was done. Because you know, in a technology profession, it's easy to be negative. It's easy to say, well, we don't have enough resources. We don't have enough money. We don't have enough time. This is always the perennial problem. Of course, but when you step back and you take the 30,000 foot view and you look at what's been done over the past 60 years. And I think we heard this from every one of our participants. When you look at that, it's amazing how far we've come. And it's hard not to look at that scope and not come away with a positive perspective on what we've accomplished. And our hope with the book that we're writing is to convey that sense of enthusiasm to help inspire the next generation of people who are doing this technology work in museums Kathy Jones: “Ian, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about something that we love.” This has been Museum Archipelago.…
On Berlin’s Museum Island , four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum . Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago. Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ , and their role in repatriation or restitution cases. In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums. Image: Reconstructed Lion Sculpture Sam'al near modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey 10th-8th century BCE by Mary Harrsch Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Sam’al/Zincirli Lions 01:09 Pinar Durgun 01:22 Museum Island 01:40 Find Divison 02:28 Gipsformerei 03:12 Replicas Jump-Started Museum Collections 04:35 Trending Away from Copies 05:27 When Visitors Feel Tricked 06:00 When Visitors Are Okay With Copies 07:28 Ancient Cultural Contexts About Copies 08:07 Hokusai’s Great Wave 08:35 “Immersive Experiences” Made Up of Digital Copies 09:08 Digital Copies 12:39 Museum Archipelago 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does. 13:32 How Should Museums Present Copies in Their Collections? 14:36 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 102. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. On the Museum Island in Berlin, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE. And one is a plaster copy carved a bit over 100 years ago. Pinar Durgun: When you see these lions, you cannot tell the difference which one is a copy, which one is original. And lately, curator Pinar Durgun has been wondering how visitors feel about that copy. Pinar Durgun: But when I tell visitors, this one is a copy. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about a copy being here? Do you feel like you've been tricked? Pinar Durgun: And if I ask a question like this, they say yes. They say, I don't like copies. Durgun works at the Pergamon Museum, where those Gate lions from Samʼal are now perched -- well, some of them. Pinar Durgun: My name is Pinar Durgun. I'm an archeologist and art historian, currently working at the Pergamon Museum as a curator. Pinar Durgun: We're on the Museum Island. And it's funny because you always say museums are not islands, but we are literally on the Museum Island, one of the five museums on the museum island, but they're all kind of interconnected, I would say. Ian Elsner: That's terrific. They're in their own little archipelago. Pinar Durgun: Yeah, exactly. The Gate lions from Sam’al, also known as Zincirli in Southern Turkey, were excavated in the early 1890s and came to Berlin through a colonial-era practice called Find Division, which was a system to divide up ownership of excavated artifacts. Pinar Durgun: So during the Ottoman period when excavations were happening, so for instance, Germans or other foreigners were excavating in the Ottoman Empire, there were some agreements between the Sultan and the Kaiser here in Germany. So they were basically dividing objects that they were finding, and half of them would come here and half of them would stay in Istanbul. Of course, the extent to which this division was carefully adhered to depended on the local and international power dynamics, so in many cases it was more than half. But when an original artifact was to remain in the Ottoman Empire, the excavators would use a molding shop to make a copy. Pinar Durgun: The Berlin State Museums has its own plaster workshop called Gipsformerei. And this is a very old institution. I think it's one of the oldest in the world. It's 200 years old and the people who work at the Gipsformerei create these copies that look almost exactly like the originals. Pinar Durgun: And they take pride in creating copies that are skillfully made, skillfully prepared. So it is difficult to distinguish between originals and copies. The late 19th century was a time when the modern museum was taking shape, and institutions all around the world were seeking to fill collections. And copies, particularly paster copies from skilled molding shops like Gipsformerei made that possible. Pinar Durgun: So this interest in having ancient objects in museums or in university collections was growing as an idea based on education basically. So you would acquire a copy for your art school, let's say, and then people who could draw these Roman or Greek statues that they would otherwise never see. Now we can travel and see these statues, but think about a time when you could not do that, where you could not go see the statue of David whenever you wanted to, or you couldn't Google a picture of it. Canonical highlights or quote unquote masterpieces were being distributed around the world in universities, museums, and schools. Pinar Durgun: And this is a time where museums were basically coming to being, right? They were being formed. So a lot of the collections were built through these copies. The Metropolitan Museum, for instance, bought a lot of copies. The idea behind acquiring these copies was to allow museums like the MET to showcase a “survey of art history” for the interested public, more like a textbook. And many museums still follow this model. Pinar Durgun: Science museums, natural history museums we're so used to seeing reconstructions or copies of things or for instance, things that are like blown out of scale. It's a copy. It's not an original, but it communicates information that you cannot otherwise communicate. So people are on board with those things. But during the 20th century, many history museums trended away from showcasing copies. Museums that built up collections based on copies started giving the copies away to smaller collections or smaller universities as the perceived value of a copy waned and the cultural aura around an original increased. As Durgun says, the visitor's attitude of feeling tricked when presented with a copy might have something to do with the shift – but even that is not clear. Pinar Durgun: There was a recent survey, I think it was 2020 that they did in maybe nine German museums to see how visitors react to copies. And it was very mixed. There was no solid conclusion that people don't like copies or people like copies. It's very much context dependent and how you present information. Pinar Durgun: The only thing that they don't like is being tricked, and I think that's also a challenge for us curators. How do you make people feel like they're not being tricked, and how do you signal that this is a copy? But it’s not like the lion is trying to hide the fact that’s it's a copy. The label on the plaster copy clearly indicates that it is a copy. So if a visitor is feeling tricked, that feeling might be based on a visitor's expectations of what they might see when they enter a museum. Of course, museums are responsible for setting those expectations. Pinar Durgun: When I say for instance, think about a copy of an object that is lost during the war. Because this also happened, right? Some of the Berlin museums got destroyed during World War II. Some of the objects got lost. So what if we only had a copy of this object, and then we have that in the museum. Then their approach changes a little bit. Or if I say, let's say, we have an object in this collection, but it is requested from the country of origin, and it's returned, and we keep a copy of that object in the galleries and talk about this whole process of restitution, then they're like, yes, you know, that makes sense. That would make sense. Or for instance, if we have a copy and then you can go touch this copy. Recently one of our conservators here created a copy of one of these dragon figures from the Ishtar Gate as a touchable copy. The label encourages you to go touch it. And in this case, everyone loves it. Everyone loves to touch things in museums, as you know. So if there's a copy that you can touch, everyone is on board with copies. So it really depends on how you present the copy to the visitors. Here, Durgun is focused on archaeological objects, and underscores that coping indigenous objects or ethnographic collections is a completely different issue. In those cases, the indigenous groups need to be involved in the decision to make copies at all. But even with archaeological objects, the challenge of presenting copies to museum visitors includes understanding different cultural attitudes about the perceived value of copies. Pinar Durgun: The other cultural context is the Mesopotamian, the ancient cultural context. How did people perceive or think about copying in ancient Mesopotamia? So I'm kind of looking into that as well, because in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, an image of a person, or a God or a king is not just an image, it's not just a copy of that thing, it's the thing. Pinar Durgun: It stands in for the thing. So when you make a statue of a king there are all these rituals that go around it, and then the statue becomes the king. So there's a different way of thinking about images and objects in ancient Mesopotamia. So how do I bring in that while presenting these copies. Pinar Durgun: We also treat some of the artworks in the same way. For instance, if you think about the Hokusai Great Wave, right? There are multiple copies of this because it's a wood block print that was produced, in multiple versions. Pinar Durgun: So the British Museum has multiples of them. But when you see the Great Wave in a museum, you treat it as this is an original object, even though you can think of it as like a photocopy in some ways, right? But you don't treat it that way. There’s even a whole industry of immersive exhibitions of famous artists whose work is in the public domain, all displayed as digital copies. Pinar Durgun: If you think about these more commercial, immersive exhibits that are popping up everywhere, like the Monet's Garden or Van Gogh's World or something like this. And then you just go to this exhibit and there's not a single original painting. Everything around you is a copy, is a digital copy. You're looking at screens, and people don't mind paying 20, 25 euros to go see copies. The perceived value of a copy also looks different in a computer. Copying is the native function of digital systems – and a digital copy is a perfect replica. The computer doesn’t have a way to know what is an original file, and I’m not sure what that would even mean. Even the concept of moving a file from one location to another in a computer system, which has a clear physical-world analog, is actually achieved on many systems by copying the file to another location, confirming that the two files are identical, and deleting the first. There seem to be two ways that the digital world intersects copies in museums. The first is translating something in the real world to digital information and back again. A process achieved by digital photographs, by 3D scans and 3D printers. Here the marginal cost of storing, distributing, and copying approaches zero. Pinar Durgun: I feel like with 3D scanning and copying, because it was such an amazing opportunity to create copies and make things more accessible or documenting things, we all jumped on it really fast before even thinking about what are the ethical implications of copying? If the purpose is we are scanning this building, or this, let's say, open air relief because we wanna preserve this information for the future because it's exposed to the weather and the rain and everything. So it may not preserve in let's say 20, 30 years. Then you need to think differently. It is probably good to have some sort of documentation of these objects because, Wars always happen, catastrophes always happen. The National Museum in Brazil had a big fire a couple of years ago, and a lot of objects no longer exist. So if there was a digital scan of them, maybe that could have been good. Pinar Durgun: So it has benefits obviously, but then we have to figure out do the benefits justify the fact that there are all these problematic ways of using copies. As a museum, you legally have the right to scan something. You don't really have to ask anybody.But then some of the objects that are in museums come from other places. And then who is the owner of the scan or the copy or who gets to have a saying on what can be and cannot be copied is also I think a question that we haven't really figured out, both like ethically and legally. Pinar Durgun: You see these replicas in museum shops that basically copy the original objects on display, and I am guilty of this as well. I love buying little replicas of museum objects. But in the museum, it makes money out of this, so what is the ethical implication of this is another question. Do you actually own these things? And do you own the rights to replicate these things, even if it's for education, even if it's not commercial. I find that a difficult question to answer. The second way that the digital world intersects copies in museums is the increasing amount of culture that’s digital-only. The historical record contained in online forum posts or art that was made and distributed digitally doesn’t really have an original. There are now digital tools that recreate scarcity in the digital world, that reintroduce the concept of an original to a digital system. There’s no question who owns a bitcoin for example, and there’s no way to copy your bitcoin and end up with two bitcoins, like you could with any other digital file. NFTs are a way to apply that same scarcity to an arbitrary artwork or piece of information. Pinar Durgun: Ten years ago were we this much obsessed with authenticity? is a question that I'm trying to ask myself, I'm trying to find more writings about it because I feel like this whole, like NFT or this, AI or the deep fakes, I think you wrote about this as well. Pinar Durgun: There is this anxiety around things not being authentic and original. So is that the reason why we feel a little bit anxious about copies? It seems like there has always been some sort of anxiety around copies. Maybe not in these early years of the establishment of the museum collections because then they didn't have original objects, so the only thing they had was the copies. But again, like even from like 20 years ago, there are these writings about original objects having their own aura or you having some sort of like genuine experience with the original, whereas you don't have that with the copy. So where does this leave museums? How should museums present copies in their collections? For Durgun, it might mean actually highlighting the history of the copy itself – how it came to be, what was the reason for making the copies. In other words, valuing the copy as an object with its own history, puncturing the common expectation of museums as public treasure boxes filled with priceless artifacts. Pinar Durgun: I feel like one of the best ways to open up museums and make them a little bit more welcoming is the possibility that the museum would acknowledge the fact that they're not the sole authority. And saying that we don't know what to do with copies. We have these now in our collection and we're trying to find a way to make them useful. But what do you think about them? Pinar Durgun: I think this is a better way of moving forward. Maybe some people hate it, but we should also say that for some people,copies may not have any kind of value. But here are maybe some ways that they can be valuable and useful. So showing these different kind of perspectives on the issue of copies, I think is also a good step forward. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
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Museum Archipelago
1 101. Buzludzha Always Centered Visitor Experience. Dora Ivanova is Using Its Structure to Create a New One. 19:48
Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration. But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation. But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures. In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform. Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience. 01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains” 02:40 The Original Visitor Experience 03:02 Dora Ivanova 03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47 03:35 Entering the Building 04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof 05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves 06:25 The Inner Mosaics 07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show 08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation 09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation 10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform 11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built 12:30 Acting before memory becomes history 13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary 14:05 The Panoramic Corridor 15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society 16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum 17:20 The preservation as proof of change 18:05 “Buzludzha is about change” 19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 101. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience. Opened in 1981 to celebrate the grandeur of the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha is an imposing building, an enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria. Rising out of the back of the disk is a tower, 70 meters high, and flanked by two red stars. Dora Ivanova: It was built to impress. It was built as part of the political propaganda and education as they called it during this time. Its shape looks like a UFO, actually. This is also on purpose because it had to show how the socialist idea is contemporary, it’s the future. Visiting the site, you can still see the care that went into the sightlines – the approach from a winding mountain road, the drama the first time the building comes into view, the photo opportunities of the still-distant building flanked by smaller sculptures. There’s an eerie similarity to some well-designed corners of Disney theme parks, using scale and space and sightlines to transport the visitor – a Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. But the original visitor experience didn’t end outside the building. In those first years during communism, the building received tour groups by bus every four hours. Visitors entered Buzludzha through the front doors underneath the cantilever of the disk. Once inside, they were led up the stairs and into the belly of the building, which makes up an impressive amphitheater surrounded by colorful mosaics of Marx and Lenin, and a variety of Bulgarian communist leaders. At the center of the domed ceiling is a hammer and sickle mosaic whose tiles spell out the words, “Workers of all nations, unite!” But visitors haven’t been able to officially enter Buzludzha for many years. Those front doors are locked and grated with metal bars – the worn concrete covered and covered again in graffiti, like the words “Enjoy Communism” written in the style of the Coca Cola logo and the all caps motto “forget your past”. I’ve visited Buzludzha many times over the past few years, but I’ve never been inside. Until now. Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was open to everybody, but we had to register in before. So it was not open to individual tourism. It was open just to groups who had registered before like a school was coming to visit or the local factories coming and seeing the monument. People will come here and then , they'll go first down the staircase to leave their coats and bags, so you cannot go with them up. And then you'll put something on your shoes because you cannot go on the bright, perfect white marble with your dirty shoes from outside. This is Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova, founder of the Buzludzha Project. When I first met her in 2018 – and presented her story on episode 47 of Museum Archipelago – she was working on a proposal to save this monumental building. But since then, the scope of her work has increased significantly. Today, after more than three years of work recruiting international conservators, stabilizing the building, and basically running a fundraising and PR campaign for the monument, Ivanova hands me a hardhat, unlocks the grate, and leads me inside. Dora Ivanova: click “And be very careful with the staircase and that you don't fall somewhere.” Because there’s no perfect bright white marble underneath visitors' feet anymore. After communism collapsed in Bulgaria in 1989, Buzludzha just sat there, exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures. The regime changed, Bulgaria headed towards a democratic form of government, and people started stealing anything they could from Buzludzha – the glass from the windows and from the red stars, the copper roof and marble sculptures which were sold for scrap, and the perfect white marble perhaps used in a bathroom remodel. Ian Elsner: Buzludzha bathroom! Dora Ivanova: Yeah, many people have it, I’m sure. Buzludzha has been a ruin way longer than it was a functional building and that’s why Ivanova and her team's efforts have been focused on stabilization. Dora Ivanova: As I was walking on the roof, I was thinking, it's like a very ill person who can still get better. And can still be saved and it can still function. And I think if we started this whole initiative like five years later or 10 years later, there'll be very little less of the building to protect. Protecting the building is a complex process, which requires a lot of coordination between technicians, and a deep understanding of the structure. Ivanova jokes that she used to think saving Buzludzha would take just a month of hard work. Dora Ivanova: At the beginning I was thinking, okay, this month I didn't manage to save the building, but next month I'll save it! laughs Today, the blue sky is clearly visible through the roof of the amphitheater, sunlight streaming through the scaffolding erected to preserve the hammer and sickle mosaic on the ceiling. It’s only now that we can safely walk around with hard hats. Dora Ivanova: So metal sheets like this will fall down and a big pieces of wood like, like this there and bigger will fall. And this is why, on the first place, this building is not safe for visitors because anytime something can fall down, and that's why our task was to, we're thinking could take down only what is needed, but it turned out that everything is unstable and you can just touch it and everything's moving. and also this is like not stopping the water in any way. It's not helping the building because we have just like a metal sheet here, but it, the water falls from the three sides of the metal sheet, so you're not stopping kind thing. Dora Ivanova: We had a ceiling out of aluminum, with rings, many rings, which are missing, which was completely stolen from the very beginning. And the top covering was this copper sheet, which was also stolen in the nineties in a very professional way, by the way. This is absolutely hard work. Now we know it. Ian Elsner: You have new respect. Dora Ivanova: Well, I'm very respectful to the thieves. It was very hard! Surrounding the amphitheater are colorful mosaics– this is the inner mosaic circle, we’ll get to the outer mosaics a little later. Yes, here we see Marx and Lenin, but there’s also a mural called The Victory of September 9th, 1944 – when the new Bulgarian communist state was declared, and another called The Fight depicting workers with pitchforks defeating a fire-breathing beast. Dora Ivanova: There was a partisan fight, anti-fascist. And then the idea is that three generations are gathering at Buzludzha and that the fathers were working or fighting for freedom. And then the sons were fighting for socialist freedom. And so they wanted, that's absolutely propaganda stuff. So they connect to the history, which is very well acknowledged and which is very well perceived by the public and show that communism is the final best stage of the entire Bulgarian human history. Dora Ivanova: So something like this. So that they were using everything on the way to make their point. Visitors to Buzludzha in the 1980s would have stood in the amphitheater and watched a narrated light and sound show projected onto the inner mosaics, lighting up certain figures at dramatic moments in the story. Dora Ivanova: So the people will be watching this show of light and sound. They were standing, they were just watching from here, the mosaics. They were also not going to the mosaics to see them up close. So this was the place to experience the building. So there was a voice and there was lightning on the different spots and they were telling for different images. Ian Elsner: And the computer equipment to play this recording. That was all stolen soon after? Dora Ivanova: Yes, absolutely everything, yes. we don't have the video and we don't have the text as well. But Ivanova thinks that it’s only a matter of time until these types of details surface. Up until now, ensuring that the mosaics don’t fall any further and the ceiling won’t collapse has been her team’s main concern. Dora Ivanova: I'm sure over the time we may might get to this information as well. But this is again connected to the topic of interpretation. Until now we are very focused on the structural integrity of the building if it stands and if the music falls. And we had all our attention on those first topics, and I'm sure that's when we dig deeper into the story that we can find information like this. Dora Ivanova: I'm not sure we'll find all of them but we had a lot of archives, mainly drawings and mainly construction papers. So not really a lot about the mosaics or the artwork because it was a private archive and not so much about the visitors' experience. Dora Ivanova: There are three tour guides, who were working here who are telling the stories. And one of the lady who wrote down everything, she knew it until today. Like, all the words and how it was and what. So we have a little bit from that. These tour guides, using the building as intended, would have been reading from a script that the communist party approved – that version of history where communist bulgaria was the end of history. But Ivanova and her team realized that the preserved building could host the stories of the people in the audience, presenting as many narratives about communism as there were lived experiences. Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was different. In the beginning I was thinking, so now we go there and we preserve this building and it'll go very nice and I'll be very happy because the building will be preserved. But with the time I realized it's actually not the motivation line and the purpose line a nd the idea of the whole thing. Dora Ivanova: Of course, we want to preserve this building. But the goal is not the entire purpose of the journey. So the journey is the purpose. Now she recognizes that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures. Dora Ivanova: What we really want is a storytelling platform and that's the building tells stories and this is the best place to tell these stories and to allow the different views, to allow the criticism to allow different points of view. Dora Ivanova: I mean, for some it was the labor of their life, and of course they're touched in some way to it. For others it was the most terrible time. And that's okay. And both things are okay and they can live simultaneously in the same world. So we don't, doesn't need to destroy the one or the other narrative. Collecting stories from all over Bulgaria conjures an interesting symmetry with Buzludzha’s original intent – as a celebration of Bulgarian communism, the idea was that all of Bulgaria would contribute to the construction. Dora Ivanova: There are so many different actions that they did in order to make it a national big initiative. So first it was funded by the people. So it could be funded by the party. Dora Ivanova: This was not a problem for the party, but they decided everybody should participate. Not everybody can work on site, so everybody should donate. So it was not really a choice, but I think everything back then was working more or less like this. Yeah. So it was from the one side ordinary thing, but from the other side. Yes, it was, mandatory donation or just taken out from the people. And I even know that some children were collecting paper and selling it for reuse, like to recycle paper so that they can get the money and donated for Buzludzha. Dora Ivanova: And the second thing is that there were 6,000 people working and out of them 500 were the, solders so there were military forces which constructed it., there were many people who were craftsman. But there were also a lot of volunteers. Again, “volunteers.” laughs Of course, the critical difference is that this time, while anyone can contribute, nobody has to. Ivanova and her team have been gathering interviews, oral histories, and anything that could be presented in a future interpretive center. And like stabilizing the roof of the building, the team feels an urgency to act before memory becomes history. Dora Ivanova: We have to take the stories before the people are gone. And do have this entire big project, I'm sure with this interpretation and analysis and historical research. But we don't have the time because we have to take the stories now. That's why we are doing this oral history campaign and those will be major stories that we are going to tell inside of the future building. But it’s critical that the storytelling platform provided by the future interpretive center doesn’t end with the collapse of communism in Bulgaria – because that narrows the focus and complicates the politics of preserving Buzludzha in the Bulgarian context. Before Ivanova started the project, the building’s fate was presented as a binary: destroy it as a symbol of the collapsed communist government, or restore it to its former glory as a rallying cry to reinstate the system that built it. Charting a different path means acknowledging the decades since the collapse and the need for a space to reflect on the communist period. That’s why the team is also carefully documenting what happened since – including the graffiti. Dora Ivanova: The general idea is definitely that the graffiti will be saved. And if all the graffiti or not, it's a matter of further discussions. But I think this is also something nice on the way that we don't have like a super fixed idea. This is how it's going to be. And this is exactly the target. Is exactly the function. This is exactly the way it's going to look like. But this is, again, a process and it develops according to needs, ideas, functions, people,partners, and interests. After the original visitors watched the narrated light show, they would have climbed stairs to the outer walkway around the amphitheater, called The Panoramic Corridor. Here, with giant windows facing the rest of Bulgaria, visitors would have contemplated what they just watched and connected it to the familiar landscape. It’s windy out here since there’s no glass anymore, but the views of the surrounding mountains and valleys are beautiful – almost like a real life background to a propaganda poster. Opposite the windows are the outer mosaics. Unlike the inner mosaics of Communist figures and dramatic battles which were dyed with artificial paints to make them colorful – there’s a lot of red as you might imagine – the outer mosaics are made of natural colors from Bulgaria’s rivers – they have a grayscale dignity to them. Here the titles of the murals are things like The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society. Dora Ivanova: So not only the people had to donate their time and money, "voluntarily" but also the nature. So the mosaic stones from the outside mosaic ring are from all the different rivers in Bulgaria, so that the nature gives it's gift and participate in this project. So this is The Care For Next Generation. This is the name of the mosaic and it's actually even the name of the entire, project for preserving the mosaics because this is the also our idea care for the next generation. So we have the mothers and the children. There's one very pretty chicken there. Dora Ivanova: Yeah, so this is one of the unpolitical mosaics: this is The Role of The Women in Our Society – a very nice mosaic. So we have the woman with many hands because she has many roles and has to do many things. So she's concerned. The woman lover and the woman caretaker. And the woman everything possible.The woman who wants to run from all this stuff cuz it's too much. It’s so easy for me to imagine this Panoramic Corridor as part of a future museum at Buzludzha. The connection between the past inside the building and the future of the country, spread out beyond the windows, makes me shiver – not just because of the wind. Even though I didn’t choose to become a Bulgarian citizen until a few years ago, I can feel the potential standing in front of the open windows pointing in all directions. My mom is Bulgarian, but I was raised in America. My choice to connect with Bulgaria was future-looking – I’m interested in where Bulgaria is going and I want to help where I can. But I’ve been struck by the general cultural unwillingness to talk about the communist period that defined the country until fairly recently. The physical remains of that era and ideology are scattered around the country, but for many Bulgarians, they remain in the background – overgrown and unmovable – a kind of cynical proof that not much will change. Which is why what Ivanova and her team have done is so impressive. She says that the visible signs of recent preservation has actually gotten people to pay attention for the first time – to think that there is movement, and this physical proof has made people more likely to come forward with stories or offer to help. Dora Ivanova: You change people's ideas and you involve people and people find motivation and inspiration and, and they multiply, multiply the, the effect. So, I think that the building is the tool to create this impactful processes in this site. But I think this is also the only thing that can keep you motivated While there is a brutal finality in what Buzluzdha was built for, a way to present the final triumphant stage of history – a finality that turned out to be brittle, the way that Ivaona and her team are approaching it gives it the flexibility to mean whatever Bulgarians will find important. Dora Ivanova: And so at the end of the story, I think, it's about values, it's about change. I think even mostly about change. It's about the changing nature of everything which is related to humans and to humans, beliefs and human understandings. It's such a powerful place to tell these stories. And also with the traces of time, with the traces of, if you want to religious somehow communist ideology, but with all the graffiti with all the comments of the people, with the time, with all the artwork, which was created already here, which will be created here in the future. When you have this visibility and the, especially, this is a very visible thing. We cannot deny it. Yeah. And I think somewhere that is the motivation and the meaning for me. Thanks to the efforts of Ivanova and her Buzludzha Foundation, you’ll soon be able to go inside Buzludzha. Exactly what you’ll find inside is still being worked on, but it will all be in a future episode of this show. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum. As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name? And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview. So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs Archipelago Museum. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Why is Ian in Finland? 00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days 01:30 Same Name 03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum 04:05 Naomi Nordstedti 04:30 Life on the Archipelago 06:04 Opening the Museum 06:54 Boats 07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition 08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes 10:40 Thanks For Listening 10:54 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 100. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum. Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”. Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland” But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago. Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…” When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands? And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck. Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland. Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ” Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left” For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, instead of my podcast. It didn’t really bother me – well maybe a little – but no, it didn’t really bother me. Archipelago is a great word, and the museum was all the way in Finland, and it certainly was around for longer. But as my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. I would wonder what they were up to. I wondered if they had heard of my podcast. Maybe they came across it one day? Maybe I was annoying them with my similar name. Every few months, I would think to contact the museum, to highlight the similarity and hopefully make a new friend – only to remember that they didn’t have an email address. An old email address, from an archived version of their website, bounced back with an undeliverable error. The more I thought about it, the more it sank in: the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview. A few years later, with help from those of you who have supported the show through Club Archipelago, visiting the museum finally became possible. I decided to hop on two planes, book a rental car, spend a night in an airport hotel in Helsinki, drive down the coast, and visit the Archipelago Museum in person. Even if there was nobody there willing to talk to me, it would still make for an interesting 100th episode. Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left. Then your destination will be on the right.” Field Audio - Ian: All right. This is the Archipelago Museum. Field Audio - GPS: “Your destination is on the right.” Field Audio - Ian: “ Wow. I think it's open and I see a WC sign! Okay, I'm gonna park where it says parking. The Archipelago Museum is a long, old stone barn on the Gulf of Finland that’s packed full of boats. Field Audio - Ian : *walking over stones” Field Audio - Ian: “How are you?” Field Audio - Naomi: I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Welcome. Field Audio - Ian: “I’m very good, thank you! I would love to visit the museum. One ticket, please.” Field Audio - Naomi: Yes, you are welcome. That’s 5 euros. With card or cash? This is Naomi. Naomi Nordstedt: “Hi, my name is Naomi and I work at the Skärgårdsmuseet Rönnäs [Rönnäs Archipelago Museum]. So as the cashier, guide, whatever.” Naomi told me that the museum usually gets one or two visitors from the US every summer. Naomi Nordstedti: How did you find us? Or like how did you, how did you come to Finland of all places? Field Audio - Ian: “Well, to visit this museum!” Naomi Nordstedti: Oh wow! The Archipelago Museum tells the human story of life on the archipelago off the coast of Finland. The main area of the exhibition underscores the centrality of surviving among the remote islands by fishing, seal hunting, and cattle breeding. The main idea is Naomi Nordstedti: To see how people lived within the archipelago and like how the archipelago has sustained the people, while the people sustain the archipelago. The sea is very important. That's the most important thing. And it, since it's very like the people who live here live very scattered cuz it's a bit remote. We have couple neighbors, but then to one side there's nothing but forest for like kilometers. So you become closer with the people who live close by. Sometimes you have to go a bit further to meet. And that becomes also part of like, you meet up with bigger groups of people a couple times a year because you know, you might not see them that much otherwise. And also just as a side point, most people here have a boat. Most people sail. That's just a thing. You do that here. People have been making this part of the archipelago their home for 500 years, and the reasons always come back to geography. Naomi Nordstedti: We know there's been a medieval village here since the 13th century. Over here, there used to be an inland lake. This is all, there's no water over here now. And so like the water line is over here. Which means that there used to be back in 1414 or 1421, there have been records that people used to live here and this used to be like a bigger, for that time, bigger town, because this made it possible for commerce to happen way more since this led to the sea. The medieval village disappeared and over the centuries, various families lived in the area, surviving, using boats, and building barns. By the mid 1970s, the stone barn we’re in now sat abandoned. Naomi Nordstedti: This building was left and it was like, nobody owns it. Nobody was like, just kind of living in it. It's a beautiful building. So then it was just decided that a lot of people like around here were like, well, what should we do with this building? It's a beautiful building. It's a shame to just let it go to waste. So this is the guy who was like, hey, should we start a museum? Cuz he made boats. And they were like, yeah. There was a lot of, support from the local community and from the other people. 1985 is when we opened. There's a lot of beautiful things there and so much history that isn't really known about.It's only known about like from families and within families, and they tell the stories. So it's nice that other people get to see too. As the museum’s brochure says, “the boat occupies the central position in being the prime tool of the population.” Naomi Nordstedti: There is information about how to build boats, how boats have been built throughout the centuries, and our collection of the working boats that have been used here in the archipelago. Most of the stories that the local community tells about the archipelago are indeed told through boats – school boats, the differences between the boats that year-rounders used compared with the people who built summer cottages, the engine development and design through the 20th century, and the way that boats were used to used to smuggle alcohol during the period of Finish prohibition 1919 to 1932. Naomi Nordstedti: People in Finland have never drunk as much alcohol as they did during the prohibition. So it did not work, but it was interesting. This is how they smuggled alcohol. They filled these canisters with pure alcohol. Most of them from Estonia or some from Germany as well. You can fit about 10 liters in one of those. Then they filled those canisters, this whole thing, filled them up like that and then they took the rope, attached it to the boat, and then went, and then if they got caught by the authorities. Like you can see over there on that picture they'd cut the rope and then this thing would fall to the bottom. And then they have this little thing. So this is a buoy. It's attached to , a bag of salt or sugar, which means that they would go to to bottom. And then the sugar or salt would dissolve in a couple days. So jump up again and they could recover. Yeah, they had a lot of clever ideas. The Archipelago Museum is only about 500 meters from the coast, so I ended my long journey by walking over to see the archipelago for myself. Field Audio - Ian: *walking over stones” Field Audio - Ian: So here I am on the Gulf of Finland, overlooking the archipelago overlooking some islands. Extending out into the distance, some boats and people in them, some islands that are not much more than just rocks… it’s a good place to think about 100 episodes. Doing museum archipelago has helped me expand my understanding of museums – far more than I expected when I started work on episode one. It allowed me to have conversations with people at tiny museums – museums so small they haven’t been built yet – and giant museums where change seems impossible. It enabled a new relationship with guides, exhibit designers, and the visiting public. Walking through almost 100 museums for this project, it’s still tempting to see each museum as an island – every episode, it’s easy to focus on just one museum, to examine their unique collection or an updated exhibit. But zooming out helps too and is useful in its own way. Anyone’s local museum can be a beloved fixture, but museums as an institution have a centuries-long history undergirding white supremacist, colonialist, and racist ideologies and helping them flourish. Interrogating museums as a whole hopefully allows us to better recognize colonial structures embedded within an individual one. We can’t forget the power that museums hold. And by examining the larger forces acting on this rocky landscape of museums, we have the chance, if we’re careful, to wield that power for better uses than the ones that created museums in the first place. Thanks for joining me on the journey so far. I’m so excited for where we get to voyage to next. Thanks for listening to 100 episodes of Museum Archipelago!…
The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players. But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting. Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process. In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside. Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0) Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin 01:23 Joe Kalicki 02:06 Namco Museum 03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games 04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith 05:25 Occupy White Walls 07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins 10:11 Animal Crossing 11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums 12:44 Joe Kalicki’s new podcast, Panoply 13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉 13:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 99. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games. The central interpretive throughline, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry through 50 individual games: from Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT to the latest console and PC games. But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with original controllers. The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games their year of their release: games like Asteroids or Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment, early home computer games like Oregon Trail live inside your parents home office, while the home-console classics like Super Mario Bothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early 90s suburban home in the U.S. So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum — but what about putting a museum in a video game? Joe Kalicki: I think we're in a very important place right now where we need to assess the value of fully digital educational experiences in the context of the museum. But particularly I also wanna explore the value for educating everyday people on how to appreciate and interact with brick and mortar museums as well. This is interaction designer Joe Kalicki. Joe Kalicki: Hello, my name is Joe Kalicki. I'm an interaction designer, musician, and podcaster. Kalicki remembers the first time he encountered a museum-like space in a video game. Joe Kalicki: In the late nineties, the Namco company published a series of games called Namco Museum, and this was earnestly the first attempt to create mainstream historical documentation for video games and it’s a very pivotal example for me in thinking about digital museum spaces. Namco Museum was a digital version of the Computer Games Museum, but all the video games presented in the collection, like PacMan and Dig Dug, were originally made for Namco arcades. Joe Kalicki: They actually had a fully 3D-rendered museum space. You would walk into the front, into the atrium where a receptionist would greet you. And then you would walk into the main hall and go into the specific wing of the gallery for a particular game. And you would walk around this space and you could do things like view concept art for the game or view documents and artifacts related to the game. Joe Kalicki: And then of course you could go on and you could play the game. There was theming in each of the wings to represent something about the game itself. And as a, I guess I was probably six or seven when I played this, this was mind blowing to me. Not only was this game taking the time to put me into a place and contextualize these games that I was playing, it provided so much more value and actually frankly, kickstarted me really deeply caring about the history of video games and the history of these things that I was interacting with rather than just hopping in and playing a round of Dig Dug, and then turning it off. Playing Namco Museum today, it’s easy to see the match between a museum space and the video game technology of the 1990s. White gallery walls are easy to render, and navigating through sparse 3D rooms and hallways is a prerequisite for any first-person shooter game. And white walls with the occasional object is all it takes to read as “museum” and – as we talk a lot about on this show – “museum” conjures up a whole lot of cultural signifiers about how we should treat the information and objects presented. The fact that Namco Museum decided to present its games in a virtual gallery space was a way to signal that these video games were important – a statement that these games were worth engaging with like historic or artistic object. A 2021 project by game designer and programming instructor Kate Smith called Museum of Memories delibrary employs a gallery space to signal important objects. Joe Kalicki: Kate Smith and a couple other developers created Museum of Memories as a project for a game jam. She had an open invitation to send in an item that people cared about. Send in an audio recording of yourself saying why you care about it. And then she put together a very straightforward museum space: classic pedestals and wall mounts and whatnot. Joe Kalicki: And somebody would send in a reference photo or, so a cookbook, for example, and Kate and her team would create a 3D version of that item, put it on display and you can listen to why these objects are meaningful to the people that submitted them. Then there are experiences that invite the player to create their own museum space – not just contributing objects and stories. Kalicki points to Occupy White Walls, where people construct a museum and fill it with art – then invite other players to come inside. Joe Kalicki: It's a free-to-play game that was released a couple years ago and essentially you are dropped onto a plot of land and you have a building and it's kind of a rinky dink little art gallery, and you can essentially remodel it and take art that either people have uploaded into the game or exists in the public domain. And you can essentially decorate and design your space. And you could totally build a bunch of white walls and throw things up that you like. Joe Kalicki: You can do it as densely or sparsely as you like. You can create sort of fantastical spaces and then present the work that you're placing into the 3D space in a way that pleases you, or maybe you want to create some sort of lack of harmony, and dissonance and you know, freak people out. And the really cool thing about the game is that you can hop into other people's galleries and you can go take a look. Joe Kalicki: And I checked it out last night, for example, and I teleported to somebody's gallery and there were five or six other real people walking around and looking at things and chatting about the art. And the cool thing about it too, is there would be,something that I would've formally a piece of art that I would've associated with a Tumblr or a Deviant Art back in the day next to a Caravaggio or other Renaissance classics and whatnot. In the same way that Roller Coaster Tycoon – a video game from the late 90s – encouraged players to think deeply about the logistics of designing a theme park, Occupy White Walls gives players control over a museum gallery in a way that’s really difficult to achieve in real life. But by doing so, it asks players to think critically about museums in the real world. At a certain point, the cultural signifier of a museum space could become limiting – if designers and developers can make anything at all, why make white walls and display cases? The latest versions of the Assassin's Creed series of video games feature something called a Discovery Tour. In the Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins, which takes place just before the Roman occupation of Egypt in about 40 BCE, the video game’s players – free from their assenination duties – walk around the crowded ancient cities of Alexandria or Memphis on a guided tour. Joe Kalicki: And this era, which the game has built out for the purpose of you running around and, you know, killing people just to put it simply – they stripped away all of that and your avatar, your character could walk around the world and basically take a guided tour of basically every nook and cranny of Egyptian society at that time. Joe Kalicki: So you could walk into a city and a nice, documentary style narrator would talk to you about the city and what the various classes of people would do in the city. You'd walk through the markets and observe that. But as you reach certain locatio ns, if you would go into a tomb for example, and there would be a sarcophagus, well, an image viewer would pop up and you'd be able to look through some of the high resolution photos that were used for reference modeling or other purposes. In the Discovery Tour, the cultural signifier of a museum is replaced with the cultural signifier of a narrated guided tour. The level of detail – both in terms of historical research and digital recreation – is the primary selling point of the main game. But since studios had to put in all this work anyway, it’s not too much of a stretch to build an educational module on that same foundation. Joe Kalicki: Every game that's created there's something called a like a content bible or development bible, or, there's various names for it. But the idea is it's kind of like the master guide for the world. And it helps when you're basing your game in an area of the world that's been heavily researched and documented and actually existed that can become very fleshed out very quickly. Especially these triple A where there's many, many, many millions of dollars, budgets, exceeding massive blockbuster films going into these games. Joe Kalicki: So, why not create some additional value out of it? Personally, I would love if companies like this could release modes like that either for free or in some context where, yeah, you're not getting to do the thing where you're running around and, jumping off of ledges and assassinating people, but you can access this big, beautiful world that all this work went into. We’re probably already at a place where museums in video games are easier to access than museums themselves. Since its initial series release in 2001, the popular video game Animal Crossing has featured a village museum where players can place culturally or aesthetically valuable items that they find in the world of anthropomorphic animal. Joe Kalicki: for a child thinking about this in a, in a real, ground level situation where you are not a person that has the lifetime and historical context of what museums are. Joe Kalicki: It's the early 2000s, and you're playing one of the first Animal Crossing games: you may or may not have even been to a museum yet. And you're going around the world and you're finding precious items that you care about. You’re excited that you caught the butterfly or you dug up a fossil or a rhinoceros gave you a painting or whatever it is. Joe Kalicki: And when you donate those to the museum and then you see them represented and you see them respected and displayed proudly there's that may be a formative experience for someone even knowing what a museum is. And so that person then goes on a field trip or they travel with their family or whatever, and they're gonna go to a museum and they're gonna say, somebody had to find all this stuff. Somebody had to bring it here. And they had to decide that this belonged in a museum rather than keeping it in their house. And one final point blurring the line between visitor and player. All of these games rely on video game engines – the foundational code on top of which these games are built. Occupy White Walls uses the Unreal Engine, while Kate Smith used Unity to render realistic museum spaces in Museum of Memories. These engines, designed and tweaked for video games, are also the fastest and cheapest ways to develop interactive exhibits for museums. I use Unity for exhibits I develop because that gives me access to a whole toolbox of solved problems (like realistic lighting, 3D model support, and a stable tech stack) meaning I don’t need to worry about making a custom solution from the ground up. At the Computer Games Museum in Berlin, even the interactives that aren’t the video game artifacts – interactives displaying information like text and images – are built on a game engine. And the interactives at your local museum probably are too. I wasn't able to find a game in the Computer Games Museum that featured a museum-like space: so I could have the delightful recursion of being in a museum in a video game in a museum. But with more and more museum-like spaces popping up in video games, it’s only a matter of time. Joe Kalicki is starting a podcast called Panoply – the first episode releases on August 15. The podcast is about learning through oblique strategies and will feature interviews with musicians, academics, and historians and is not afraid to be obscure and esoteric. You can subscribe now and listen to the trailer by visiting the awesome URL: panoply.space. This has been Museum Archipelago. The next episode of Museum Archipelago is episode 100. To celebrate this milestone, I want to hear from you! I’ve set up a place on the internet where you can send a voice memo to be included in the very special 100th episode. There, you’ll be presented with two questions: one, where do you listen to Museum Archipelago, and two what museum would you like to hear about on a future episode of the podcast. You can answer by recording yourself, or just writing in a text field. Visit museumarchieplago.com/party to join the celebration. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks for listening! Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast, guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Thanks so much to everyone who supports the show by being a member of Club Archipelago. You can join them by going to http://jointhemuseum.club. Thanks again for helping make this show possible. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.…
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Museum Archipelago
When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal’s construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal. Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she’s determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered around Panama as a point of connection from pre-Colonial times to the present day. In this episode, González describes the geographic destiny of the Isthmus of Panama, how America’s ownership of the Canal physically divided the country, and how her team is developing galleries covering Panama’s recent history. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Panama Canal's Politically Sensitive History 01:20 Ana Elizabeth González, Executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum 01:35 Opening of the Panama Canal Museum in 1997 02:44 Making the Museum About Panama, Not Just The Canal 03:10 Geography is Destiny 03:30 The Isthmus of Panama as a Point of Connection 04:20 A Brief History 04:50 French Attempt at a Canal 05:10 Treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla 06:30 Construction of the Canal 07:00 "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll" 08:00 Martyrs' Day 08:50 Work In Progress: Galleries of Panama's Recent History 09:10 Panama's Recent History, Briefly 11:10 The Museum's Future 11:15 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉 12:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 98. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned in school about the Panama Canal told a narrow story. Ana Elizabeth González: The history of the canal that was told here was told in a way that was very politically sensitive at the time. So it didn't want to ruffle any feathers.. it's mentioned in schools, but not in depth. Up until 1979, the United States fully controlled the Panama Canal and a 5 mile zone on either side, and until 1999, the United States jointly controlled the Canal with Panama. The presence of the United States, and the politics of the Canal, meant that the safest story to tell was one that was mostly focused on the technological feat of building it. Ana Elizabeth González: The history was very carefully constructed so that it praised the engineering feat of the United States, but it completely ignored the fact that Panama was home to people from 97 different countries to build this Canal, which causes such a diversity in our country. Ana Elizabeth González is now Executive director of the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City, Panama. Ana Elizabeth: Hello. My name is Ana Elizabeth González and I'm executive director of the Panama canal museum, El Museo Del Canal. González became director in 2020, but the Panama Canal Museum itself opened in 1997, two years before control of the Canal was returned to Panama. The museum – a non-profit which is not government funded – was created out of a hope that, among all the changes, Pamana’s complex relationship to the Canal would not be forgotten. Ana Elizabeth González: I was in school at the time, but, I remember it was, I think the then President of Panama and the Mayor and a lot of other people that created the board of trustees and I think it was the idea that this history of this struggle to gain our land and to find our sovereignty and the generational struggle that had been going on. There was a fear that it would have gotten lost in memory or forgotten. So I think that the museum back then was created to preserve and study and research everything surrounding the Canal history and promoting the education of what an impact it had. So for González, the Panama Canal Museum is really a museum about Panama. Ana Elizabeth González: I think people come with the preconception that the museum is just going to be about how the Canal works and how the locks open fill with water. And we don't really have that in-depth here. That's why the Canal has a visitor center that explains how it works in terms of technology and engineering. But it's something we just brush over here because we deep dive into the history of Panama as a point of connection. And as this route that changed the world. The first gallery of the museum begins long before the Canal and highlights the unique features of Panama’s geography: a small isthmus that’s both the only way to travel between the North and South American continents by land and also the narrowest land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ana Elizabeth González: We've been a trade route or over a route of connection. Ever since Panama – well, the territory sort of resurfaced from, from the oceans, because we were always a bridge between north and south America for animal species and then indigenous peoples. So we've always sort of been a point of trade and contact both culturally and commercially. You enter, the first exhibition space, which is the sort of emergence of Panama as a land in this sort of Omni globe that we have, and you see how it connects both landmasses of North and South America. And you go through the exhibition towards the pre-colonial living traditions, and what Panama was like before the Spanish colonization, then the importance of Panama as part of the Spanish crown and monarchy until 1821. After three hundred years as part of the Spanish monarchy, the isthmus’s geography started to look even more useful to outside interests during the 19th century, as global trade started to pick up. Here, goods and passengers could bypass a much longer and much more dangerous journey around the Strait of Magellan on the southern tip of South America. In 1855, a railway was built across the Isthmus, facilitating the movement of people and goods in time for a wave of the California gold rush. Ana Elizabeth González: And then in 1881, if I'm correct, the French after the success of the Suez Canal, the French chose to build a canal through Panama. Unfortunately, due to yellow fever and other diseases and badly managed funds, the enterprise did not succeed, but it was bought from the French by the United States through the treaty of, Hay–Bunau-Varilla, which we signed upon getting our independence as a country. The 1903 treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla granted the United States complete ownership over a 50 mile long slice of land that was to be the Canal. In the gallery, visitors walk through a hallway that’s completely covered in words from that treaty. Powerful words like “perpetuity” and “authority” look down on them. Ana Elizabeth González: The United States had rights for… well for forever it wasn't even a question of whether or not they owned it. They owned the land where it was going to be built and the land where they had to operate and the land where they had to create their offices and their ports. Back then the country was completely divided, through a gap that was considered the canal zone. And that was United States territory and Panimanians were not free to wander into it, and it did separate the country in a massive way. And that treaty, which no Panamanian negotiated or signed, was actually the seed of our struggle with international relations during the whole 20th century until the CanalI was transferred back to Panama in 1999. But first the massive task of actually constructing the Canal through that slice of land. The project required enormous numbers of people, and Canal administrators tried to entice workers from all over the world to take part in the project – yet another way that this isthmus was at the forefront of a more globalized world. Ana Elizabeth González: We had people obviously from the Caribbean, we had people from Europe. We had people from Asia. So there's a big mix and such a big diversity that came with the construction of the Canal.And many of them remained in the country after the Canal was built and they made their life here, but what is also not known is the amount of racism and discrimination that these people faced. Because in order to work in the Panama Canal construction, you were assigned either a gold roll or a silver roll. So the payroll was either you were paid in American gold or in Panamanian silver and the American gold was reserved for white Americans. And sometimes there were some exceptions with some Europeans, but the remainder of the population whether you were Asian, Caribbean, European, or even Panamanian, you were paid in Panamanian silver. The living standards for silver roll were appalling. The law even, because I'm assuming some of it was important from the Jim Crow laws at the time, they had segregated entrances for silver roll and gold roll. The schools were segregated. And this is a history that not many people in Panama or elsewhere know. And I think a lot of that ripples into certain racial tendencies and racism that permeates through our society today. After taking people through the construction of the Canal, the museum’s exhibits end abruptly in 1964, with an event known as Martyrs' Day in Panama. Ana Elizabeth González: And it ends in 1964 because we had a very significant moment in history at the time where students from a high school in Panama peacefully protested with their flag towards the Canal Zone. And there was a scuffle, there were a lot of tensions and in the end, many of the students died, shot by Canal Zone police, or otherwise, and the flag was torn. And at that moment, Panama became the first country to break diplomatic relations with the United States. And we still commemorate that day as the day of the Martyrs' that day. And that was a turning point in the negotiations of a new treaty. For the Canal and that's where we are at the moment, because the next exhibition rooms are completely empty at the moment. We're continuing to renovation plans for those. González and her team are developing the galleries that feature the rest of the story, up until the present day – this includes the Torrijos–Carter Treaties in 1977 which defined the handover of the Canal at the end of the 20th century, and the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. When the new galleries open, it will be the first time much of this history has been presented in a Panamanian museum. Ana Elizabeth González: Yeah, it's our next challenge. Many people may not know this, in 1968 we had a coup d'état. the government was deposed and we had a military regime and it's a history that not many Panimanians talk about till this day. There's still a lot of sensibilities I think that could be hurt, from it because there are still people around that were part of both the military regime and families of the victims it disappeared. But it was a big part of our history and it was a big part of the negotiations for the canal because, general Omar Torrijos who signed the Canal treaty with president Carter from the United States was in fact that a dictator and not many, not everybody agrees on that terminology, but, he eliminated political parties. He eliminated media that was not government controlled. We had another dictator until 89 when the United States following a clause from the treaty from 1903, and also 77, which said, they can invade Panama at any point where they, when they think that Canal is being endangered, invaded the country to a lot of human losses, but managed to successfully arrest our dictator. All of that is a very difficult history to share. And I think that's why maybe in 97 when the museum was created. It was still too soon. But it's something that we're definitely going to tell now. And I think it's going to be a really important dialogue with the people's Panama to remember maybe parts of history that are hurtful to remember, maybe embarrassing to remember, but that need to be remembered in order not to be repeated. So that's our next step. González says that the new galleries featuring recent history will be open in September 2022. In the century since the Canal was built, the globe has only become more connected – and the Canal remains the world’s biggest trade route. González is sure that Panama’s place as a global point of connection will only grow – and wants to make sure there’s a museum that tells that story. Ana Elizabeth González: I think it's important for people to know the Canal is not just a recent history. To know that Panama has been a link between peoples and. cultures and points of trade since we've existed is quite important. We've been geographically blessed and such a small country plays such a big impact in the world that it's an honor for me to direct the museum that tells that story. This has been Museum Archipelago. Museum Archipelago is turning 100 and you’re invited! Whether this is your first episode or your 98th, I’m so happy you’re listening. How I want to celebrate is by hearing from you. To do that, I’ve set up a place on the internet where you can send a voice memo to be included in the 100th episode. There, you’ll be presented with two questions: one, where do you listen to Museum Archipelago, and two what museum would you like to hear about on a future episode of the podcast. You can answer by recording yourself, or just writing in a text field. Visit museumarchieplago.com/party to join the celebration. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks for listening! Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast, guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Thanks so much to everyone who supports the show by being a member of Club Archipelago. You can join them by going to http://jointhemuseum.club. Thanks again for helping make this show possible. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.…
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Museum Archipelago
1 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does. 14:58
As the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn’t make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered. But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Nixon somberly reciting those words. It looks like real historic footage, but it’s fake. Artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund used the text of the original address and media manipulation techniques like machine learning to create the synthetic Nixon for a film called In Event of Moon Disaster . It anchors an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen . In this episode, Panetta and Burgund discuss how they created In Event of Moon Disaster as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 July 18th, 1969 00:40 The Safire Memo 01:38 Clip From In Event of Moon Disaster 02:30 Nixon’s Telephone Call 03:00 What is Deepfake? 03:30 Halsey Burgund 04:06 Francesca Panetta 04:30 How They Did It 04:50 Why This Speech? 06:02 Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City 07:05 Misinformation By Editing 09:53 Misinformation and Medium 10:23 Museums as Trustworthy Institutions 11:27 What Would a “Deepfake Museum Gallery” Look Like? 13:43 In Event of Moon Disaster 14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 97. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. On July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the Apollo 11 astronauts who were hurtling towards the moon, on their way to be the first humans to land on its surface, didn’t make it to the moon – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Nixon would have to address the nation. So Nixon’s speech writer, William Safire wrote an address titled “In Event of Moon Disaster.” It’s a short, haunting speech – the first time that billions of people on earth would learn about the failed Apollo 11 mission. Safire notes that before delivering the speech, Nixon “should telephone each of the widows-to-be.” Widows-to-be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t be dead yet, just stranded on the moon with no hope of recovery. Halsey Burgund: The astronauts are still alive. I mean that – every time I even think of that, I just get these sort of chills. They not only would have been alive when the speech was delivered, but they could have actually heard it. Then, back on earth, Nixon would have soberly walked up to a television camera, adjusted the speech written on his stack of papers, looked right at the camera lens and said. Richard Nixon: “Good evening my fellow Americans. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there's no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” But Nixon never said these words. On July 20th, 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar lander successfully touched down, intact on the surface of the moon with enough fuel to get safely back to earth. So instead of addressing the nation in a sobering speech, Nixon called the astronauts directly in a more awkward but definitely preferable phone call. Richard Nixon: “Hello Neil and Buzz, I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, And there certainly has to be the most historic telephone call I've ever made. I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have – every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.” The reason why it’s so hard to tell these two Nixons apart – the real one and the fake one – is because of a technology known today as deepfake. Halsey Burgund: Deepfake comes from the combination of deep, which is short for deep learning in this case, which is an artificial intelligence technique, and then fake, of course, meaning, you know, something not true. So deepfake is a representation through audio and video of an event, of a person, doing or saying something that never actually happened in reality. And the addendum to that is that it almost always happens without the consent of the individual who is depicted. The first Nixon, the fake one, was created by Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta as part of a film they titled In Event of Moon Disaster. In Event of Moon Disaster is the centerpiece of a new exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Halsey Burgund: Hello. My name is Halsy Burgund. I am an artist and a creative technologist, and one of my most recent projects is called In Event of Moon Disaster, which looks at a deepfake synthetic media technology. And it uses the Apollo 11 moon landing mission as a vehicle to explore this new technology. Francesca Panetta: Hello, my name is Francesca Panetta. I am an immersive director, artist and journalist, and I am the co-director of In Event of Moon Disaster, a film and an installation about misinformation and deep fakes and an alternative history of the moon landing. Panetta and Burgund made In the Event of Moon Disaster by combining footage of Richard Nixon giving an unrelated speech and employing video techniques to replicate the movement of Nixon’s mouth and lips. Combined with the contributions of a voice actor and some deep learning techniques to synthetically make the audio sound more like Nixon, the whole video is quite believable and striking. Halsey Burgund: We've thought a lot about how our project needs to create misinformation to a certain extent, but then it needs to identify what it has done. We need to wrap the whole project in a context, which does the best we can to ensure that people don't leave the experience thinking that two astronauts were stranded on the moon and their bodies are still there and they, and they died. That is the context of our piece. And that is what the speech that Nixon delivers – fake Nixon, synthetic Nixon delivers. The directors choose to use this particular speech by Nixon for the project in part because it relates to moon landings – already a deep well of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and because the speech is non-political. Francesca Panetta: When you are face swapping someone onto a video where they haven't consented. Yeah. It is a deepfake. In terms of putting words into someone's mouth it felt like these were words that he could well have ended up speaking. And so it kind of didn't feel so, so morally problematic. And we weren't trying to deceive the public that the moon landing never happened. Again, these were ethical questions we had around not wanting to see more misinformation about the moon landing of which there is a considerable amount already. In Event of Moon Disaster appears in the middle of the Deepfake Exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image. After visitors have seen historical context about media manipulation, they walk into what appears to be a 1960s living room. Halsey Burgund: There's a vintage television from 1960 something. And on that TV is playing our film and it's an old CRT TV, and there's a couch in front of it that you can sit down on. There’s a carpet, a shaggy carpet. And then you can sit there and watch the whole film as though you have been invited over to a friend's house to view this historic event. It's as though you're sort of stepping back in time to 1969 and watching this for the first time. But of course things go wrong and it doesn't turn out the way that we all know it actually did. And then you come out on the far side of our installation and then you start to do the demystification process if you will, which is, helping people to understand what they just saw and how it was made and other examples, et cetera. The actual speech is short – it only takes about 2 minutes for Nixon to deliver it. But the movie doesn’t begin with Nixon walking up to the camera – it actually begins with real footage of the CBS broadcast from that mission. CBS News Voiceover: “This is CBS News color coverage of Man on the Moon. Sponsored by Kellogg's. Kellogg's puts more in your morning. Here from CBS news Apollo headquarters at Kennedy Space Center: Correspondent, Walter Cronkite.” But as the video continues, the real broadcast is edited in such a way to show something going wrong with the mission – a disinformation technique much older than deepfake. Francesca Panetta: I searched through enormous amounts of audio material trying to find any sound of stress in the voices of the mission control and the astronauts, which is really hard because those astronauts are really trained never to sound perturbed or scared in any way. We found one alarm that went off and we repeated it over and over again. Halsey Burgund: This alarm is going and it's beeping and we don't know what it is and, “Oh no, communications cut off!” And then we kind of leave it up to the viewer to sort of think about what might've happened. And we put in a bit of sort of lunar surface footage to sort of make it feel like, okay, they've crashed but, you're still there with them a little bit. Halsey Burgund: I forget who coined the term cheap fake, but is what has existed in the, as long as media has existed, there's been the ability to do this kind of deceptive editing, by the way that's happening with audio too. You are going to take my interview and you're going to chop it up and take a piece here and a piece there and put them together, hopefully in a way that represents fairly what I'm trying to communicate. These are very standard editing techniques that more available to everybody nowadays,then some of this is sort of AI enabled stuff like deepfakes. So we're making something fake out of a lot of truths and we're wrapping something fake with a lot of archival, true quote-unquote footage. And, we all know that the Apollo 11 mission did happen. And, we know that Walter Cronkite was a real anchor and covered it and there's all these truths in there, and then we, boom, we hit you with this massive, piece of disinformation that changes everything, but wrapping it in those truths, I think makes it so much more believable. Beginning with real unedited TV coverage, then moving to real footage edited to tell a story that didn’t happen, then transitioning to the Nixon deepfake speech works really well in an audio/visual medium. That’s the subtitle of the installation as a whole: Unstable Evidence on Screen. Francesca Panetta: As an artist and director, but also journalists, I think very carefully about the context. In which people come across content. So the attention that they will have, the amount of time they're likely to spend, how they're coming to the project. Because the whole exhibition is set up this way, there is an opportunity to really engage on it on a deeper level than is possible on an online context . There are different crafts for different mediums. Panetta and Burgund are demonstrating the tools of misinformation in the medium of TV. On this show, we think of museums as a medium too. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most people are more conscious about the possibility of misinformation on social media or on TV than in a museum. And one of the things that attracted me to this project was seeing something deliberately fake put in the middle of a museum – a medium that still scores very high on the list of most trustworthy institutions. Halsey Burgund: Bringing it into a museum context in some ways it is a bit odd to bring into this traditionally thought of as a purely authoritative and factual and accurate space to bring something into it that is, in a certain sense inaccurate. Halsey Burgund: It makes me think about sort of museums when I was growing up the thought of even whispering to somebody while walking through the hallowed halls of the museum was, “oh my gosh, I can't believe you'd even, shhh be quiet!” And now things have, you know, thankfully, and I think this is a positive direction: people are a little more relaxed about that. The film works so well on a CRT TV set in a living room because that’s how the vast majority of people experienced the actual moon landing. The grainy TV footage is shorthand for the era itself. Panetta and Burgund have created a believable fake broadcast of a failed Apollo 11 mission. But I would love to take it a step further — instead of the primary medium being TV, what if the project was a fake museum exhibit? What would it feel like to walk into a dark gallery titled “The Last Moments of Apollo 11.” Dioramas of the lunar surface sit under speakers looping the last radio communication with the astronauts. Somewhere in the gallery, on not a living room TV, but on a flat panel screen is Nixon’s speech, forever echoing words he would have said. How would the medium of a fake history museum feel different from the CRT TV broadcasting fake history in the living room? Francesca Panetta: I think it's very obvious from how we all see media technology rapidly developing that, these kinds of tools develop very fast. That will be the case with artificial intelligence as well. Even in just seeing over the few years in which Halsey and I have been working in this area, we've seen incredible increases in what is possible in live face swapping and deepfaking, which wasn't possible when we started this project. I personally have no doubt. This'll be easy to do very realistically in the future. But I think also the familiarity with these kinds of techniques will become more widely known. So just like now, when a general member of the public looks at a photo, they will expect, well, that it's probably been photoshopped or had some filters on it. The kind of techniques of AI I hope will become more generally known by the public. And that's certainly what this project is trying to do is is make people aware about these kinds of possibilities. Because it's a new technique, it is not as widely known as more conventional editing techniques, but that's essentially where we need to get to so that as the technologies develop, so do the public's understanding of those capacities. You can and should watch the full version of the excellent In Event of Moon Disaster at moondisaster.org. It’s accompanying exhibit, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen is at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City until May 15, 2022. This has been Museum Archipelago. Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast. If you enjoy this show, if you find it a meaningful addition to your week, please support us by joining Club Archipelago. Once you join Club Archipelago, you’ll find dozens and dozens of bonus episodes – including hour plus shows where special guests and I dive deep into museum movies and documentaries. But the best reason to join Club Archipelago is to make sure this podcast continues to exist. You can join club archipelago at http://jointhemuseum.club.…
Public historian and writer Tegan Kehoe knows that museum visitors act differently around the same object presented in different contexts—like how the same visitor excited by a bayonet that causes a triangular wound in an exhibit of 18th-century weapons could be disgusted by that same artifact when it’s presented in an exhibit of 18th-century medicine. Kehoe, who specialises in the history of healthcare and medical science, is attuned to how objects can inspire empathy, especially in the healthcare context. Kehoe’s new book, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, looks for opportunities for empathy in museum exhibits all around the U.S. Each of the 50 artifacts presented in the book becomes a physical lens through which to examine the complexities of American society’s relationship with health, from a 1889 bottle of “Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters” that claimed to cure a host of ailments to activist Ed Roberts’s power wheelchair that he customized to work with his range of motion. In this episode, Kehoe describes how her work has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts, how the aura of medical expertise is often culturally granted, and how living through the current coronavirus pandemic changed her relationship with many of the artifacts. Image: Ed Roberts's Wheelchair, National Museum of American History. Treasures of American History online exhibition. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Old State House “Weapons of the American Revolution” and “Medicine and the American Revolution” 01:35 Tegan Kehoe 02:00 Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures 02:30 How Museums Tend to Present Medical History 05:40 Who Is “Worthy” of the Most Care? 08:02 Ed Roberts’s Power Wheelchair 10:06 Ambulance Damaged in the 9/11 Attacks 11:28 Lessons from the Latest Pandemic 13:41 Pre-Order Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures 14:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Support Museum Archipelago Directly 🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 96. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Museum curator and historian Daniel Neff used to present tours in the Old Statehouse Museum in Boston, the site of the Boston Massacre in 1770. One tour was called “Weapons of the American Revolution” and went into gory detail of the carnage inflicted by bayonets and musket balls. At the same museum, Neff also presented a tour called “Medicine and the American Revolution,” often featuring the same grizzly battle wounds. As his colleague and today’s guest Tegan Kehoe recalls, Neff started to notice a difference between the way visitors responded to each of the tours. Tegan Kehoe: He remarked a number of times that visitors who seemed otherwise temperamentally the same, sometimes even the same visitors would react very differently to hearing about a particular type of battle wound, depending on whether they were on the weapons tour or the medicine tour. And it seemed that people on the weapons tour were imagining themselves inflicting those injuries. And on the medicine tour, they were imagining being the victim and being the patient. And that's just such a powerful way of thinking about how people are relating to the content and museums and how people are relating to history. Neff’s observation is featured in the introduction of Kehoe’s new book: Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures. Tegan Kehoe: Hello, my name is Tegan Kehoe. I'm a public historian and writer specializing in the history of healthcare and medical science. I work at the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. And my forthcoming book is Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, which is coming out from AASLH press in January. Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures looks at the fields of medicine and public health through the lens of artifacts in museums and historic sites around the country. Kehoe’s day job at a museum of medical history, where she researches and writes museum exhibits, has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts. Tegan Kehoe: Museums, especially generalist museums tackling a medical history topic will often go for the gruesome because that is a hook for people. And I very much understand why exhibits tend to latch onto the gruesome and the macabre in medical history. But it can be a little bit narrow sometimes. And then the other thing that I see in exhibits especially of museums that do focus on healthcare or medicine is this narrative of progress. Of sort of the march of scientific progress always moving forward. And they'll go for sort of emphasizing the way in which medicine before a particular period was particularly primitive. And there isn't necessarily a particular set of imagery or exhibit style choices that goes with that the way there is with the sort of the more gruesome stuff. But I think this idea of “look how great progress is”, which I don't disagree with, but it's another way that it can be a very narrow way of looking at healthcare. Each chapter in the book centers around a different historic artifact, arranged in chronological order to tell the story of American medical history. Chapter one is a wax model of a scrotum showing what was know as children’s chimney sweep cancer at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – typical of the models doctors and medical students used to study a variety of diseases in the eighteenth century. Chapter 24 is a bubonic plague pathology slide at a collection at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, from a cluster of outbreaks that happened along the U.S.’s Gulf Coast in 1920. By grounding the narrative in objects, Kehoe is doing two things – first, copying the presentation style of most museums for artifacts that are scattered across the United States. And second, providing a window to a particular time and place. As Kehoe writes, “Looking at healthcare history through artifacts can help us see the people of the past as people, people who drank beer, waited for the nurse to read their high temperature, or hoped against hope that the new medication they took would prolong their life.” Tegan Kehoe: Not being able to play with placement and just having those sort of static images, gave me a lot of freedom. So in the chapter about an infant incubator, I wasn't able to find any stories about a baby who might have been in that incubator, but I found a lot of information about a baby from a few years off from when that incubator was in use, but from the same county, really closely connected to the story. And I could trust the readers making it clear that this baby wasn't in this incubator, but I can trust them to sort of make that connection. So I was able to kind of go off on this in a way that I could do in a museum exhibit if I had room for it, but in a small object label, you wouldn't necessarily be able to. And so I could use that freedom a little bit to get the fuller story. That fuller story, the story of American healthcare, touches on the societal ideas of who was worthy of a lot of care, and who was worthy of less care. And these societal ideas go both ways – Kehoe maps out varying levels of trust in medicine and medical institutions over time – something that medicine shares with museums. Tegan Kehoe: I think that one of the similarities that's really striking to me is that in both medicine and museums, that expertise is–well, the expertise is real, it's based on study and work and certain methodologies–but that aura of expertise is kind of culturally granted. Tegan Kehoe: And in both medicine and museums, it's culturally granted by the dominant, powerful culture within our society. It's white middle-class and upper-middle-class with certain educational backgrounds are the ones who trust doctors the most and trust museums the most. I don't have stats to back that up, but I know that the people who are most likely to be disregarded by either their doctor or by a museum exhibit are also the ones most likely to say, that's not for me. I'm not welcome there. I don't fit in there. Authority is messy when people feel like that authority is top-down and doesn't involve listening. And I think that's something that rings, throughout both medicine and museums. Kehoe points to various movements in which doctors or self-styled doctors challenge established healthcare institutions, using newspaper advertisements or their own self-funded schools to create authority. Tegan Kehoe: I have a chapter on 19th-century alternative medicine and there the problem or the perceived problem was that conventional medicine was thought to be really dangerous, largely because it was. If this is kind of the 1830s is sort of the era when the chapter begins, a lot of bloodletting, as in, cutting someone open and letting them bleed until they were weak. And that was thought to restore balance in the body. But the problem there was an ideological one for patients. Do we go with what doctors are prescribing or do we go with this street salesman who says that if I take the right herbs, I'll be able to treat myself and I won't need doctors ever again? An artifact from the 20th century is the modified power wheelchair that belonged to activist Ed Roberts, now in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Tegan Kehoe: I think one of my favorite objects in the book is the power wheelchair that belonged to Ed Roberts, who was one of the biggest pioneers of the disability rights movement and the independent living movement within disability rights. He became disabled as a teenager because of polio. And one of his memories of that experience that he used in talking about his experiences–because he was a very eminent public speaker who campaigned for disability rights–he would talk about a doctor telling his mother within his earshot that she should hope that he dies because if he lived, he would be nothing but a vegetable. And that ended up sort of galvanizing him, but this really disgusting level of prejudice coming from someone who was supposed to be helping him through the huge changes affecting his body at the time. And so he would have absolutely seen a doctor as an authority figure, but not an authority figure in the sense of someone to trust. That would be an authority figure in the sense of someone who might be doing gatekeeping, someone who might be changing your level of access to the care that you need. Tegan Kehoe: He got a power chair while he was in college, so that he could have more independence. He sometimes related that it was so that he could go on dates without having an attendant chaperone the date because he needed someone to push his wheelchair. And at first he was told that he couldn't use a power chair because he didn't have the correct range of motion in his hand to be able to use the controls. And he realized that if they installed the controls on his otherwise commercially-built wheelchair backwards, that the range of motion he did have in his hand was completely adequate to operate the chair and so it was a customized chair in that way. One of the last artifacts presented in the book is an ambulance damaged in the September 11th attacks, in the collection of the 9/11 memorial museum in New York. Like always, the artifact is the jumping off point to a much larger story–in this case, Kehoe details the history of emergency medical services–from transport of the sick during epidemics to battlefield ambulances during the American Civil War. Tegan Kehoe: The artifact in this chapter is an ambulance that was on the scene, and that was badly damaged after the second tower fell. So the two EMTs who had been in the ambulance, they both survived. They were not in the ambulance at the time that it fell. But they were responding before the second tower fell. And I felt so incredibly lucky that both of them had given oral histories that were publicly available. And so I can read their experiences of that absolutely horrible day and being separated from their work partner for hours with no way to find out whether the other person was alive and just these absolutely gut wrenching, heart wrenching stories. And I think that 9/11 is a perfect example of that as well as we're always living through history, but that is a moment that everyone understood immediately that it would be historic. The ambulance from 9/11 is an example of an artifact that was collected for a museum soon after it was used – I’m not sure what medical artifacts, if any, were collected after treating the wounded of the Boston Massacre. It won’t be long, if it hasn’t happened already, that museums will display commercial and homemade masks from the current coronavirus pandemic along with banners thanking healthcare workers. The coronavirus pandemic is not covered in this book – Kehoe started writing the book before the outbreak. Tegan Kehoe: In terms of the actual writing of the book: about the second half of it was during the pandemic, which certainly changed my research process and also changed my relationship to the material a little bit, because I was writing about medical history while living medical history. Tegan Kehoe: I mean, we're all living history all the time, but it's a little more noticeable during something like a pandemic. But while the coronavirus pandemic is not covered in this book, you can feel your own experience of the pandemic in almost every artifact. Before the outbreak, I didn’t think much about how health and healthcare don’t exist in a vacuum. I didn’t appreciate how the decisions that patients, providers, researchers, and public health professionals make are not only informed by correct or incorrect understandings of current medical science, but also by a host of other factors. Tegan Kehoe: People who are dealing with healthcare, whether they're dealing as patients or providers or researchers, or some combination, they're always looking for answers to questions. And what answers they come up with is going to be influenced by science, but also by culture. By what kind of trust relationship they have with the other people in the equation. By the technology that's available in the day. By so many other things. Tegan Kehoe: And so when you're able to take a step back and look at kind of the various ways that people are involved with health care and with medicine holistically, there are a lot of common themes, but very few are sort of universal. And that idea of everyone approaching it with questions and there are a lot of influences that affect their answers is the kernel that I'm actually confident in saying is universal. And I think that that's also the place that my book really connects to the pandemic You can pre-order Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures anywhere books are sold, but I recommend going to bookshop.org/shop/tegankehoe, where you can both support independent bookstores and check out her other writings. This has been Museum Archipelago. Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast. If you enjoy this show, if you find it a meaningful addition to your week, please support us by joining Club Archipelago. Once you join Club Archipelago, you’ll find dozens and dozens of bonus episodes – including hour plus shows where special guests and I dive deep into museum movies and documentaries. But the best reason to join Club Archipelago is to make sure this podcast continues to exist. You can join club archipelago at http://jointhemuseum.club.…
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1 95. The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland Knows Even the Most Futuristic Technology Will One Day Be History 11:31
In 1969, noticing that technological progress was changing their fields, heads of Finish industry came together to found a technology museum in Finland. Today, the Museum of Technology in Helsinki is the only general technological museum in the country. But of course, technical progress didn’t stop changing, as service coordinator Maddie Hentunen notes, and that can be challenging for a museum to keep up. In this episode, Hentunen describes the museum’s philosophical stance on technology, how the museum balances industrial development with more open source design practices, and how the museum thinks about its own obsolescence. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 1969 in Technology 00:49 Maddie Hentunen 01:02 The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland 02:34 The Museum’s Building 03:51 Original Exhibits 04:50 Today’s Exhibits 07:07 The Museum’s Philosophical Stance on Technology 10:29 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 95. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Ian Elsner: Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. Ian Elsner: 1969 was a banner year for technological advancement: for one, it’s the year humans first walked on the moon. It was also -- and this is not unrelated to technological advancement -- right in the middle of the Cold War. Maddie Hentunen: 1969 in Finland was kind of a fraught time politically in a way that it was still the era of the cold war and we're right next to Russia. Maddie Hentunen: So our political relationship with Russia has always been kind of a tightrope. We've always gazed eastwords with care and especially at that time. Ian Elsner: This is Maddie Hentunen, service coordinator at the Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland. Maddie Hentunen: Hello. My name is Maddie Hentunen, and right now I am the service coordinator here in the museum of technology in Helsinki, Finland. Ian Elsnsr: The museum of technology was founded in that banner year of 1969 by heads of Finish industries. The idea was to make a general technology museum in Finland. The point is that it’s not siloed by industrial sector. Maddie Hentunen: I think at that point, the global sort of Zeitgeist, the technology of the time was taking massive leaps forward. So at that time there were these, let's say there was a coalition in a very loose meaning of the word of these gigantic, in Finish scale, gigantic, industry had sort of, let's say, the forest industry, which in Finland has always been massive And then there was the metal industry, which includes the mining industry and, and the chemistry industry thinks like this, who felt the need for some kind of preservation because they started to, in their respective fields, notice that things are changing. And a lot of the old sort of wisdom, a lot of the old ways are gone. Pull it behind us in the past. Maddie Hentunen: I feel that is very unique in a way or very, nice in that sense is that they actually came together and made that decision that we will make this sort of generalized museum of technology instead of making a forestry technical museum or a chemistry museum or stuff like that. It was a cooperative mission, so to speak. So that's actually how first our collection started to build. We've got these big donations from different fields, industrial fields that are still big parts of our collections. Ian Elsner: The newly-founded museum decided it would use Finland’s first water purification plant -- built in 1877 -- as its main exhibit building -- it’s a delightfully squat round building that used to be filled with sand that the water filtered through -- water that would eventually be used for drinking or firefighting. Maddie Hentunen: Helsinki started to grow pretty fast after the 1850s or so. So after that there was a real need for purified water. And, also, because the city was mostly built of wood. So also the fire security was a big question. But yeah, basically this is a giant round building, which was filled with water and sand. This place of course is very much part of the Finish industrial history. So it was like the perfect place, because at that point in the 1960s, when it turned into 1970s and when then this plant was closed down and it and the space was empty. Maddie Hentunen: One of the most common things that people say when they walk in that door, they say, oh, it's bigger on the inside! I was a Doctor Who fan and I sort of got the TARDIS-like feel when I came in. Ian Elsner: In this building, the museum first opened to the public in 1985, and some of these original exhibits were still being displayed until fairly recently. Maddie Hentunen: Back then it was a very different museum. There was still a lot of the old museum thinking sort of like straggling. One of the 1985 exhibitions, the old communication exhibition, was still here, I think, five years ago. So it had a really long sort of shelf life that exhibition. And you could very clearly see that it was from a very different time that it was filled with artifacts. It was filled with stuff. And also the text were like super long, unreadable mostly, only in one language, which was Finnish at that time. Maddie Hentunen: It was not very approachable. It was really cool to just look at things, but it was not super informative. You had to sort of guess what is this? And then there was those wall of texts somewhere, and you thought you had to go and find to be able to connect the artifact with the text. As we know, then the whole museum thinking around exhibitions has changed drastically. Ian Elsner: Today, with the new exhibits, the museum features much shorter informative text in three languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English. As the Finnish industry has changed, so have the exhibits: giant machines used for forestry and mining share the open, circular space with tiny cell phones made by the Finnish firm Nokia and interactive touchscreen exhibits that teach the basics of computer programming. Ian Elsner: Visiting the museum in 2021, the Nokia cell phones look impossibly out of date -- in the way that history tends to compress itself, a phone from 15 years ago looks almost contemporaneous to a TV camera from 50 years ago. But it wasn’t that long ago, before the arrival of the iPhone, that it seemed like Nokia phones -- proudly designed in Finland -- would continue to be ubiquitous. Maddie Hentunen: Maddie Hentunen: Everybody had a Nokia phone at some point and that all the movies were. I remember when The Matrix came out and they had, they had their, their phones and everything that it was like, it was everywhere. And I think we're sort of still in that mind frame, even though Nokia has kind of declined from that. Ian Elsner: But the way the museum approaches the gulf between past, current, and future technology is fascinating -- the museum knows that even the most futuristic technology will one day be history. Maddie Hentunen: The past, the present and the future are all equally important. I think the Museum of Technology is in a special position in that sense, that technology changes so incredibly fast right now and has been doing that for the past 100 years or so, in Finland and everywhere else too. Maddie Hentunen: So we actually really need to be able to preserve the present and also stay one step ahead of the curve, so to speak. So we can guess what's going to happen in the future so we can start the preservation of those things so that we can sort of in the future, have a comprehensive set of material or remains in our exhibitions and in our collections. Maddie Hentunen: And I think that is one thing that we really want also for other people to see in our exhibitions that museums are not all about the past. Museums are not all about, the material remains of the very old age. It's also about what happens now and what's going to happen tomorrow because all of that is going to turn into history at some point. Ian Elsner: The Museum is a museum of technology, not a museum of industry. So how does a museum that was founded by industry heads explore the full range of technological advancement, including, say open source methods that are often developed outside of industrial contexts? Maddie Hentunen: So this is like the innovation part is something that we have really heavily tried to integrate it into our museum thinking here. We have cooperated with a lot of smaller companies or smaller, hobby groups. Right now we have this one special exhibition that has amateur radio technology. That has been built in very close collaboration with the actual hobby groups and the people who are the specialists in that who know a lot more about this, than any of us here in our museum staff do. Maddie Hentunen: That is one of the things that we really want to heavily push moving forward that we want to collaborate with people from various backgrounds, also of course,the big industry, because that is obviously part of technology, but also the smaller groups. And of course the innovation often begins somewhere small and not in the biggest sort of fields. Maddie Hentunen: It's somewhere small and somewhere like very personal. So those are the stories we actually love. Of course, as museum professionals and cultural professionals. Ian Elsner: Like the tightrope of Finland’s political relationship with Russia, the museum walks the tightrope of Finish industry’s relationship to society. Those moon landings probably wouldn’t have happened in 1969 if the US and the USSR weren’t locked in a cold war. Maddie Hentunen: We come clean with the fact that industry is a big polluter. Many of the things that have been done in this field and are still done in this field are incredibly harmful for the environment. So I think our stance in that is like, basically, acknowledging that fact and recycling is a theme that comes up in several different exhibitions that we really want to lift up. Maddie Hentunen: In Finland, the recycling part of everything has been going on since after the war because of the war reparations that we had to pay to the Soviet Union. The after war years were desperately poor in Finland. So everything kind of had to be recycled. And we had to get really innovative about recycling. Maddie Hentunen: But still, the parts that come from industry because, consumers, we can only do so much, but one of the really big things about being environmentally friendly is that we get the big industrial movers and shakers to understand that they also need to recycle their industrial waste, which can be incredibly harmful and they get such vast quantities of that. Ian Elsner: The museum features a giant claw used to pick up and process metal scraps, as well as a completely crushed car, a block of twisted metal and rubber. Apparently, even the way cars are crushed has changed -- now the rubber is removed first to be recycled separately. And that’s why Hentuen says that the museum’s new rule is short shelf lives for their exhibits. Maddie Hentunen: So we are happy with our current exhibitions because they have all been renewed quite recently, but they have not been built to last forever. Maybe that is one thing that has changed from the past museum thinking that now we have built this exhibition and is going to stay like this until the apocalypse. Maddie Hentunen: And, right now we built a shelf life for our exhibitions. So like maybe ten years max. And then it has to be reviewed again. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
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The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the American South has been slow to reverse. But Jazz Dottin, creator and host of the Black Gems Unearthed YouTube channel says it can be just as slow in New England. Each video features Dottin somewhere in her home state of Massachusetts, often in front of a plaque or historical marker, presenting what’s missing, excluded, or downplayed. The history discussed on Black Gems Unearthed has been left out by conventional museums, which are among the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life, according to the American Alliance of Museums. This trust may have more to do with power than truth-telling — and today, there are many different ways to build trust with an audience online. Shows like Dottin’s might point to where our new relationship with the authoritative voice is heading. In this episode, Dottin describes how working as tour guide and creating travel itineraries influences her work today, how she came up with the idea for Black Gems Unearthed, and what the future holds. Image: Jazz Dottin in front of Emancipation in Boston, Mass. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 “Always Read The Plaque” 00:45 Jazz Dottin 01:00 Black Gems Unearthed 01:20 Hopkinton, Massachusetts 02:00 Exploring Black lives in MetroWest, MA in the 1700s - Black Gems Unearthed 02:26 Museum Archipelago 42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans 02:55 The Legacy of Slavery in New England 03:50 Working as a Tour Guide 05:35 The Idea for Black Gems Unearthed 08:21 Museums and Trustworthiness 09:36 Where The Name Comes From 10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 11:39 What’s It Like Giving A Tour on A Segway? Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 94. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. There’s a saying among history nerds: always read the plaque. Roman Mars: “Always read the plaque.” But of course, the plaques don’t tell the whole story. Maybe a better mantra would be “start by reading the plaque.” Jazz Dottin: If I see plaques, I have to stop and read them. But with Black history, you know, there's not as many plaques, if any at all that are describing events and people and things that have happened in different areas across the country. This is Jazz Dottin, creator and host of a new YouTube channel called Black Gems Unearthed. Jazz Dottin: Hello, my name is Jazz Dottin and I am the host of Black Gems Unearthed, which is a YouTube series where I talk about Black history around the state of Massachusetts. So I am an experienced tour guide. I develop travel programs and itineraries, and now I'm working in the academic world at a university in Massachusetts. Dottin grew up in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Jazz Dottin: A small town, suburb outside of Boston. 21 miles or however many miles a marathon is where the start of the Boston marathon is. When I was growing up in Huffington, I don't have memories of learning about local Black history. And I was just curious about Hopkinton as I was starting to make these videos and started to do a little bit of digging. An episode of Black Gems Unearthed describes when she figured out that a stone wall next to one of the streets that she drove down as a child was probably built by enslaved Africans. Jazz Dottin (from Black Gems Unearthed): “It came up in the research that Africans likely built the tiers that you can see on the grass behind me, you can kind of see three layers, and they also may have done work on the wall that’s behind me too.” Jazz Dottin: And it just feels eerie to know that there was slavery in this town that is just known for being a nice suburb to live in. That is part of the legacy that people may or may not realize it's like in our DNA. In episode 42 of Museum Archipelago, we spoke with Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray, who in 2018, erected one of the first plaques detailing New Orleans’s slave trading past. The deliberate exclusion of Black history and the history of slavery in the Amerian South has been slow to reverse. But Dottin says it can be just as slow in the North. Jazz Dottin: I just think it's the power of storytelling. We've told the stories for so long that the North was the place where people went to be free and it was valued. And we did everything in our power to end slavery. And the South was bad because they enslaved people, but really hello! We were connected in the institution of slavery. So we really need to address the past and discuss it and look at it because it has shaped our communities and the way that we view ourselves, which may or may not be accurate. The connections to the institution of slavery in the American North come both from a time when slavery was legal in New England, and later when slavery was illegal but pwerful families profited from the slave trade and related buisnesses. Dottin was familiar with some of these connections -- say, a mansion belonging to one of these families -- because she worked as a tour guide for over 10 years. Jazz Dottin: I actually graduated from Temple University from their Tourism and Hospitality program. I did a lot of work as a tour guide in my undergraduate program, like I used to give tours on segways and then I gave culinary tours. So I was the actual guide, but then I also have experience developing itineraries. I worked for Road Scholar, which is an educational travel company for older adults. And there, I actually pieced together itineraries based on a theme, say, people want to learn about the history of women's suffrage. We would put together an itinerary that had lectures and trips to visit museums and local sites that related to getting women the right to vote. One of Dottin’s biggest challenges as a tour guide was trying to present Black history to an audience that wasn’t expecting it. Jazz Dottin: Most of our itineraries were European-centric. So you're seeing allhese sites that are well-known tourist attractions, but where is that black history? And so that might have meant including a lecture about the fact that there were people that were enslaved that work here, or including maybe a music presentation from a group that's from the area that could weave together their story of how they came to live in the area. So it always felt like I was just sprinkling in a couple of fun facts. The itineraries are never specifically about Black history. At least the ones that I was working on. It's just the reality of developing itineraries for a primarily white audience and an older adult audience is just that wasn't necessarily what they were we're looking for. Dottin first came up with the idea for a video-based guided tour focusing on Black history in Massachusetts in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. Jazz Dottin: Yeah, it was a result of George Floyd's murder. I was just very upset. Seeing what happened and just realizing that so many people were shocked by what happened when this is something that happens on a regular... Black people are murdered regularly throughout the United States for, for small issues and for no issues whatsoever. So I was very upset by what happened. And I was upset by the reactions that companies had. Some that did not want to make statements. Some that did make statements that just didn't feel like there was any action behind it. So I decided, you know what, now's the time I'm going to make videos because I have a smartphone. I am going to get Adobe Premier and the software. I need to be able to make this. I had an interest in creating walking tours, but I just realized, you know, we're also in the middle of a pandemic. Why don't we just focus on making videos? And it'll help me learn the information better. And perhaps people will enjoy watching it too. By making and editing the videos, Dottin has complete control over the topics and what is being presented. The format is effective: every video features Dottin looking right at the camera on site somewhere in Massachusetts -- often in front of a plaque or historical marker. Her well-researched narration, supplemented by historical photos and passages from documents, presents what’s missing, excluded, or downplayed. The episodes weave together multiple stories, all tied together with a strong sense of place. Jazz Dottin: I'm researching the topic and then I'm hunting around for photos that are relevant. That's probably the hardest part. Where can I find photos, pictures, and items that I can include, then actually making the video. Dottin says it takes about a month to make a video. The research buttresses Dottin’s effective presentation style, which features genuine excitement and subtle sarcasm -- it builds trust, and as a viewer, I would prefer to listen to Dottin explain something instead of another tour guide if given the choice. Jazz Dottin: So you know what? I do watch a lot of videos on YouTube also as another way to learn history as I'm making videos too. And sometimes the videos are a little dry, so I try and make the videos sound like I am talking to friends because I wouldn't talk to friends in the same way I might deliver information in more of an academic setting. Just trying to kind of change the energy around how information is presented. The American Alliance of Museums often says that museums are the most trustworthy institutions in modern American life. And the statistics are remarkable: some surveys indicate that museums are the second most trusted news source after friends and family. We’ve argued before that this high level of trust might have more to do with power than truth telling. But today, there are many different ways to build trust with an audience online, and shows like Dottin’s might point to where our new relationship with authoritative voice is heading. In this model, the museum becomes the middleman. The plaques become the setting. Given that museums have excluded Black history from their halls for so long, it’s appealing that projects like Black Gems Unearthed allow people to go directly to the source -- a personality that’s trusted even more than museums. Jazz Dottin: So I have been reading books for a long time on Black history, and I've kind of pinned down where people have lived and where events have taken place. So I figured, you know what, why don't I just make some videos about this because more people than just my friends that happened to be with me could benefit from knowing this information. Black history is kind of hidden. It's not in clear sight, but then I was also thinking about how Black history is so important. It's really valuable. And I was talking to my partner about it and he was like, “oh, gems are formed in bedrock under a lot of pressure.” And I was like, yeah, you're onto something. There’s Black Gems! And we're Unearthing them! Yes, this is the name: Black Gems Unearthed. You can find Black Gems Unearthed on YouTube by searching for Black Gems Unearthed. The project also has a website at blackgemsunearthed.com. In every episode, you’ll see Dottin in front of a plaque somewhere in Massachusetts, telling a much deeper story than what’s printed. Jazz Dottin: I'm very hopeful for the future of the museums in Massachusetts and in Boston that they'll keep sharing information about Black history and just history from groups that have not oftentimes been showcased. This has been Museum Archipelago. You love Museum Archipelago. But maybe you don’t love that each show is only 15 minutes. Well now, there’s a way to support the show while getting more. By joining Club Archipelago, you get access to hour-long episodes where I dive deep into pop culture about museums — movies like 2006’s Night at the Museum, 1966’s How To Steal A Million, and 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire — with friends and fellow museum folks. It’s a lot of fun! If you want to kick back and listen to a whole lot more about how pop culture reflects museums back to us, join Club Archipelago today for $2 a month at jointhemuseum.club. Thanks for listening. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links. Visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend. What is it like giving a tour on the segway? Jazz Dottin: Exhilarating? Oh yeah. I mean, all of your senses are coming together at once because you're riding the segway. You're talking about what's around you. And you're also keeping an eye that all of the participants are staying in line behind you and are not going into traffic or having any other issues...…
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Museum Archipelago
1 93. Bulgaria’s Narrow Gauge Railway Winds Through History. Ivan Pulevski Helped Turn One of Its Station Stops Into a Museum. 11:10
In 1916, concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders, a young Bulgarian Kingdom decided to build a narrow gauge railway to connect villages and towns to the rest of the country. The Bulgarian King himself, Tsar Boris III, drove the first locomotive to the town of Belitsa to celebrate its opening. But the Septemvri - Dobrinishte Narrow Gauge Railway would far outlast the King and the Kingdom, the communist era that followed, and the rocky post-communst period. Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region as a vital link to remote villages with no road access. But decades of neglect have left many stations crumbling. Train enthusiast Ivan Pulevski, a member of the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway,” helped found the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway in one of these abandoned stations. A sign on the building says the museum was built “for people, by people.” In this episode, Pulevski describes the decision to build the museum using only volunteers, how to interpret multiple eras of Bulgarian history through the lens of a railway, and why they have had no plans to seek official museum accreditation in Bulgaria. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Winding Through History 00:50 Septemvri–Dobrinishte narrow-gauge line 01:10 Ivan Pulevski 01:33 Stoyan Mitov and the Engineering of the Railway 03:20 Tsar Boris III 03:50 The House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway 04:40 No Electricity and No Water Supply 05:30 After The Collapse of the Communist Era 05:55 Organization "For The Narrow Gauge Railway" 06:32 Restoring the Building / Making the Museum 08:30 Bulgarian Museum Regulations 10:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 93. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started. The waiting room of Tsepina Station, south of the Bulgarian city of Septemvri in the Rhodope mountains, sits under the watchful eye of portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Georgi Dimitrov -- the revolutionary communitst leaders of Russia and Bulgaria respectively. But the communist period is only one of the eras of Bulgarian history the narrow gauge railway winds its way through. Construction on the railway, and the station, began in 1920, when a young Bulgarian Kingdom was concerned that the remote Rhodope mountains would be hard to defend against foreign invaders. Today, the railway is still a fixture of life in the region. Each day, 10 times a day, a diesel train passes by the station. Ivan Pulevski: Many people rely on this railway because it's their only transport, their only way of transport, because there are many villages which has no road. This is Ivan Pulevski, a train enthusiast who is also one of the founders of the House-Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway, which sits inside Tsepina station. Ivan Pulevski: Okay, my name is Ivan, Ivan Pulevski and I'm from Plovdiv. I'm currently a student in the Technical University of Sofia and I study transport technology and management. Creating the railway through such mountainous terrain was a transport technology and management problem for 1920. The first two engineers who were invited by the government to plan the railway quit because of the technical difficulty of building it. Instead, the honor fell to a young engineer called Stoyan Mitov. Mitov’s innovation was to build the railway in such a way that if you looked at it from above, the track would form numbers -- eights and sixes as the tracks pass over and under themselves to change elevation in such a tight space, The design also called for numerous tunnels. Ivan Pulevski: This is actually a map of how it crosses. And it looks like eight. And these are two forms, which are more like six. So it was really, really complicated project: so all these tunnels. The railway actually has 35 tunnels. In order to do that, the rail needed to be narrow gauge, which could handle the tight turning radiuses. The gauge refers to the distance between the two tracks of the railway: in this case, 760 mm. Every other working railway in Bulgaria today is standard gauge, with a distance between the tracks almost double that at 1,435 mm. The painstaking construction continued for over two decades. Slowly, more and more villages and towns were connected to the rest of Bulgaria. Ivan Pulevski: It was pretty primitive actually, because they didn't have multiple techniques and all the works were done by hand. Finally, in 1939, the railway reached the Bulgarian town of Belitsa. To celebrate a more interconnected Bulgaria, none other than the Bulgarian King, Tsar Boris III drove the first locomotive to the city. Ivan Pulevski: He was the only monarch in Europe who had a legal driving license for a train, for a steam engine. And the elderly people who still remember this moment say that they saw two miracles of their time: the train and the king. The majority of the House Museum of the Narrow Gauge Railway concerns the daily functioning of the station after Tsar Boris III, and the beginning of the communist era in 1944. By 1945, the railway was complete in its current form, stretching from Septemvri to Dobrinishte. Ivan Pulevski: It was actually probably the period in the timeline that the railway was at its peak. And in 1966 it had 71 trains per day. The station’s waiting room is preserved with pictures and information about the different types of carriages and locomotives from the era. There’s a ticket counter window looking into the main control office of this station -- all using technology that was not regularly updated. Ivan Pulevski: This station had no electricity and no water supply. So they used lanterns with gasoline and these phones, which are only connected to the Telegraph wire. And we still have no electricity. As a result, the artifacts in the control office have an old-school charm -- you can see the hand-written diary of each train that came through, you can handle the heavy metal keys for the track switches, and you can even “validate” your ticket with the official heavy-duty ticket validation machine. The station manager lived at the station, in rooms right above the control office and waiting room. Managers would get buckets of food and water delivered by train. After the communist era collapsed in 1989, things got worse for the narrow gauge railway, and with no station manager, this station building fell into disrepair. Ivan Pulevski: After the collapse of the communist era, many factories closed and actually the railway was not really maintained and the total abdication of the government made things so complicated that in 2003, all the freight trains were cut. Pulevski’s organization, called “For the Narrow Gauge Railway” fought against cutting passenger services too. Ivan Pulevski: Seven years ago they decided to cut some of the passenger friends as well. These people had no option to go home from work. Well, they have the train to go to work, but they did not have a train to go back. So fortunately, because a friend of mine who is actually part of our organization, decided to take some actions and the Bulgarian state-wide ways decided to put on track these trains as soon as possible. As part of the cuts, stations like the one we’re standing at got removed from the schedules. In 2015, the organization “For The Narrow Gauge Railway” decided to do something with the abandoned building. Ivan Pulevski: At first we decided not to make it a museum, but to just -- it was in really bad condition, so, decided to just fix some things. And then we had to think of a purpose. Why? Why we do this and decided to make it a museum, because it was the best solution. We don't have a museum for this railway. The museum was created by Pulevski and other volunteers over the course of two years. The Bulgarian National Railway company repaired the station’s roof, and people donated money, time, and artifacts to be displayed in the museum. Ivan Pulevski: In 2017, we opened the museum. It was a big opening actually. We had more than 100 guests at the time and it was really interesting, but unfortunately it's in the middle of nowhere, as you can see, and the maintenance -- it's hard. The reasons for the maintenance issue are the same as the reasons for the railway in the first place. Ivan Pulevski: We had a person, a retired person who used to come here to open the museum on the weekends, but he had some medical issues, so he does not come anymore. And since we are a voluntary organization, we did not have the funds for a salary of a person who will be here all the time. And also, there is no water supply or electricity, it is not the best place to work. Today, a tour of the museum is available by appointment. The organization has acquired some display cases they hope to soon fill with more artifacts, and plans are in place to build a scale model of the station and surrounding railway. But Pulevski is less interested in getting the museum officially accredited as a museum -- because that would come with all sorts of Bulgaria n museum regulations. Ivan Pulevski: I shouldn't be saying this actually, but we are not a legal museum because in Bulgaria we have a procedure to be a museum. It's pretty complicated to be a museum in Bulgaria. The regulations sometimes are kind of left from years of socialism and actually they have even regulations for an expert to come to your museum and decide which object should be exposed. We wanted to make a museum for the narrow gauge railway. Why would a person who's an expert, but well, we can argue about that here and say, “okay, this and this and this.” The best museum’s I visited are just like small museums made from the ground. Because of somebody who is really passionate about the topic or the museum. Pulevski and the other volunteers hope that the museum, which is now adjacent to a road, becomes a place for motorists to stop, learn about the railway, and hopefully consider taking the train for their next journey. Ivan Pulevski: The railway itself is that it is not only an attraction because the people still use this training. And it is part of the experience of seeing these people using the train every day, sharing their emotions, their worries, et cetera. This has been Museum Archipelago. You love Museum Archipelago. But maybe you don’t love that each show is only 15 minute. Now, there’s a way to support the show while getting more. By joining Club Archipelago, you get access to hour-long episodes where I dive deep into pop culture about museums — movies like 2006’s Night at the Museum, 1966’s How To Steal A Million, and 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire — with friends and fellow museum folks. It’s a lot of fun! If you want to kick back and listen to a whole lot more about how pop culture reflects museums back to us, join Club Archipelago today for $2 a month at jointhemuseum.club. Thanks for listening. For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links. Visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.…
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Museum Archipelago
The Pleven Panorama transports visitors through time, but not space. The huge, hand-painted panorama features the decisive battles of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78, fought at this exact spot, which led to Bulgaria’s Liberation. The landscape of Pleven, Bulgaria depicted is exactly what you see outside the building, making it seem like you’re witnessing the battle on an observation point. Bogomil Stoev is a historian at the Pleven Panorama, which opened in 1977. The opening was timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire’s surrender following the battles and the siege of Pleven. The building itself is etched with the story of the siege and the battles, and because the landscape is filled with the remains of the combattants, this was the only structure allowed to be built on the spot. In this episode, Stoev describes how the creators of the Pleven Panorama learned from previous panoramas, how the museum contextualizes the history of Bulgaria’s Liberation, and how this museum has become a symbol of the city of Pleven. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Skobelev Park and the Remains of the Dead 01:06 Bogomil Stoev, Historian at the Pleven Panorama 01:36 Our Story Begins in the 14th Century 01:58 April Uprising 02:40 The Start of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–78 03:10 The Pleven Panorama 05:16 General Skobelev 06:00 General Totleben 06:10 The Siege of Pleven 07:00 December 10th, 1977 07:40 Episodes 47 and 54 of Museum Archipelago 08:07 Building the Museum 08:46 A Brief History of Panoramas 10:15 Pleven’s Enduring Symbol 11:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 92. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Skobelev Park just South of the Bulgarian city of Pleven looks like a typical Bulgarian park. A pleasant place to sit on a bench, walk around with friends, and enjoy the day. Which it is. But to the people of Pleven, the area has another name. It's known as the Valley of Death, the site of the decisive battle of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, which ultimately led to Bulgaria's liberation from the Ottoman Empire after 500 years. Bogomil Stoev: Around 70, 80 thousand people, they died here and their remainings, they are here. They were not buried in the cemetery. They were using the trenches and they would put the bodies and just put mud on them. So here we cannot dig. You cannot do anything, any kind constructions and this is why when they built the museum in 1977, we are the only structure here. This is Bogomil Stoev, a historian at the Pleven Panorama museum — the only structure in Skobelev Park. Bogomil Stoev: Hello, my name is Bogomil Stoev. I'm a historian and I work in the museum Panorama Pleven and this is actually my job to work with visitors, to show the fights and the history of our city, city of Pleven. This was the main place of the fights that actually liberated Bulgaria and Bulgaria exists at this day because of this war and this fight. Story of this war and this fight actually begins in the late 14th century when the Ottoman Empire conquered the land controlled by the Second Bulgarian Empire, leading to the long period of Ottoman rule. Bogomil Stoev: [For] 500 years we didn't exist like a country. We were not existing as a country, only as a nation. And after this war, Bulgaria was again on the map of Europe after 500 years. By the 19th century, Bulgarian nationalism started to take hold, culminating in the April Uprising in 1876. Bulgrians rebelled in towns and cities across the territory against the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire's response to the insurrection — a violent suppression by massacring civilians — led to an outpouring of public support for the Bulgarian cause. Bogomil Stoev: Koprivshtitsa and Panagyurishte, those are the main places for the uprising. This is actually the punishment for the Bulgarian people because they made the uprising. 30,000 innocent people were killed this was a big news around the world. The coverage of the Ottoman's suppression was one of the factors that led the Russian Empire to declare war on the Ottoman Empire. Bogomil Stoev: And one year after the rebellion on 24th of April in 1877, Alexander II, the Russian emperor, he declared the war. And this is the beginning of maybe [the] 10th, 12th war between the Russian and Ottoman Empire, but in our history, in Bulgarian history, it stayed as a war for liberation. All of this context is briefly presented in the first gallery of the Pleven Panorama — as visitors walk up the stairs to the main attraction: the Panorama itself. Bogomil Stoev: And this is the main part of the museum actually. Wow. Bogomil Stoev: So this part of the museum, it's actually the unique part. The name of the museum is because of this part here: Panorama. The name starts in Greek. It means, looking around yourself and the idea is that when you go in a museum like this, you can see actually the real place. The Panorama is huge: one unbroken cylinder of painted canvas wrapping all the way around the room. Bogomil Stoev: It was hand- made. This is on canvas. It's one big piece. It's 115 meters long and it's 15 meters high. 15 meters here in Bulgaria are like four floors of a building. 13 painters did everything here in four months. Everything in the room — the lights, the atmosphere creates the illusion that you're standing at this location in the afternoon of September 11th, 1877. It's as if the canvas is a window — the mountains in the distance, the rolling hills in the foreground are all exactly what you would see if there were actual windows in the building. Bogomil Stoev: And the idea of this part here, or the museum is actually to show you the fight for the place that you're sitting right now. We will go on the roof of the museum: this is the view. This is not a place somewhere around the city. This is exactly the place we are right now. The focus on the exact location mirrors Pleven's geographic destiny — this was the only place for Russian troops and their Romainain allies to enter the territory because their access to the Black Sea was blocked due to the Crimean War. The trade routes and the paths over the mountains were such that whoever controlled Pleven could control access to southern Bulgaria and Istanbul. So this is where the Ottoman Empire tried to stall the invaders' progress. And it almost worked. September 11th, 1877 was the third attack on the Ottoman defensive positions. On the canvas, Russian troops — under the command of General Skobelev— stream towards you in two main divisions, with guns and bayonets. A third division of Romaian troops capture a nearby position. Bogomil Stoev: The whole park here is by the name of the person that you can see over there on the white horse. So this is General Skobelev, he was in charge of the soldiers here. And from here he wanted help to go and liberate the city. We, the museum visitors, are put in the position of the defenders, the Ottoman soldiers, surrendered by two battlefields. Bogomil Stoev: The only successful fight at this day is the fight here for the place of the museum. And this is why we are here. So 13,000 soldiers came from the green hills that you can see over there that were crossing the Valley. They separated on two and they attacked at the same time. Looking north, you can see the city of Pleven as it would have looked in 1877, one of the largest cities in Bulgaria at the time. The battle resulted in so many casualties that the attackers switched tactics, and brought in General Totleben. Totleben decided to conduct a siege of the city of Pleven, still under Ottoman control. Bogomil Stoev: The idea of Totleben was very different. So he didn't rely on soldiers to fight for the place. As you can see here. His idea is actually to use the place. You can see that the city is in the Valley. It's very easy to surround the place so that nothing goes in and nothing goes out. For 45 days, no food, no water, the water mills that were in the city, they were not working. The soldiers, they started to die from hunger, from diseases. Actually the people of Pleven started to actually die from hunger and diseases. They are telling that the city was like tomb. The siege was successful in forcing the Ottoman soldiers to break out of the city: after another battle, the Ottomans surrendered on December 10, 1877. Bulgaria was finally back on the map of Europe. The Pleven Panorama museum opened exactly 100 years later, on December 10th, 1977. 100 years is a long time, and Bulgaria looked very different. In 1977 Bulgaria was a satellite state of the USSR, operating under a communist regime. I asked Stoev if the political environment — and the story of Russian armies contributing to Bulgarian liberation — was one of the reasons for creating the panorama. Bogomil Stoev: Our museum was made from volunteers and from donations and it's not part of any political things, we were just representing the fights that actually liberated Bulgaria. And so that's different than something like Buzludzha? Bogomil Stoev: Yeah, yeah that's made from, for the government and from the government and it was something different as an idea. Buzludzha — the concrete flying saucer monument that we covered on episodes 47 and 54 of Museum Archipelago — comes to mind because it was built only a few years later in 1981, and it has a similar feel: an imposing, disk-shaped structure of pressed concrete with a vertical column or two. But the comparison ends there. While Buzludzha was constructed to make the communist party look futuristic, the architecture of the Pleven Panorama itself is etched with the story of the siege and the battles of the past. Bogomil Stoev: This building was built to be the museum. It was not something that already existed and they used. This vision of the building here is something that was part of the history of the city. How? You saw the spikes, they represent the two battlefields. You can see the structure that is on the rings.The first three rings that are the upper part of the museum. Every ring represents one attempt to liberate the city. And then the siege is the big ring that's down in the museum. So this is the idea. When you see the museum to see the three attempts, then the siege and the two battlefields. The shape of the building supports the massive panorama inside. 1977 was long after the peak in popularity of European panorama painting or cycloramas, as they tend to be called in North America. They were a way to create an immersive environment by hand — an early example of virtual reality. The landscapes and the battles they portrayed — almost always in custom built-buildings — presented spectacle without words, and like modern immersive experiences, each little detail helped complete the illusion. The Pleven Panorama learned from the panoramas before it. The studio that built it had experience with other panoramas. They knew the color temperature the lights had to use to make it feel like sunshine. They knew how sensitive the canvas is to heat and humidity, so they built the museum so that only 30 people would be in the room at any one time, for a maximum of 10 minutes — but with two staircases leading to other galleries, the visitor flow could be continuous. The surface in front of the panorama canvas, but beyond the viewing platform, is littered with artifacts — cannons, makeshift camps, broken wagon wheels. It's all positioned to create the illusion that the scene continues into the painted canvas. Bogomil Stoev: Everything that you can see, the uniforms, all the weapons. They are actually real, they were not made, they're found here and they're real. And they were used in the war. Of the approximately 100 panoramas in the world, the Pleven Panorama is one of only 19 extent examples in the classical style. Bogomil Stoev: This is the old way how you make a museum like this, you make a painting, that's handmade. It's on canvas. It's with oil painting. And it was made here on the place of the museum. The modern panoramas they can be prints or even they can be all digital, where you have even sound, you'll have some kind of lightning, even a smell. It can be full experience for the visitor. So this is not a modern type of museum. It's as if lot of things came together perfectly to create this panorama — the innovation was doing the older-style panorama correctly, with enough resources, and with the technology to protect the canvas. In a city teaming with nearly 200 monuments to the events of 1877, the Pleven Panorama has become the most enduring symbol of the city and the decisive battle. Bogomil Stoev: And every place is a symbol for something, every city in Bulgaria. But when you tell someone Pleven, they think about this, they think about the war, liberation of Bulgaria and the Panorama.…
Museums can be a shorthand for truth, or for history, or for what a culture values. Disney theme parks all around the world use fake museums as a tool to immerse visitors in the themed environment. This detailed world-building can make the imaginary universe more real—or provide a setup to subvert a narrative. But these fake museums aren’t the only ways the Disney theme parks present history to visitors. Public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio describes how the parks “traffic in the past.” By removing references to the present or a future with consequences, parks like Disneyland free the visitor from responsibility for what happened in history. Since the opening of Disneyland in 1955, there have been several iterations of Disney theme parks, each reflecting the way we think about knowledge and history in the times they were built. In this episode, Amaio describes examples of fake museums in Disney theme parks, details how corporate-sponsored edutainment can reflect the public's anxiety, and explains why EPCOT has the most museum-like spaces at Disney theme parks. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Yeti Museum 01:30 Shaelyn Amaio 02:03 Amaio’s First Visit to Disney World 03:30 Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom 05:50 EPCOT and World’s Fairs 08:01 17. Entertainment and History at Disney’s America 09:12 Dinosaur at Disney’s Animal Kingdom 10:20 Layering in Theme Park Design 11:00 Overlap Between Museums and Theme Parks 11:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 91. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript There's a museum just outside Orlando, Florida at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. It's called the Yeti Museum, and it's dedicated to the scientific, historic and cultural studies of the legendary humanoid primate said to inhabit the Himalayan Mountains. The curator of the museum is convinced that the Yeti is real and dangerous. Shaelyn Amaio: It includes local, indigenous cultures and references to their beliefs about the Yeti. And it's all of this evidence, quote unquote--I'm doing air quotes, but you can't see it--that the Yeti is real and it's something that you should be scared of. The museum is actually the queue to a roller coaster called Expedition Everest, which is themed to look like a train taking visitors on a journey through the Himalayas. At points in the ride, visitors encounter an audio-animatronic Yeti. Shaelyn Amaio: So by the time you get on the train, you're primed. You know you're going to see the Yeti, even if you haven't been on the ride before. And so then when you encounter it, it does make it a little bit more real because you've already seen all of this evidence of the existence of Yetis. And so you're not just like, Oh, this is just a robot covered in fake fur with a strobe light on it. And it kind of like switches that on in your brain. For public experience advocate Shaelyn Amaio, this is a great example of how museums--and museum iconography--are used as shorthand for reliability, truth, and prestige in theme parks. Shaelyn Amaio: Hi, my name is Shaelyn Amaio and I am somebody who works in museums, mostly in history museums, but I like to think of myself as a public experience advocate. So my interests lie both in museums and in other leisure activities. Amaio grew up in Connecticut, and first visited Walt Disney World in Florida as a five-year-old. Shaelyn Amaio: I just remember the feeling of being on Main Street U.S.A. in the Magic Kingdom and being completely overwhelmed. Right? Because when you're five, you don't know the history, you don't know what it's referencing, but you still know that it's like this nostalgic feeling, even if you don't have the words or the experiences. To, to relate that. And I think at that age, a lot of what you're feeding off of are the reactions of the adults around you. When people talk about going to Disney, they tend to center children and, like, what the kids will think of it. But I think something that's left out of that conversation is how adults react to the theme parks and why the kid's experience is kind of a mirror of adult experience in theme parks. Back in Connecticut, Amaio also spent her childhood visiting museums. Shaelyn Amaio: I was really lucky to get exposed to museums from an early age. And then as I got older, I will admit that I did not see a career in museums for myself. And then I went to undergrad and I was studying anthropology and I got to the end of my undergrad and was like, oh no, I don't actually want to be out in the field all the time. What am I going to do? Shaelyn Amaio: And so I ended up in a museum education program. And when I went on to get my MA I actually wrote my thesis on the presentation of history in Disney theme parks. So it all, it all came together. The 2011 thesis, which was titled “Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy: History and Innocence in the Magic Kingdom”, dives into how the so-called Castle parks at Disney resorts around the world, like Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Disneyland Paris in Paris, France and the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida--which all feature an iconic castle in their center and differened themed lands surrounding it like Adventureland and Frontierland--remove the present from the visitors’ experiences. Shaelyn Amaio: So the Disney theme parks actually like traffic in the past, that is their main currency you have in the Magic Kingdom most of the areas of the park are themed to different historic moments, right? The one main exception being Tomorrowland, which is kind of set in this retro-futuristic never. And so when you look back and say, okay, I as a visitor am now the main character, the important thing to understand is that they remove the present. Shaelyn Amaio: And so if you are only looking at the past and this future that will never be then the past doesn't have any impact, right? There's no responsibility for what happened in the past. And so as a visitor, I can just kind of be like, wow, the past was bad, but look, we've made so much progress. Things are getting better every day and not really have to grapple with all of the history and, and its continuing legacies today. I think another important thing is that it's intended to feel neutral to mostly to white Americans, which I think we can't talk about Disney parks without talking about that. Each of these images of the past, weathered rocks etched in the landscape of Frontierland or the oil-lantern illuminated shops of Main Street, U.S.A, help us relate to history. One of the main principles of experience design is that even the smallest out-of-place detail ruins the illusion. Castle parks that follow this same formula continue to open into the 21st century in Hong Kong and Shanghai. But even by the 1980s, Disney had developed a different model of park in the form of EPCOT. EPCOT was a theme park which sought to create a permanent World’s Fair. Disney had experience with the 1964/1965 World's Fair in New York, where no fewer than four corporate sponsors hired the company to develop attractions for them. Shaelyn Amaio: It is really interesting to think about how these different parks and the periods in which they were built reflect the way that we think about knowledge in these different times. If you look at EPCOT, which opened in 1982. Here you have a different relationship to history and a different relationship to progress for Americans. So you're coming off of the 1970s, which were really tumultuous, right? You have an entire pavilion in EPCOT that is the Universe of Energy Pavilion, which was sponsored by Exxon Mobil. And we had just come off of the gas crisis. Americans were not really feeling secure in the future of fossil fuels. And so you have this entire ride that talks about how great everything is, how technology is advancing, how we're going to solve all of the problems of humanity. Universe of Energy Narration: In our ever-changing world, the road to tomorrow’s energy is indeed long, complex, and challenging. It demands the development and wise use of today’s energy resources. It calls for practical and affordable new sources for tomorrow. But at this point they have to kind of also be like, we know sometimes things are bad. Like they have to acknowledge the reality of the situation, but at the end of the day, they're still like, yeah, but don't worry. Corporations are doing great. We're going to figure it out together. We'll get there, which is this just a really interesting contrast to what's happening in the Magic Kingdom, where it's just like, we've removed all of the bad things. Don't worry. We're all doing great! EPCOT represents the closest experience to going into a museum in a Disney theme park, precisely because of its World’s Fair legacy. Shaelyn Amaio: You also have things like a pavilion devoted to imagination that was sponsored by Kodak. So thinking about the power of creativity and imagination, you have a pavilion about the ocean and about things that live in the ocean and ocean technology. So all of these attractions are basically set up so that you are learning something, it feels like a very didactic experience, right? Shaelyn Amaio: Like probably the most traditional quote unquote museum-y, edutainment-y experience in the parks. By the early 1990s, Disney was on track to develop yet another type of park--a theme park that presented actual history in an edutainment context called Disney's America. In episode 17 of Museum Archipelago, we cover its spectacular failure. Disney’s idea would have put a park showcasing [quote] “the sweep of American History”--including the institution of Slavery and the Civil War--within a fun theme park environment just outside Washington, DC. The idea met so much public resistance that it was scrapped and there’s no plans for this type of park in the future. In recent years, in the current park types, there’s been a mixing of mediums happening: the introduction of fake museums in the Disney parks, like the Yeti Museum. The mixing says more about the medium of museums than the medium of theme parks. Shaelyn Amaio: There's so much that you have to do in order to help people take that leap, to kind of letting themselves be immersed in an experience. And the fact that theme parks very often turned to museums as a tool in that journey is really fascinating to me. Another example is also at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Park: it’s a ride called Dinosaur, which begins with a museum space filled with fossils and printed graphics, setting up the subversion that happens in the ride itself -- and is actually meant to be dull. Pre-Show of Dinosaur: Hello! I’m Dr. Marsh, Director of the Dino Institute, and I hope you enjoy those quaint exhibits in the old wing. That's how dinosaurs happened was into to the public since the study of fossils began over 150 years ago. Shaelyn Amaio: You have the Institute quote unquote, where the Dinosaur attraction takes place, which has the actual fake museum inside of it. And I think all of that is meant to set up this idea. That this is somehow legitimate in a way that it wouldn't be understood otherwise. And so I think just the use of not only museum environments, but also just the science world in general is really interesting. it really just tells you as a visitor, like I am meant to understand this as real. I am meant to understand that we are actually going back in time, and it’s not just strobe lights. The museum, and everything it represents, can be a tool in the world building of a themed environment. Theme park designers talk about layers of meaning, all on top of one another to create a successful theme. A fake town seems less fake if there’s a fake historical maker describing the founding of the town. It’s even less fake if within the fake town there’s some disagreement about the accuracy of the marker -- feuding families, each trying to tell their own stories. As visitors, this level of detail doesn’t distract -- quite the opposite. For anyone who works in or thinks about museums, it’s worth figuring out what museums are shorthand for in themed environments. Shaelyn Amaio: Walt Disney himself had this quote that was like, “I'd rather entertain people and hope they learn something, then educate them and hope that they are entertained.” Shaelyn Amaio: I don't think that the way that theme parks use museums is meant to be educational the way that museums want to be educational. I think it's a little bit of a distortion of theme parks, even the ones that are more traditional in terms of how they're displaying things in the topics they're covering. But there is a lot of overlap when you're looking at how humans act, and so that's where we really have this opportunity to learn from each other to improve experiences in both spaces so that visitors do learn some things. So that visitors do have fun. I think we have to kind of embrace some things that theme parks are doing well so that we can better serve our visitors and continue to fulfill our missions. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
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Museum Archipelago
1 90. Civil Rights Progress Isn't Linear. The Grove Museum Interprets Tallahassee's Struggle in an Unexpected Setting. 14:53
The Grove Museum inside the historic Call/Collins House is one of Tallahassee’s newest museums, and it’s changing how the city interprets its own history. Instead of focusing on the mansion house’s famous owners, including Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, Executive Director John Grandage oriented the museum around civil rights. Cleverly tracing how Collins’s thinking on race relations evolved, the museum uses the house and the land it sits on to tell the story of the forced removal of indigenous people from the area, the enslaved craftspeople who built the house, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. Grandage says the museum’s interpretive plan and focus on civil rights wouldn't have been possible without the work of Black Tallahassee institutions like John G. Riley House Museum created by Althemese Barnes or the Southeastern Regional Black Archives built from FAMU Professor James Eaton’s collection. In this episode recorded at the museum, Grandage describes how historic preservation has always been about what the dominant culture finds worth persevering, the museum’s genealogical role, and the white backlash to Collins’s moderate positions on civil rights. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Ian at the 1992 Springtime Tallahassee Parade 00:55 White Supremacy in Tallahassee 01:20 Smokey Hollow 01:40 John Grandage 02:35 The Grove Museum 03:05 Developing the Interpretive Plan with a Focus on Slavery and Civil Rights 03:30 Governorship of LeRoy Collins 04:36 Tallahassee Bus Boycott 06:08 Presenting the Narrative through Collins 06:50 White Backlash to Collins’s Moderate Position on Civil Rights 08:15 The Construction of the House by Enslaved Craftspeople 09:45 The Genealogical Role of the Museum 10:50 Forced Removal of Indigenous People in Tallahassee 12:25 How Tallahassee Interprets Its History 13:00 The John G. Riley House 13:10 The Meek-Eaton Black Archives 14:08 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 90. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript I found an old picture of me, taken about a block away from what is now the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, FL. The picture was taken in March 1992: I'm facing the camera as the Springtime Tallahassee parade -- Tallahassee's biggest annual celebration -- goes by behind me. Positioned in the frame is a confederate flag, proudly carried by two people parading down the middle of the street. My three-year-old self is blocking whatever group came after the flag -- maybe a club, maybe a mascot, maybe a group of Civil War reenactors? The fact that the confederate flag in a parade happened to be in the background of this candid shot hints at the white supremacy that undergirds Tallahassee, a city that had a majority Black population during Reconstruction. In 1907, the city refused Andrew Carnegie's offer to build a library, because the conditions of the donation stated that the library would have to serve Black patrons. In the 1970s, Apalachee Parkway was built right over the Black Smokey Hollow neighborhood -- a pattern of development which repeats to this day. And the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, waited until 2006 to apologize for it's pro-segregationists coverage of the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott. And of course, that white supremacy extends to the local museums. John Grandage: So the whole idea of historical preservation in the United States, so in our country, has been what is worth preserving. And here we are, interrogating the source material to reach back in the past and bring stories that have been dormant or deliberately excluded, silenced, now into a place where they can be told. I think what's interesting is how museums have a role to play in that. John Grandage: Exactly. Right. Because, in some ways museums have been, maybe the nicest way to say it is complicit in that storyline. John Grandage: Right. They're part of that dominant narrative. And that's why this historic house, the Grove Museum, which opened in 2017 is so interesting in the context of how Tallahassee interprets its history. This is John Grandage, executive director of the Grove Museum. John Grandage: My name is John Grandage, and I'm the executive director at the Grove Museum in Tallahassee, Florida. And we are at the Call-Collins house at the Grove Museum. At first glance, the Grove Museum doesn't look like a museum that might change how Tallahassee interprets its history. It's a stately mansion house in the center of town -- less than a block from the parade route -- and it was built from 1835 to 1839 by Richard Keith Call. After that, it was owned by a series of wealthy Floridians, most recently by former Florida Governor LeRoy Collins and his wife, Mary Call Collins, who left the house to the state to preserve as a museum. John Grandage: So I've been here since 2014 and like there wasn't really a clear interpretive plan. So coming up with the, let's tell the whole story, let's talk not just about politics, but let's dig deeper and try to look at this as sort of like a witness to all this history. And then coming up with the let's emphasize on civil rights. The museum uses the governorship of LeRoy Collins as a narrative arc to tell that ‘whole story.’ It traces how his own thinking on race evolved from his early years as a staunch segregationist, as an opening to tell the story of civil rights in Florida. Collins was elected in 1954 -- the same year that the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation is unconstitutional in public schools and other places of public accommodation. John Grandage: When he ran for office, he didn't initially come out in support of that. So it's thinking about how does the country respond to civil rights? Collins feared also, to be very frank about it, the economic ramifications of Florida having kind of, you know, people being firehosed in the street or people standing in front of a doorway of a school and like shouting and calling out the troops to prevent integration. Like that to him was, would have been very damaging to the image Florida. Collins became one of the most prominent white Southern politicians to speak in favor of racial integration and the growing Civil Rights movement. He was governor from 1955 through 1961, which means that he was in charge during the 1956 Tallahassee Bus boycott. John Grandage: The bus boy caught here with the two students at FAMU that that really started it: Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson are their names. John Grandage: And then the community organized behind them, then you see the local churches, people like C K Steele, leaders in the community, sort of bring some broader community organization, which of course the boycott put all this economic pressure on the city and the bus company, which ultimately led to them repealing segregated seating ordinances and at the same time, the bus boycott in Montgomery, which started earlier, but runs somewhat parallel. And that's an important part of our interpretation of Collins is that he undeniably has a very specific moral view of the world. And as the state, or as the local government in Florida started to react very extremely to Civil Rights activism like jailing the sit-in demonstrators. What we can trace is here's a person who began to question these beliefs that he had grown up with. He says, it's like a two class society. Right. And he's on the privileged side. And then seeing the response and thinking about the potential for all kinds of ramifications in society. That's really what drove him to do a lot of the things that he did. And so he began to adapt his thinking. So in that way, we can actually take Collins and position the decisions he made, you know, not as something that came solely from him. So it gives a little bit of power to the activists and it helps to position the people really who were putting it on the line. So alongside the Collins story, we're able to tell that story of the local activists, and so it's important that Collins didn't act in a vacuum. Even more critical to the story -- in a way that de-centers Collins -- was the white backlash to his moderate stance on Civil Rights and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott. The version of the civil rights movement that I was taught in public schools in Tallahassee focused on sweeping and uplifting narratives that had widespread support and presented progress as a straight upward line. Simply put, that’s not what happened. After leaving the Governor's office, LeRoy Collins was appointed by President Johnson in 1964 to direct the Community Relations Service under the Civil Rights Act. John Grandage: And so he was present in March, 1965 in Selma, Alabama to negotiate on behalf of the federal government. So the marchers are attacked on March 7th. Collins comes in on March 9th, they sort of negotiate this sort of settlement. They progress past Selma. They go onto Montgomery, but this photo's taken and this becomes like the number one piece of anti-Collins propaganda. So he's with John Lewis and Andrew Young and Dr. King and Coretta Scott King and Ralph [Abernathy], like the main figureheads in the Civil Rights movement. John Grandage: He runs for Senate in 1968, loses the election. And it's really tied back to him being at Selma. He was too liberal, right? Yeah, he was, he was associated with the civil rights activists and that blow back in the South is really pronounced during that 1968 election. Collins went from receiving 99% of the vote share in Tallahassee in 1954 when he ran for governor to 48% in his 1968 senate race. Again, the museum uses this story as the opening act -- presenting Colin's preserved office and an old-timey TV playing videos of his speeches alongside the most detailed account of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott and backlash that I've ever seen. But here's where the museum really opens up -- remember when I mentioned that this house was built by Richard Keith Call? John Grandage: So when we take people through the tour, we sort of give them that story arc, but then we jump back and nest it all within the fact that this was a plantation that, bonds people who were claimed as the property of Richard Keith Call built the home. And like, you can reach up and still touch, the physical fabric of the home that they laid into place, the bricks or those floor joists or whatever. The number one artifact that speaks to African-American history here is the house itself. And it's the positioning of credit who built the home, right? Enslaved people built the house, right. You know, we get this telling of American history where it becomes, you know, Call built the house. Which we know is, you know, maybe not in all cases intended to erase the people: it's our manner of speaking. Right? It's kind of the way that we conceptualize this history at a broader level. John Grandage: So even the position, the credit back to the craftspeople that built the house. was vitally important and putting this museum together. Because when we come, when we bring people in the space and say, think about Collins in that Civil Rights era, and then jump back a hundred years and what this property would have literally been witnessing on a day-to-day basis. Civil rights had been really the purview of only people like Call, you know, not even, you know, women at that time, and certainly not at the African-Americans who were considered property. And sort of denied all, you know, humanity, like we were talking about, even in the records, right there, there tally marks, there may be an age or a gender, and I could show you some ways that we've worked against that, but this speaks to that. One of the interactive exhibits is Call's logbook about the people he enslaved -- represented by tally marks and business records. But the Grove Museum uses the interactive to focus on their humanity. John Grandage: So like for example, this family here, starting with Tom Hackley, We've been able to trace their family up into the present. I mean, present living people who we’re in contact with, who are descended from Tom and Diana Hackley. So that's like that genealogical role that a museum can play. So like Thomas 34, these are their children and , the bank owned them as property at the time, kind of a complex thing. John Grandage: But we've been able to take a document like this and then jump to different documents and make connections to like living people, right. Who are, who are increasingly. The tools that we have, through databases and things like that enable us to do this genealogical research. So people all around the country are finding out things they had no idea about. The museum presents a house -- and even the land it sits on -- as a witness to all of this. John Grandage: The very presence of this place on the landscape is directly related to the forced removal of indigenous people from this area. So we wanted to bring in that because Call got his start as a soldier fighting against the Creeks, the Seminoles. And so he's literally, you know, as we know about, um, kind of colonialism this sort of dropping onto this place of an entirely different way of land use, politics, culture, et cetera, you know, that, that swept, you know, generations of the indigenous people that have that lived here and they were in the process of being removed by the American government from this area, just as Call and his associates were coming here. So it was a very active process. John Grandage: They had actively wage war against them, and they knew it was about expanding slavery into this area. And that these red Hills of Tallahassee were agriculturally going to be very productive. So it's, it's strange how we then tell these different stories. Cause we, we don't want to engage fully with, with, um, you know, the removal of indigenous people and we don't want to engage with with slavery as a system that was, you know, the value of the land was not as important as literally the value placed upon those bodies that were put to work and should be shaping the land. And people don't want deal with that. What's unusual is that the Grove Museum does deal with it -- most institutions in Tallahassee simply don't. The mascot of Florida State University, where Grandage got a degree in Indigenous History is still, as of 2021, a representation of a Seminole Indian. The Grove Museum was able to build on the work of local Black museums and archives, some of which have been featured on previous episodes of this show. John Grandage: I would say like for a museum like this in Tallahassee, and I know you talked to Mrs. Barnes. So like if Althemese Barnes hadn't created the Riley House and hadn't created the Florida African-American heritage Preservation Network. And if Professor Eaton, hadn't created the Black Archives. And if we didn't have FAMU, that's all the framework that it's interesting. Cause we think about the, his, his historical museum landscape. And it's largely defined by these institutions that don't represent the African-American community. John Grandage: Let's say, right. And that's, as we talked about is sort of a legacy of historic preservation of museum and cultural studies in the U.S. The Grove Museum’s central location in the city -- right across the street from the current governor’s mansion and its deliberate decision to focus on civil rights instead of the white owner protagonists, is helping change how Tallahassee interprets its history.…
Dr. Tehmina Goskar, director of the Curatorial Research Centre, co-founded MuseumHour with Sophie Ballinger in October 2014. The weekly peer-to-peer chat on Twitter “holds space for debate” for museum people all around the world. This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role at MuseumHour. This episode serves as both an “exit interview” for Goskar’s MusuemHour work and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophy. In this episode, Goskar discusses founding the Curatorial Research Centre, democratizing culture through her Citizen Curators program (in association with the Cornwall Museums Partnership), and how over six years of MuseumHour conversations have shaped her work. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 MuseumHour at 6.5 Years Old 00:50 Tehmina Goskar 01:20 MuseumHour's Founding 03:00 Mediums and Platforms 04:35 Museum Conferences 05:30 What is Curation? 07:15 "To Care For" 07:30 The Curatorial Research Centre 09:20 Citizen Curators 12:38 Archipelago at the Movies: How to Steal A Million (1966) 14:05 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 89. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript For the past 6 and a half years, more or less weekly, museum people gather on Twitter for something called MuseumHour. Together, these people form a peer to peer community, supporting discussion and debate between those who work in, enjoy, and challenge museums in society. Tehmina Goskar: That's the beauty of MuseumHour. It is entirely independent. It is not an organization. It is just about holding a space so other people can talk with each other. This is Dr. Tehmina Goskar, who co-founded MuseumHour back in October 2014. Goskar also founded the Curatorial Research Centre. Tehmina Goskar: Hello, my name is Tehmina Goskar and I am the director and curator of the Curatorial Research Centre. And that's an organization I started back in 2018, very much to support fellow curators from around the world and also to make progress in modernizing curatorial practice. This month, Goskar officially steps back from her role in MusuemHour. I wanted this to serve as both an exit interview and a chance to highlight other projects that she has founded based on her curatorial philosophies. Tehmina Goskar: Museum Hour started back in October, 2014. Sophie Ballinger, who was the co-founder with me, got together over Twitter. We've never met in real life. Goodness knows whether we ever will. Sophie was based up in the North of England. I'm based in the far West of Cornwall. But we both decided we'd give the idea of these discussion-based hours that were kind of finding their feet on Twitter at that time. So we decided to give it a go and it's grown and grown and grown and changed a lot since then. Of course Twitter's also changed hugely in terms of who participates, who feels confident about speaking up, who lurks in the background. There is a lot of polarization on the platform now. And so we've changed and adapted MuseumHour to all of those trends that we've seen happen, including its growing politicization as well. If I'm being honest, I kind of treated the whole thing even six and a half years on as an ongoing experiment in trying to understand how it is people like to communicate with each other and how it is that you can provide some kind of support for this peer to peer contact is what we're really after. On Museum Archipelago, we look at museums as a medium. And Twitter is also a medium -- one that has changed since MuseumHour started six and a half years ago. Since then, Twitter has shifted from a simple subscriber model, one where you see all the tweets from the people you follow in the order that they tweeted, to a system that uses algorithms that optimize for other factors, such as engagement with the tweets. This can make a global conversation about museums difficult. Tehmina Goskar: With the change in how Twitter is managed and how the concept of driving engagement and algorithms are dictating what we see on our timelines, there has absolutely been an impact on MuseumHour because of that. We've got to work much harder to try and get ideas for topics, for example, or people's ideas out to as broad and interested audience or participation group that we can. And that, that has proven very difficult, in fact, particularly of late, because people's timelines are so manipulated by Twitter's algorithms and because there's so much more noise on Twitter now than there was. So I'm kind of glad that MuseumHour has managed to hold its own so it retains a light structure. It does support those intimate conversations, as well as supporting bigger thoughts and opinions and even ones that people disagree about in one space. I’ve participated in and even hosted a few MuseumHours, and the thing it reminds me of the most is a museum conference, or the conversations you might have at a museum conference, which is yet another medium. But, interestingly, Goskar says that MuseumHour has never been about recreating that experience. Tehmina Goskar: That certainly isn't the kind of experience you usually get, unless you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to go to very expensive, large international museum conferences, for example, like the Museums Association Conferences in the UK or any of ICOM conferences. But we've never really perceived of MuseumHour to fill that kind of gap. We're still kind of exploring what it is that we think we're doing. And that's just by way of being very honest about not having an agenda and letting sort of the emergent process of MuseumHour happen. MuseumHour is just one of the volunteer projects Goskar works on. She is first and foremost a curator -- I term I still ask for the definition of after almost 90 episodes of this show. Tehmina Goskar: Curating doesn't just exist in the museum world. And I think far too many people in museums think that being a curator is somehow a special feature of museums, but no other field, but that is just not true. The way I described curation is very, very simple. For me. a good curator is part knowledge creator, and part communicator. So the philosophy of the Curatorial Research Centre is very much to promote this 50% model as we call it, idea of a curator. That you should be as interested in communicating knowledge stories, ideas about people, about material culture, and of course the connections between them as you are in the research, in the generating of knowledge, and also to recognize that not all knowledge and not all research comes from a Western idea of academic research. That's very important to me in my practice, but I would certainly also recognize expertise coming from lived experiences, coming from curatorial cultures, as I would recognize them in other parts of the world and certainly from other cultures past as well. So for me, it's very simple: I boil it down to a curator is 50% knowledge generator or knowledge creator and 50% communicator and wrapped ‘round that kind of equation is the very heart of the word to curate, which means to care for. So there must be some elements of intention and meaning and caring for what you're curating in order to authentically curate whatever it is you feel you want to curate. Goskar founded the Curatorial Research Centre in 2018, and a few months later brought archaeologist and audiovisual specialist Tom Goskar aboard -- who also happens to be her husband. The Centre aims to work in partnership with museums, not just in a transactional manner. Research is the core of the Centre’s work. At every opportunity research answers the questions: why are things done like this, what should we be doing instead? Tehmina Goskar: So why Curatorial Research? What on earth is Curatorial Research? It is critically engaging with the act of curation, wherever that may happen. The study of the phenomenon a bit like museology is the study specifically of museums. Curatorial Research is I would say taking a much more proactive stance towards constantly critically engaging with what curation and being a curator is all about and what it might be all about. So from my standpoint, I am an action researcher. I am a pretty vocal thinker and I'm interested in systems. So that means that I'm. Always analyzing, always lining up the evidence to take a really good look at it. Whether that's exhibition making or collections research or that I might be now currently focused on so that might be diversity and decolonization. It might be more about the change in technical skills, a curator needs, or it might be as my current professional life is dominated by training others in how to be a curator, put simply. These curatorial values and philosophy are on display in Goskar’s other project: Citizen Curators with the Cornwall Museums Partnership. Citizen Curators is designed to support volunteers by building their confidence and competence in key areas of curatorial work. Tehmina Goskar: Citizen Curators a bit like my creation of the Curatorial Research Centre, was a long time in the making before it happened. So I was beginning to think that the idea of volunteer reliant or volunteer run museums needed some kind of channel into what I would call the mainstream professional museum world. And I felt that there was a lack of opportunity there that I felt that a program like citizen curators could fill. There were these really fascinating, bigger ideas, like inclusion, like decolonization of late that were not touching the small museum world. The idea came for Citizen Curators, which, but simply as pitched as a work based curatorial training and museum awareness course aimed specifically at volunteers from our communities and part of it was to sort of break down barriers between volunteers and collections and asking new questions of them. Through my support, they had permission to, for example, browse the stores, browse the object, databases, come to their own conclusions, go outside the museum, talk to people about the kinds of things that they were coming up against to also bring their own talents and hobbies and ideas to the process. There’s a similarity between holding the permission space for Citizen Curators and holding the discussion space for MuseumHour. For Goskar, both projects feed back into her work at the Curatorial Research Centre. Tehmina Goskar: I've always been a practitioner. In the kind of museum, heritage, culture, arts world. That is what some people, and I would describe as, I bring my whole self to the table so I don't compartmentalize the voluntary activities I do. For example, running MuseumHour. And the professional activities I do to earn a living. So as a career curator, curating in all sorts of different contexts, not just exhibitions, but being engaged in collections research, critically engaging in the systems that museums use and take for granted, trying to understand the whole phenomenon of museums. I would say that my experience of MuseumHour has in parts quite heavily shaped how I see other people's views of museums. Other ideas and other thoughts about what museums can and should be. It's also helped me formulate and to check my own understanding and also my own, my own prejudices and biases, about museums and you know what I think a good museum is isn't what someone else thinks a good museum is. And that's okay. You can find Tehmina Goskar at curatorialresearch.com.…
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Museum Archipelago
1 88. Jérôme Blachon Collects and Transmits Precious Memories at the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France 7:25
During World War II, a Nazi collbatoring regime governed the south of France, and the city of Toulouse was a Resistance hub. The Vichy Government promoted anti-Semitism and collaborated with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Fragmented Resistance fighters organized to form escape networks and build logistics chains to sabotage and disrupt the regime. In 1977, former Resistance members created a community museum in Toulouse about their experience. Today, that museum is called the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, and is run by the regional government. Museum director Jérôme Blachon is reimagining how the museum tells the story of the French Resistance as the people who experienced firsthand pass away. In this episode, Blachon describes the challenge of presenting the fragmented nature of the resistance to a modern audience, the 2020 renovation of the museum, and his focus on transmitting precious memories. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Memorials in Toulouse 01:00 Toulouse During World War II 01:32 Jérôme Blachon, Director of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France 02:20 "Engage, Collect, Transmit" 02:50 France During Nazi Germany's Administration 03:38 Museum Archipelago Ep. 51 04:08 Presenting the Difference Forms of Resistance in the Museum 05:25 2020 Renovation 05:35 The Disappearance of the Last Witnesses 06:26 The Museum as Transmission 06:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 88. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Toulouse, France has many memorials, covering hundreds of years of history. There’s a statue of Joan of Arc, there's monuments to the soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War, and there’s memorials to the dead of World War I. But look closer, and you’ll also find sites covering a very specific slice of history: the years between 1940 and 1944, the period of Nazi Germany’s military administation of France. There’s the building where the Gestapo secret police made their local headquarters, there’s a monument to the Glory of the Resistance, and there’s the Shoah Memorial, the Hebrew word for the Holocoust, that honors the Jews who were deported and killed during this period. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Toulouse, during World War II, was a Resistance hub in the South of France. A lot of Resistance fighters came to Toulouse to form a Resistance unit and many then left for the rest of France or Spain. A number of escape networks began in Toulouse and took English airmen, for example, or Resistance fighters across the Pyrenees to London or the United States. This is Jerome Blachon, speaking French. Blachon is head of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, which is right down the street from many of these memorials in Toulouse. This museum brings together these sites, as well as artifacts, stories, and witnesses from across the region and all over France. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Hello, my name is Jerome Blachon. I am in charge of the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France. The museum actually opened in 1977. It was first a community museum. The museum was initially a community museum set up by former members of the French Resistance, and in 1994, it became departmental--which is to say it is now funded by the regional government. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The three themes of the museum are: engage, collect, transmit. We collect to store and transmit this memory of our ancestors from our elders to future generations. Memorials that defend the memory of the Resistance gives us access to people who have objects in their homes and documents and some of them intrust them to us. The focus on Toulouse and the surrounding region in the museum is in not just because it’s under the authority of the regional government--it also reflects the the uneven and ever-changing military administation of France under Nazi Germany. Until November 1942, the Nazis only had direct occupation of part of the country: mostly the north of France, including Paris, and the western coast. The south of France was under the jurisdiction of the Vichy regime--an independent ally of Nazi Germany, which promoted anti-Semitism and practiced collaboration with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. So when it comes to the people fighting this regime--the Resistance--It’s tempting to present history like a story, with clear-cut intentions and a simple narrative. But the history of the French Resistance was anything but simple. It’s not like there was one single unified resistance with one single outcome in mind. In episode 51 of this program, we examine another collaborationist regime: Bulgaria in the early 1940s, by visiting the Sofia Jewish Museum of History. Today, one of the galleries is named The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria, which even the museum staff say is an overly simplisic title. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Many visitors are in fact unaware of this fragmented structure of the Resistance, with the Gaullists on one side and the Communists on the other. So, in the Museum, we do indeed present the different forms of Resistance. To present the complexity, the Museum of Resistance and Deportation focuses on presenting objects gathered from witnesses. These include Resistance newspapers of various groups, and photos and testimonies of those who were fighting -- whether in acts of sabotage, providing shelter to those who needed it, or even building the logistictics of feeding fighters in other parts of France. There’s also catalogues: names and photographs of people deported and accounts of reprisal attacks against Resistance Fighters and Collaborators alike, as control of territory ebbed and flowed. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The period of World War II is quite complex to explain to the younger generations, who often have a rather Manichean view, that is to say in black and white. You are either a Resistance fighter or a collaborator, pro-Vichy, Nazi, that's it. You are either a good guy or a bad guy. The museum was closed for an 18-month renovation from 2018 until 2020. The renovation modernized the museum, and also reflects our moment in time. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): Today, this type of museum has a new dimension with the disappearance of the last witnesses, since they can no longer testify in front of students, scholars and the general public. So it is our mission to transmit this memory. To do so, we have collected and we continue to collect objects, and especially testimonies. The renovated museum features two floors of permanent galleries and space for temporary exhibitions. Special programs are available to school kids, who are encouraged to question the sustainability of the spirit of resistance, the current struggles for the preservation and extension of rights and freedoms, and the fight against inequalities. Today, it’s no longer a museum run by former members of the resistance, but instead it focused on being the transmission to new generations. Jérôme Blachon (speaking French): The witnesses are now 90 or 95 years old, and we continue to collect their testimonies and to project, broadcast, and record these testimonies in order to gather their precious memories and transmit them to the new generations. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
Vitosha Mountain, the southern border of Sofia, Bulgaria, is home to about 15 brown bears and one bear museum. According to Dr. Nikola Doykin, fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the bear population is stable—if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward, and the Vitosha Bear Museum does just that. Founded in 2002 by repurposing an abandoned mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers, the Vitosha Bear Museum provides “useful tips on how to meet a bear.” It’s also sparse: the entire gallery is a single room, and the gallery lighting is powered by a car battery. In this episode recorded at the museum, Dr. Nikola Doykin describes why the location is so useful for eco education, how groups of schoolchildren react to exhibits, and what the museum plans to do when it installs solar panels. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Vitosha mountain 00:50 The Viosha Bear Museum 01:05 Dr. Nikola Doykin 02:10 The Location of the Museum 04:00 "Useful Tips On How To Meet A Bear" 04:35 Bear Markings in the Museum 06:40 Ep. 6 Muzeiko 06:50 Ep. 46 Vessela Gercheva Directs Playful Exhibits at Bulgaria’s First Children’s Museum 08:30 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 87. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Towering over the Bulgarian capital of Sofia is Vitosha mountain. Connected to the city by several public buses, residents like me love hiking the numerous mountain trails to get away from the hustle and bustle. [Hiking Sounds] And it was on one of these solitary hikes that I first came across The Vitosha Bear Museum. At first I didn’t quite know what I was looking at: a cute little hut halfway up the mountain with a locked door and boarded up windows. But the sign said Bear Museum in Bulgarian, and also that the museum was closed because it was “hibernating” for the winter. So I sent some emails and that’s how, a few days later, I met Dr. Nikola Doykin at the museum. добър ден! (Good day!) Dr. Nikola Doykin: добър ден! (Good day!) Dr. Nikola Doykin is a Fauna expert at the Vitosha Nature Park Directorate, the organization that runs the museum. And he also had a key to open the museum door, which he wasn’t sure would work because it had been a month since he last used it. [Key Unlocking Sounds] Dr. Nikola Doykin: “And as you see, our museum is how to say, very simple.” The museum is as small on the inside as it looks on the outside. There’s no electric connection at the museum -- the LED lights that illuminate the gallery are powered by a car battery that Doykin switched on when we entered. The rustic appearance is a carryover from the building’s first purpose: a mountain shelter for the Vitosha mountain rangers. Dr. Nikola Doykin: And this was the place that they are staying during the night. And after that, it was abandoned, totally. And one guy had the idea to make this a place where we can show the bears, and where they can live, and the whole idea of the bears in the forest. The abandoned shelter was turned into the Vitosha Bear Museum in 2002. For Doykin, this is the perfect setting for the museum -- because what’s outside is just as important as what’s inside. Dr. Nikola Doykin: it will be easy for us if this kind of a museum was in a city. But we cut the line if we are in the city, but not in the forest because after that we can go out in the forest and show something else to the children. And mostly we have a little bit of a different education with the children and we start from here after that, we go out in the field and they can feel everything. Dr. Nikola Doykin: the idea is to put especially the children, the new generation, to put them in a real feelings to smell the forest, to feel the wind. The whole idea of the eco education, forestry education to take out the children from the cities and to show them real nature and how they can walk around and even to have fun in the forest, not only in the cities. The forests and mountains of Bulgaria represent a part of the national ethos, and so do the brown bears that live there. As the number of bears in the country declined, so too has the cultural pervasiveness of bears as fearsome carnivorous predators. Today, there’s an increased focus on conservation and even a sense of pride about Bulgaria’s remaining bears. Dr. Nikola Doykin: We can say something about 10 to 15 bears that are left in Vitosha mountain, but mostly on the south part of the mountain. According to Doykin, DNA testing has indicated that there’s enough genetic diversity in this population of bears to reproduce and ensure their continued survival on Vitosha mountain -- that is if humans stay away and protect their habitat. To Doykin and his team, teaching children about the bears is the best way forward. As a local news article about the museum put it, “useful tips on how to meet a bear are given at the Vitosha Bear Museum”. Dr. Nikola Doykin: And mostly what to do, not to meet the bear. And if we meet it, find it somehow, what to do. In the corner of the room, there’s a tree taken from the forest which has markings from a bear. Dr. Nikola Doykin: What they do to mark their territory, the different types of markings. And also, one tree that is for real marked, from a bear, here with his teeth and here with his claws.We can show to the children what, what to look for. The tree in the sparse interior makes it easy to connect visitors to what’s going on outside the four walls. Dr. Nikola Doykin: After we show them how the bears mark their territory, to start to look around, to see if some of the trees are marked, And then we present to the children that same information. Where it can live, where we can find it, to take care of the animals, not to kill them, we make some programs and speak to the childrens. On interpretive panels, visitors will also find information about the evolution and geographic distribution of different types of bears. These cover not just the brown bear -- the only type of bear found in Europe in Bulgaria, but also black bears in the Americas and in Asia, and polar bears. A glass case displays skulls from all of these bears. There’s even a bit of space in the basement where visitors can go inside a fake bear cave and see statues of a brown bear and her cub. Dr. Nikola Doykin: In here, the main idea was to be dark, because in a cave, there is no lights. We had no real bears, but only those. And the small bear in the cave, that's his mom take care of him. The cave is the perfect example of the museum working with what it has -- in this case a dark, low-ceilinged basement that doesn’t require electricity, and choosing the interpretive materials carefully -- in this case a simple statue is quite effective. In many ways, the museum stands apart from the Muzeiko Children’s museum in Sofia, which we’ve featured in episodes 6 and and 46 of this show. That museum: the first children’s museum in the Balkans, features a huge number of computerized interactives centered around the concept of playful learning, which was not encouraged -- to say the least -- when Bulgaria was a Communist country. But The Vitosha Bear Museum also breaks the mold of rote memorization and statistics overload that used to define Bulgaria’s education system and is still present at many of Bulgaria’s museums. But instead of computerized interactives, the museum finds playful learning in the feeling of a sparse ranger’s hut. And next season, the museum will add electricity with a solar panel system. Dr. Nikola Doykin: Next year, already we got contract with company to make a solar system with solar panels. We will have electricity and then we will have more things to do. With electricity installed, Doykin and his team hope to increase the number and interactivity of the exhibits. Dr. Nikola Doykin: For me, it's not bad to have this kind of nature of feeling of wood, really to touch the bear or to smell the leaves. And also you can have some interactive games. You can make some 3d, and mentioned to see how the bear walking around. But Doykin -- who would spend all his time in the mountains if he could -- still considers the real museum to be on the outside. Dr. Nikola Doykin: We have both museums: the biggest and the smallest. And it's good to have both. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
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Museum Archipelago
History professor Dr. James Eaton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black University in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. So he started collecting himself, driving a bus around South Georgia, South Alabama, and North Florida to gather artifacts. That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus. Today, museum director Dr. Nashid Madyun presides over one of the largest repositories of African American history and culture in the Southeast. In this episode, Madyun describes how the structure of the gallery fights the compression of Black history, how the archive handles dehumanizing records and artifacts, and how a smaller museum can tell a major story. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Dr. James Eaton 00:50 Starting The Collection 01:35 Dr. Nashid Madyun 02:44 Carnegie Library 03:20 13 Galleries at the Meek-Eaton Black Archives 04:56 The Compression of African American History 05:20 Jim Crow and the KKK Exhibit 06:02 Presenting Derogatory Material at the Museum 07:00 How a Smaller Museum Can Tell a Major Story 08:20 Manumission Exhibit and Reading Cursive Handwriting 09:24 No Visitors During the Pandemic 10:40 Museum Archipelago Episode 85 11:00 The First Steps to Telling Hidden Stories 11:50 SPONSOR: SuperHelpful 12:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: SuperHelpful This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SuperHelpful , an audience research and development firm dedicated to helping museum leaders create more equitable and innovative organizations through problem-space research. Kyle Bowen, the founder of SuperHelpful, has brought together a team of designers and researchers to build a new community for museum folks who want to support one another as they reimagine what museums will be in the future. To join—and bypass the current waiting list—use this special link just for Museum Archipelago listeners! Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 86. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] History professor Dr. James Eton taught his students with the mantra: “African American History is the History of America.” As chair of the history department at FAMU, a historically Black university in Tallahassee, Florida, he was used to teaching students how to use interlibrary loan systems and how to access rare book collections for their research. But in the early 1970s, as his students' research questions got more in depth and dove deeper into Black history, he realized that there simply weren't enough documents. Nashid Madyun: And that helped him to realize that the understanding of Abraham Lincoln, the KKK , the rise of the Black middle class, Jim Crow, all of the stories where will forever untapped properly if there is no repository. And he found that as people die, they had material in their attics. But in this region: South Georgia, South Alabama, Northern Florida, there was no place to present these wares. So he started to try to enhance his classroom with these artifacts. He took advantage of an available bus and went around the region, asking people for material and they were happy to share and donate. Nashid Madyun: And there was no formal museum practice or archive at the time. It was a professor of history trying to find a way to help the students see that there are two sides to a story. That collection grew to become the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum on FAMU’s campus, one of the largest repositories of African-American history and culture in the Southeast. This is Nashid Madyun, director of the museum. Nashid Madyun: Hello, my name is Nashid Madyun. I'm director of the Southeastern, regional Black archives research center and museum at FAMU, that’s Florida A&M University. Nashid Madyun: So this institution was founded in 1971. It opened its doors officially to the public in 1976. Professor James Eaton was able to collect artifacts to enhance the classes he was teaching in history, in African American history. And he was able to utilize this building in the mid seventies to present the rare memorabilia and artifacts that he found to interpret African American history as he saw it and present public programs. The collection and museum are housed in the Carnegie Library on FAMU's campus. Dr. James Eton died in 2004, during the construction of a four story expansion building that was erected right behind the library to keep up with the growing size of the collections. Because the archive was started from artifacts and documents gathered by bus, there is some geographic focus on the North Florida region. But today the Museums interprets Black history in general -- with objects from all across the country. Nashid Madyun: The research we pulled together takes us to the entire Florida panhandle and South Alabama, South Georgia. So now we have what we consider amongst these four floors, 13 galleries. The highlight, the number one highlight would be our Jim Crow and KKK collection, an authentic uniform, the constitutions from the 1920s, the memorabilia that highlight the derogatory advertisements and propaganda of the Jim Crow era. We also have an authentic-style church highlighting the plantation churches of the TriCounty area, as early as 1830s and replicas of those churches. 64 churches were utilized for this exhibit. Nashid Madyun: We also have a changing gallery upstairs that we highlight items or issues that address some point or some aspect of popular culture. Public culture now would be Black Lives Matter. And that movement has been going on for the past couple of years, so what we have up now is an exhibit objectively presenting the subject of newsprint from the 1700s to the present, how the violence and Black Codes and legislation and perspectives have been portrayed in print media. And so people have been very interested in that exhibit, so that's very compelling. The galleries also include African Americans in the Military -- which features artifacts from the Civil War and the Spanish American War, and African American pioneers in medicine and science, which highlights FAMU’s role as a research institution. With the way the gallery is setup, Madyun fights against the compression of African American history -- when I was studying Black history in Tallahassee, Florida as a high school student, we moved quickly from the Emancipation to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, skipping the time between. Nashid Madyun: I like to integrate new possibilities and ways to tell stories that are hidden or not properly told. We call this particular exhibit Jim Crow and KKK, aside from Slavery to Freedom. So the exhibit previously had all of these words together. And I wanted to separate those two so that we could see that there was a split and time: there was bondage and then there was amancipationand freedom, and there was a gap from the 1880s to the 1930s, when cotton was king, tobacco was strong. You had the rise of the Black middle class and the rise of the Black middle class, the mobility of the Black middle class specifically coincides with the three waves of the KKK. Nashid Madyun: So we present the derogatory material in the face of the public and say, this is how it was, and this is why it was, you had people who feared this rise. Nashid Madyun: And so. You can interpret it how you want to, but we presented based on the information we have. We could talk about the rise of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the introduction of dentists and lawyers, the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, all of these movements just so happened to coincide with the exact time frames of these waves of the KKK. And that's what's going on. And so I don't believe that any part of our history, whether slave chains or breathing beds or KKK robes should be hidden. The depth and breadth of the collection enables The Museum to tell a much broader story than just a historical house -- or a museum that is tied to a single event. For museums that interpret Black history, that’s still somewhat rare, but Madyun sees it as the beginning of a trend. Nashid Madyun: I've been in museums for 20 years and when I came into museums all the museums, the majority were mainstream, there were only a few African American museums. If there was an African American museum, it was an African American historic house, right? And so the idea that a major story can be told by a small museum in our new virtual world is possible. Nashid Madyun: It was not possible 10 years ago. Definitely not possible 20 years ago. So we have the opportunity. Unfortunately, we still need to catch up to the digitization that’s needed so that we can compete. Major museums, some city museums, you know, especially art museums, they receive city funding, even if they're attached to universities. And now we're starting to see that happen with the Black museums. And my role is to take advantage of these resources and bridge the gap. Madyun says that part of the gap is technological -- that museums are always trying to catch up to where visitors are. An example that he cites is seeing his student visitors not being able to read cursive handwriting. Nashid Madyun: We had an exhibit last year that we thought was wonderful and opened it up. And the students are coming in and looking at manumission, actual bills of sales from slaves, you know, former slaves buying their sisters and brothers and wives, buying their freedom. And so we're waiting for that jaw dropping expression, and they're looking at it like it's art. Nashid Madyun: I'm like, “oh, they don't know how to read cursive writing!” Here's a letter from Zora Neale Hurston talking about her ex and going through that divorce, you know, she's from Florida, understanding that the cost of a slave was $800 and pulling these details that you would normally get. And there's a generation gap. I'm in my forties and beyond, but the new generation that are not learning to write long form or manuscript or cursive writing. So now we're able to go back and look at some of these exhibits and enhance them and align them properly. It turns out, the museum has time to go back and enhance some of the exhibits because of the pandemic. Nashid Madyun: Because of the time we live in with the pandemic the idea of digitization has, really been propelled into a stage that is front and center. People were at home doing summer wondering what they could do. They wish they could go visit the museum. You've had three or four years to get to the museum in your hometown. Now we wouldn't really want to get out and get to the museum. We began to walk through the museums and pull out artifacts and have virtual tours. It's been a very good, very productive summer. Partly because we've had no guests so we've been able to focus on all of these very practical logistical projects. And we're going to come out a nice polished, shiny diamond able to look at K through 20. So the students on campus and the counties that surround us, the exhibits will be aligned to support curriculums. Students and teachers will be able to go to our website and pull down scavenger hunt and coloring pages or discussion questions and see artifacts to help illuminate that. The Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives Research Center and Museum is part of the Florida African American Heritage Network, which we discussed in episode 85 of this show. For Madyun, the increased focus on Black museums in the state and the slow progress towards more historic markers on Black history are stepping stones. Nashid Madyun: It's a stepping stone. These are the first step into establishing and acknowledging stores sometimes. And hopefully stories are our objective, but at the least you are able to identify the initial point of interest and organizations, nonprofits, grassroots communities can come together and expound on that. Whether they erect a structure, a walking park, an activity, but across the South specifically, and I'm from Arkansas, across the South, it's been wonderful to see places that have monuments, or a historic house, or parks or demonstrations where there was once just a marker. [Outro]…
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Museum Archipelago
1 85. The John G. Riley House is All That Remains of Smokey Hollow. Althemese Barnes Turned It Into a Museum on Tallahassee’s Black History 14:54
During the period of Jim Crow and the Black Codes, a self-sustaining Black enclave called Smokey Hollow developed near downtown Tallahassee, Florida. As the first Black principal of Lincoln High School, John G. Riley was a critical part of the neighborhood. In 1890, he built a two-story house for his family—only about three blocks from where he was born enslaved. In the 1960s, the city of Tallahassee seized and destroyed the neighborhood as part of an urban renewal project through eminent domain. Riley's house was all that remained, thanks to activists who fought its demolition. Althemese Barnes was determined to not let the history fade: as founding director of John G. Riley Research Center and Museum, she transformed the building into a place where people can learn about Smokey Hollow. In this episode, Barnes talks about creating a museum to connect with young visitors, the process of becoming familiar with Florida's museum organizations which are often resistant to interpreting Black history, and the long process of building a commemoration to Smokey Hollow in Tallahassee’s urban landscape. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 John Gilmore Riley 00:50 Althemese Barnes, Founding Director of the John G. Riley House and Museum 01:15 Tallahassee in 1857 02:45 Why The Name Smokey Hollow? 04:00 The John Gilmore Riley House 05:00 Jim Crow and the Black Codes 05:40 Growing Up in Tallahassee 06:00 The Destruction of Smokey Hollow Through Eminent Domain 07:26 Barnes Steps Forward to Found the Museum 08:10 Interpreting Black History at the Museum 09:10 Dred Scott v. Sandford 09:25 Brown v. Board of Education 10:00 The Development of Cascades Park 11:40 Smokey Hollow Commemoration 12:15 Florida African American Heritage Preservation Network (FAAHPN) 12:30 Barnes Becoming Familiar with the Museum World 12:45 Resistance to Teaching History 13:44 SPONSOR: Ian Elsner 14:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 85. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript John Gilmore Riley was born enslaved on a Tallahassee, Florida plantation in 1857. Althemese Barnes: John Gilmore Riley was born into slavery about three blocks from here. After slavery ended, he chose education for a career and became the first black principal of the Lincoln high school that was built to provide an education for newly free slaves and their descendants. Here - where we’re sitting right now -- is the John G. Riley House and Museum in what is now basically downtown Tallahassee, and this is Althemese Barnes, the founding director of the museum. Althemese Barnes: Hello, my name is Althemese Barnes and I am the founding director of the John Gilmore rally research center and museum. And I've also been, I'm still the executive director and I've been that for 24 years. The John G. Riley House -- a handsome two story wood house -- sits in the same neighborhood as the older well-kept plantation homes. Tallahassee in 1857 was the center of Florida’s plantation economy, a system built almost entirely on enslaved labor. Enslaved people outnumbered white people three to one. Of the 779 white families living here in 1860, nearly two thirds owned at least one person. Althemese Barnes: Once the slavery system broke down or was eliminated in the area, a lot of the properties remained a part of that establishment. And a lot of the Blacks who worked on the plantation remained in the area. Over time, other Blacks moved in. So ultimately, it became this African American enclave we call it. And it's over 80 families settled around the 1870s. The families had stores. They had churches. They had a school that operated out of new Saint John AME church. Um, they had a Woodyard and I say all that to say that it was a pretty much self sustaining community. They had pretty much everything that was needed, which was important because it was doing on the days of segregation, legal segregation.So they were limited in terms of where they could go to shop. Where they could go for entertainment and what have you. And during the period of Jim Crow and the Black Codes, this neighborhood, this enclave, became known as Smokey Hollow. Althemese Barnes: Why the name Smokey Hollow? With our younger visitors, we have fun with that, but Smokey Hollow grew up out of the fact that, okay, it's an all-Black community. So a lot of the more, I would say, undesirable elements ended up in Smokey Hollow. So you have the electric station, the first electric building, the incinerator where all of the city’s trash was burned was in Smokey Hollow. Many of the women did domestic work, white families brought in their clothes and back then the women did the wash outside over a black smudge pot. So they had to make these fires. And so he would always see smoke coming up from the fire pots and then the train ran right through Smokey Hollow. So what does it emit smoke? So that's all of that is about the smoke part. Then we say to the children, well, where are we? Are we on a hill? No, we are in a hollow. So that's the Smokey Hollow. John G. Riley was a critical part of the self-sustaining neighborhood. As the principal of the the Black Lincoln academy, which later became Lincoln High School, he was known as Professor Riley. He also served as a Guardian -- a kind of official record keeper of births and deaths for Black people in the Smokey Hollow neighborhood. The majority of houses in Smokey Hollow could be described architecturally as “shotgun homes”. Riley was able to buy some, and rent them to tenants in Smokey Hollow. In the 1890s, Riley built this grander house for his family on the northern end of Smokey Hollow. Althemese Barnes: this house, when it was built, Was a very upscale, big deal for Tallahassee, for a Black person. Because if you think of the fact that, okay, you have a person who was born a slave and he was a slave until he was about eight, nine years old then along came. Another time in history when people like Mr. Riley still, we're not allowed to learn, to read and write. So he had to slip and get books. He had an auction. Yeah. Riata who was very learned it. So she could teach him how to read and then he grows up a little more, but he still has obstacles. And then. Look at the fact that other people counted on him. And then you Jim Crow and the Black Codes. Yeah. Black people, especially the men were in danger. Couldn't do things that other men did. There were lynchings close by because the jail was in Smokey Hollow, and they could it pass in there every day. I grew up in Tallahassee—in fact, I grew up and went to school less than 2 miles from Smokey Hollow, but I had never even heard of it, not even once. So why had I never heard of it? That was the question I came to the Riley house to ask. It turns out there’s a lot of reasons, but it all stems from an event that Barnes simply refers to as eminent domain. 14 years after Riley died, the city of Tallahassee decided that it needed the land that the Smokey Hollow neighborhood sat on -- and proceeded to take it as public property through eminent domain. Althemese Barnes: In 1968 the community was eminent domained, you had maybe about eight families that were able to negotiate and stay in there long enough to get money for that property. The residents were told that the city needed the land to build a new capital complex -- Tallahassee is the capital of Florida -- but not much actually came of the project save for the construction of a new road over the neighborhood, and this was the Talalhassee I was familiar with. The community: erased out of the urban landscape, and out of the minds of people like me. But not for the former residents, who forever resented eminent domain. With most of Smokey Hollow already cleared out, in the 1970s, the city also had its sights on the Riley House itself. Althemese Barnes: the idea was to demolish the house and turn it into an electric substation here. Former residents of Smokey Hollow -- many of whom were taught by Riley -- rallied to prevent the home from being destroyed. The house was fully restored in 1981. Barnes says that it was the preservationists’ goal that the house would serve as a center to interpret local African American history. And that’s where Barnes comes in. In 1996 she stepped forward to turn the dream into a reality, starting with oral histories. Althemese Barnes: We were the first people to come over to get it all cleaned up after the restoration, to turn it into a research center and museum. There are many ways to interpret this house history through aspects of his house. One of the first things I did when I came here. I said, we don't want to just be a museum with pictures on the wall. I wanted to document history that has been ignored, neglected. So with my old camcorder camera and tripod, I did almost a hundred interviews. All the people are deceased now. If people want to know anything about the Black history, the real authentic Black history. You have to talk with people who lived it. Someone else might tell you something, but your primary source is much better. Today the dream is realized. The museum doesn’t just have pictures on the wall..There’s even a talking, Audio Animatronic likeness of Riley which was, in a very Florida twist -- donated by the Disney cooperation. Audio Animatronic Riley: “If you don’t know your roots, people can tell you anything and convince you of its truthfulness.” Barnes says that the museum uses the years of Riley’s life as an interpretive method to provide context for the legal forces of segregation acting on Smokey Hollow and Black people across the nation. Althemese Barnes: We kind of bring it up even with, with the birth and death date. Mr. Riley was born in 1857, so we said, okay, what famous court decision happened in 1857? And if it's then middle school or up students, keep thinking, if you think. Oh, Dred Scott. Yes. Dred Scott decision. Tell me about Dred Scott. Black man trying get his freedom. Didn't work. Courts ruled against him. Okay. Mr. Riley died in 1954. What happened in 1954 relates to education? Oh yes. Brown vs the board of education! The location reviews of the John G. Riley House and Museum mostly express gratitude to learn what reviews didn’t learn in school. There aren’t too many museums in Tallahassee that interpret these kinds of histories. Barnes knows all too well how much work -- often bureaucratic work -- is necessary to keep the memory of Smokey Hollow in the city of Tallahassee. A more recent example of this comes in the City’s development of a new 24 acerpark, called Cascades park on mostly land that used to be Smokey Hollow. Althemese Barnes: Now here we are with these 24 weeks, well, we will do this part. And the whole thing was that the people doing the development city County, whomever was making no mention. Of the footprint, of the original footprint. And when it was time for Q and A, I raised my hand and it got to the point where people knew what I was going to say, you know, I think you need to represent the history of what was here before. You make this into cascades park, bam, no reference to smoke hour that went on for about two years. Finally, after a shift in project management, Barnes was invited to create a group that would commemorate Smokey Hollow at Cascades Park. Althemese Barnes: So we met for about, I would say two and a half, three years identified people from Smokey Hollow, brought them in. Did oral history histories. We had work groups, we got a bit map, they will come and put a sticker. Okay. This family that was here is they mopped where everybody lived, where every business was located, everything we needed to document Smokey Hollow. The results of Barnes’s efforts are now right across the street from the John G. Riley house. Park goeres pass the Smokey Hollow Commemoration -- which includes historical places and cleverly designed 3D outlines of the ubiquitous Smokey Hollow shotgun houses. Althemese Barnes: We really wanted to put real shotguns, but there was the safety security factor, that kind of thing. And so we decided now what should we call these and run around? And so we said spirit houses, because, because though Smokey Hollow is not here, the spirit of Smokey Hollow lives on. When she stepped forward to work on the museum in 1996, Barnes was unfamiliar with the museum world -- she had worked in state government. She had never written a grant. But she became familiar with the museum world in Florida. She helped found the Florida African American Heritage Preservation Network, which features landmarks and museums all across the state. She wrote grants. She helped others write grants. In order to fund projects that were overlooked by the mostly white historical establishment, she realised that she needed to sit on committees that decided which grants should be awarded, and then she sat on those committees. Althemese Barnes: But to this day, there are still resistant. If you go to some of the organizations that are supposed to be representing the state museum groups, associations, go to some of their meetings… phish. And it's really unfortunate because there's a rich history here. Now I would say during the past, say five to seven years, I've noticed more and more as a few younger people come up, they have come in wanting to know what are you doing? But it's a richness that people have missed all these years. The resources were there, but they didn't have the people with the right mindset. And this is all a part of this social justice that people talk about. And then the house itself built 1890. How many years ago was that? In a person's life they aren't supposed to still stay in, but this house is standing because some people cared about it. This has been Museum Archipelago.…
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Museum Archipelago
1 84. On Richmond’s Transformed Monument Avenue, A Group of Historians Erect Rogue Historical Markers 14:25
Near the empty pedestals of Confederate figures that used to tower over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a new type of historical marker now stands. The markers have most of the trappings of a state-erected historical plaque—but these are rogue markers erected by a group of anonymous historians called History is Illuminating. History is Illuminating decided to use historical markers as a medium to talk about the Black history taking place while those statues were erected as monuments to white supremacy. In this episode, an anonymous member of History is Illuminating discusses the ubiquity of the Lost Cause narrative, the reasons for being anonymous and going rogue, and the means of historical marker production. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Historical Markers in the U.S. South 01:00 History is Illuminating 01:20 Rogue Historians 02:10 Lost Cause Narrative 03:13 Monument Avenue 05:15 The Origins of History is Illuminating 06:10 Studio Two Three 06:20 Naming History is Illuminating 08:10 Constructing the Historical Markers 08:30 Episode 42. Freddi Williams Evans and Luther Gray Are Erecting Historic Markers on the Slave Trade in New Orleans 09:05 The Markers 09:45 John Mitchell Jr. 10:30 Going Rogue 11:00 Means of Historical Marker Production 12:35 Learn More and Donate to History is Illuminating 13:05 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 13:52 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue. Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them. Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum . Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 84. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] Over the past few weeks, near the empty pedestals of confederate figures that used to stand on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, a new type of historical marker started appearing. The markers have most of the trappings of a state-erected historical marker--etched letters and an iconic shape. But there is no official logo, just a bright sun icon at the top, text in the middle describing a past event, and at the bottom simply the words: History Is Illuminating. History is Illuminating: If you start looking at historic markers that were installed in the 60s, 70s, 80s across the South, not just in Virginia, but in states all across the South, they're so biasly worded and the subject matter is so biasly chosen. History Is Illuminating is a group of anonymous historians from the Richmond area who, as the confederate statues were being removed, decided to use the format of those historical markers as a medium to talk about the Black history taking place while those statues were erected as monuments to white supremacy. The anonymous historians started calling themselves rogue historians. History is Illuminating: “We have had a lot of discussions around this and we consider ourselves rogue because while all of our bosses appreciate what we're doing. A lot of the issues that come across in history are issues where the Lost Cause narrative was taught for so long in schools that talking about aspects that go against the Lost Cause narrative can often be divisive in our society, especially in the South. And I know personally for the organization I work for, I regularly receive phone calls or voicemails from people angry that we're talking about Black history or saying things along the lines of it's better just not to talk about it. We've actually had a couple of our signs defaced and we felt like it was safer for us as well as significant because the facts are what are important, not the historians that are coming forward. The Lost Cause narrative permeates museums, historical monuments, and textbooks in the United States. The narrative casts the cause of the confederacy as a just and noble one. The ideology has been used to perpetuate racism a racist power structures since the end of the Civil War. History is Illuminating: The Lost Cause narrative was actually invented here in Richmond, Virginia. There was a popularity of glorifying the battles and glorifying the nobility of what happened in the Civil War, rather than acknowledging the loss or acknowledging the essential part of slavery that was played out within the Civil War. The popularity of that concept just grew ridiculously and the United Daughters of the Confederacy joined in on this and popularized it across the South, putting it as the mainstream form of education within textbooks, as well as making monuments rise across the South. The Daughters of the Confederacy, actually not only rose monuments to the Confederacy, but they also actually rose a few monuments to the Klan. And one of the single densest and largest collections of confederate symbols was in Monument Avenue -- a grassy, purpose-built grand avenue in Richmond. The first monument erected was a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee, which as of this recording is the only confederate monument still standing on the Avenue. When it was erected in 1890, there were no buildings around it. History is Illuminating: At the time it was constructed, you can actually see photographs to Google it that have pictures of the Robert E. Lee monument, surrounded by people working in cotton fields. The whole thing about monument Avenue that's so interesting is that Monument Avenue has been a street of walking tours. It has been a street of people coming and walking down and remembering a glorified past that was taught to them in their textbooks, in childhood, and many people from outside of the South come to Monument Avenue and are taken aback and gasp at how dramatic it is. It's these large, larger than life monuments set up on huge pedestals with marbles sculptures around them that seem like something from ancient Rome. With Jefferson Davis, giving his, ‘I quit the federal government’ speech and all of the symbolisms around him. And they also have quotes on that monument. There was a quote on that monument. There, it was, I forget the exact wording, but it goes on into detail talking about how he deserves these inalienable rights to pass on the legacies that he knew to his children. And this it's fascinating, the way that the sentence structure so often just falls short of a full sentence. The ideas just fall short of a full idea. The idea that we were fighting for states' rights, not the state right to own slaves. It's these half ideas that are not fully constructed that caused really short winded debates because there's not many talking points beyond the short ones. People were taught in school. It's just been really upsetting to everyone in our group. After years of pressure, on July 2nd, 2020, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney announced the official removal of most of the confederate statues on Monument Ave. That’s when History is Illuiminating started. History is Illuminating: The way this initially came down was me and a friend who is the other lead organizer, were talking on the phone one night after Levar announced that the monuments were coming down and we said, this should happen. And we initially had just planned to write them ourselves and write them in with the yard signs. We were just going to keep replacing yard signs on Monument Avenue. And my partner in signs started talking to a few friends and they were really interested. And then I knew a couple of historians that we thought might be interested too. And we just kind of kept talking to people and everyone was like, this is what I've been wanting to be doing! The group of rogue historians continued to grow. They communicate by a text channel, bouncing ideas off each other. The group partnered with Studio Two Three, a local collective, feminist printmaking studio to print a Zine featuring the markers and a map of how to find them. History is Illuminating: So there's about 10 members in the group, they're all different races, genders, sexualities, ages, all of those different representations. And there are people in the group who wanted to participate in the signage and have no interest because they are way too busy to participate in social media or anything like that. I think it's important to just keep going back to everybody and saying, who wants to participate in this, or have an opinion and let us know if you think this is a good idea or not. The name History is Illuminating is meant to indicate that it is the act of studying history itself that can illuminate the present. I choose to read it as History Can Be Illuminating. To the extent that the statues that used to stand on Monument Avenue “teach” history when combined with tour guides, they teach the battle history and the aesthetics of quitting the federal government. That history has a lot of facts in it, but what might be more illuminating could be a discussion about the reasons of the war, or the backlash against Reconstruction. History is Illuminating: When I came to them and told them I wanted the name History is Illuminating, they were kind of taken aback and they were like, I don't know how people are going to feel about hearing history. The word history seems like a bad word so often. And it's so true that so often history has been manipulated and utilized to hold people down, which is so true in the Lost Cause narrative. The people in our group realized that working in history and listening to the people getting frustrated and angry, that if we take these monuments down without taking a moment to educate people about the larger picture of why these monuments are offensive to so many people and not simply the things that people are saying in their head, the one liners from history classes as children, once you start realizing these larger pictures and you start to realize that it is unjustifiable that they're still here in our communities or even if it is justifiable that they're still here, we need to be telling the whole story. The markers are created using a CNC machine which chisels the text and creates a convincing-looking historical marker. Members of History is Illuminating are quick to point out that the markers are not intended to be confused for an official marker, but they clearly evoke the medium. In episode 42 of Museum Archipelago, author and historian Freddi Williams Evans and activist Luther Gray describe their efforts to go through more official channels to erect historical markers in New Orleans, Louisiana. Like Richmond, there was plenty of commomentation going on in New Orleans, but like Richmond, there was almost nothing that acknowledged the city’s slave trading past or powerful backlash against Reconstruction. History is Illuminating’s approach demonstrates some of the advantages of bypassing the official channels: they can act quickly to comment on the changing situation on Monument Avenue. History is Illuminating: We did the signs in chronological order. And since the Monuments themselves are not in chronological order, it's a little weird, but it works out. We wanted to talk about Black history and what was occurring to Black people in the city of Richmond concurrently with what was happening as these monuments were raised surrounding the white history. So like the first sign is Dusk of Black Power, Dawn of Jim Crow, and it discusses members of the Virginia Black men who served in the Virginia general assembly between 1869 and 1890 and 1890 was the date this monument went up, and the first act of the 1889 elected Virginia Senate was to accept the Lee monument. Another marker erected by History Is Illuminating describes John Mitchell Jr, a business person and editor of the Richmond Planet, which was Richmond’s Black newspaper at the time, and quotes what he wrote on the occasion of the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee statue in 1890. History is Illuminating: John Mitchell Jr. wrote on the unveiling that “the South’s reverence for its former leaders slowed progress and forged heavier change with which to be bound.” And he also stated that, “Black men were here to see this monument raised and we'll be here to see it torn down.” It is also illuminating to realize that even within the history and museum fields, going rogue and staying anonymous can be the easiest ways to get something like this done. History is Illuminating: Trying to move forward in a way that everyone gets a little bit more education and understands the fuller picture. It's something that a lot of museum organizations, because they are held accountable by donors or grants or things like that often have to tiptoe around and are not able to just come out and say flatly and the idea of bringing some other discussions up within the community is unsettling to many people, even within the historic fields itself. There’s also a technological story here. It used to be that only civic institutions could raise the funds to make something like Monument Avenue. History is Illuminating: What's so interesting in the city of Richmond is actually just like how all of these monuments were written. Historically, the way that monument commissions work is somebody will say, “Oh, we need a monument for this person.” And someone in the monuments commission or someone involved in the city says, yes, yes, that's a great idea. Let's create a commission for that and they'll come together. And it's a lot of experts. It's not like they don't know what they're doing, but they'll all sit down in a circle and kind of say, “yes, just I am an academic and I work in museums or I work in public history or yada, yada, yada.” They think they know what is right for everybody. And then they'll go to Richmond city council or some whoever's community city council and say, we need X amount of dollars for this piece of public art in front of this building. And they'll say, “yes, yes, that sounds great.” And then they'll go and interview a bunch of artists and choose the piece of art. But at no point, is there actually -- and these are not elected officials -- at no point does the community actually get a say in the construction of it, this monument, which is exactly what happened all along Monument Avenue. Today, historians can go rogue because the tools of producing and erecting historical markers are relatively inexpensive. The technology to 3D print a convincing life-size statue of anyone or anything is right around the corner. Today, museums are expensive and require huge funding structures to start. But they won’t be forever: the tools of museum building at every level are posed to become much cheaper. And when that happens, it won’t just be historians going rogue. History is Illuminating: If anyone is interested, they can download our Zine for completely free on Studio Two Three's website. They can donate if they want to, but I mean like it's really not a big deal. Um, we are encouraging people that if you can't afford to donate or just don't have it in you right now, that's totally fine. Fine. We'd much rather, instead of donating, you have that really hard conversation with a relative or friends that you've been putting off. [Outro]…
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Museum Archipelago
Chris Newell remembers the almost giddy level of excitement he felt when he visited the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. Every summer, the family drove for more than two hours for his father to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum. But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the the Native Market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, and the Museum itself, which was not. Today, Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy citizen, is the first member of the Wabanaki Nations to lead the Abbe Museum. When he took on the role, the museum changed his title to Executive Director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations, one of many steps toward decolonizing the museum and shifting power. In this episode, Newell describes how to spot a colonial museum, how museums’ default colonial mindset—including when it comes to maps and language—harms everyone, and his plan for his tenure. Image: Beadwork by Kristen Newell (Mashantucket Pequot). Wabanaki double-curve motif with dawn time as the background. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Visiting the Abbe Museum 01:40 Chris Newell, Executive Director and Senior Partner to the Wabanaki Nations 02:05 Akomawt Educational Initiative 02:29 Museum Archipelago Ep. 68 with endawnis Spears 02:46 What is a Colonial Museum? 04:30 The Abbe Museum’s Decolonization Process 05:45 The Wabanaki Nations 06:31 What It Means to be Senior Partner to the Wabanaki Nations 08:07 Museums’ Default Colonial Mindset 09:06 How Do You Know If You’re Visiting a Colonial Museum? 09:30 Maps in the Abbe Museum 10:39 The Use of Language in the Abbe Museum 12:05 “There’s No Book” 13:24 SPONSOR: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green, Available Wherever Books Are Sold 14:27 Outro | Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 83. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Chris Newell remembers visiting the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine as a kid. His father was hired to put on educational performances, to perform songs about their Passamaquoddy language, history and culture at the Native Market and the Native American Festival hosted by the museum. So every summer, the family would drive the two and a half hours from their home Motahkmikuhk. Newell looked forward to it year after year with an almost giddy level of excitement. But even as a young person, Newell could clearly see the difference between the surrounding events, like the Native market and the Festival, which were run by members of the Wabanaki Nations, and the Museum itself, which was not. Chris Newell: Back then, the Abbe Museum was more of a traditional ethnographic collection, a lot of lithics and things like that, so when it came to the museum itself, it did feel very much like a colonial museum. It was a Bar Harbor institution, not necessarily a Wabanaki institution. So I definitely felt a lot more connection to things like the events, the Native American festival and those because those were Native run and the Abbe supporting them. Although I knew what the Abbe had, I knew the special collection, I knew the treasure that they have as far as the history of my peoples, Passamaquoddy people as well as Wabanaki peoples in general. and so I've always been attracted to what is available in the Abbe. Back then as a child, I felt it was kind of two different spaces. Today, Chris Newell, a Passamaquoddy citizen, is the first member of the Wabanaki Nations to lead the Abbe Museum. Chris Newell: Hi everybody. My name is Chris Newell and I am the director of education for the Akomawt Educational Initiative, also a cofounder, and I'm also the executive director and senior partner to Wabanaki nations for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. Chris Newell cofounded the Akomawt Educational Initiative in 2018 with endawnis Spears (Diné/ Ojibwe/ Chickasaw/ Choctaw) and Dr. Jason Mancini. Akomawt is a Passamaquoddy word for the snowshoe path. At the beginning of winter, the snowshoe path is hard to find. But the more people pass along and carve out this path through the snow during the season, the easier it becomes for everyone to walk it together. On episode 68 of this show, we interviewed Spears about how the Initiative was born out of their experiences seeing colonial museum practices across present-day New England.So what do we mean when we say colonial museum -- outside the context of Colonial Williamsburg, of course. Chris Newell: this kind of goes off of my colleague endawnis Spears who was on Museum Archipelago before: museums are colonial artifacts. The idea of a museum comes with colonization. And tribal museums, even in their own right, are using that colonial artifacts methodology as a way to present their native histories, although they do it in different in a tribal museum. In a non-tribal museum largely it's based off of the American Conservation Movement, which started in the 19th century. And when it came to museums and especially the way museum content was created, colonial museums would oftentimes focus on tribes that they felt at the time were less impacted, which would have been Western Plains tribes and Southwestern tribes. Chris Newell: So if you go into a non-tribal museum that has native content, a colonial museum, then what you typically see is a presentation of native cultures from through the lens of anthropology and archeology. And a lot of those voices, 99% of those voices, especially in the past were non-native voices that were framing that lens on how to view our cultures and so it's not uncommon to see things that may seem out of place. So to go to a Northeastern museum that has a Native collection and to see only Plains artwork or only Southwestern pottery and no Wampum art, no Ash Splint basketry is really kind of an old fashioned way of presenting things that goes back to a mode of thinking that really originated in the idea that Native people were going to vanish at one point, and that we needed our history saved by an outside force. And that's literally what the colonial museum represents is that mindset. And the Abbe Museum is rooted in that mindset. Opened in 1928, it housed the collection of Native American objects gathered by radiologist Robert Abbe in a purpose-built building. Newell was hired to lead the Abbe Museum in February 2020, just before lockdowns due to Covid-19 began. But the decolonization process had been going on at the museum for the past five years. Chris Newell: The Abbe Museum has gone through the past five years under the previous executive director, the president-CEO at the time, Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, a decolonization process. And part of that was not just in the content of the museum, which centers Native voices now, but also in the structure of the way the museum is run. And the Abbe has, over time, restructured its board to become a majority Wabanaki board. So, as a colonial museum that presents Wabanaki history, we are probably the only museum that has that structure, where the voice of the people that we are representing is now centered and also is governing the institution itself. When the changeover in directorship happened, the museum changed the title from president and CEO to executive director and Senior Partner to Wabanaki Nations as part of this decolonization process and the shift of power. Chris Newell: The Wabanaki tribes of today are five tribes, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Miꞌkmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki tribes and the history, there was 20 tribes at one point , but currently there are five tribes. Wabanaki are, is an overarching term for the cosmology of the peoples in those tribes in the belief, in the Gloosekap stories, a creation named Gloosekap created our people from the ash trees and gave us the name Wabanaki, which is the anglicized version of in Passamaquoddy Wolastoqiyik, which would translate to the people of the Dawn. Collectively, that's how we see ourselves. We understand that we are the Eastern most tribes on the continent. And we are all connected in that way. So when it comes to that portion of my job, I take it very, very seriously. There's no book, right? There's no example for me to follow. I think about the museum world and the lack of representation by native people in the museum world. There's a history for the reason why that is, but what I always tell people is that it doesn't not do us any good as native people to be absent from these spaces. No matter what these spaces are interpreting our cultures and our histories and everything else, therefore we need to be present there. 85% of native people work in the museum field as an entry level of visitor services or security. And very few of us get up into the intellectual leadership positions and what I would want to do, in the long run, I would love to see the Abbe museum have full Wabanaki staff. I mean, that would be the, the biggest goal I could actually have, but how do I do that? I need to partner the community into the museum world. That way, the Abbe always feels like a welcoming space to any of the community members from the Wabanaki communities in Maine and beyond. Newell acknowledges that encouraging members of the Wabanaki Nations to work at the Abbe Museum can be an uphill battle because of the racist history of museums like it. Chris Newell: The way museums in the past have done things like hold on to Native American remains that has, you know, the older generation would not go into those physical spaces because of that. The Abbe museum is one of the places where we have repatriated all of those remains and we're making it into a welcome space and that's a big change for the museum world. But even outside of holding onto human remains, there are many examples of how museums’ default colonial mindset can—in addition to everything else—lead to a worse visitor experience. Chris Newell: As somebody that used to work in a tribal museum, it was not uncommon for me in that space for a non-native visitor, whether a child or adult to ask whether the tribe that we were presenting the history of still existed. There's a lot of people in this world that still think that Native people are all dead and gone, and that's oftentimes reinforced by their childhood experiences and their adult experiences going into a colonial museum and seeing artifacts that are only from the past or seeing our work that is only from the past. And so for museums to update or be decolonized the way that they present themselves. They really gotta get out of that mode of trying to save a vanishing culture, but rather hosts the art in the histories of the living cultures that exist here now. One of the easiest ways to tell if you’re visiting a colonial museum is if it doesn’t ask you as the visitor to normalize some aspect of the culture presented. So an Abbe Museum experience that only features maps with modern-day political borders, or is entirely in English, is not doing a good job of presenting the culture that members of the Wabanaki Nations share. Chris Newell: Two dimensional maps are, of course, a European a derivation or creation, Native people map the world in a different way. And we use songs, very long songs and orations to map our territory. But if you go into the exhibits, what we did was we did create a two dimensional map of all of Wabanaki territory, but we took out the roads and the cities and all the colonial borders. And then when you see the landscape that way, representative in that fashion, you see how it all of a sudden makes sense how our tribes existed, the riverways that separated our territories and all of those things. Chris Newell: And you can see how people traveled, great distances, how they would portage from one river to another. So it’s also is going to enrich the experience for the non-Wabanaki visitor, because they're really going to be able to, you know, see our perspective in our worldview in our language and the way we view land, all of those things, not an interpretation, but rather a first person perspective, which is really, really a powerful and impactful way. Bar Harbor, Maine is an international tourist destination—cruise ships dock there. Today, the museum’s exhibits and signage are mostly in English, but Newell hopes that under his tenure, much more Native language gets incorporated to the point where a non-Wabanaki visitor will have learned some Native words before they leave the museum. Chris Newell: Iit gets rid of the implicit bias that colonial museums have been feeding for so long. When the early English would arrive in the 17th century, they would use the word “improvement” as a reason for taking over and subduing land. Building things like farms, permanent housing. But nowadays in America we used a word development to do the exact same thing, but when we use that word development, what we mean is we're about to dig up a big plot of that life giving life cycle, and we're going to do something and build something, but really the process involved destruction first. Chris Newell: Viewing the landscape through the different languages really gives you a window into the different mindsets. The use of language I think is probably the best bridge that I can draw for making all of that happen. When an English speaker learns some of our language and learn some of our worldview through it, they have experienced something. And so for the non-Native museum visitor, the international visitor to come through and to learn our worldview through our language and to have it normalized, you know, to have the bathroom signs to say, “skitap” and “ehpit”, you know, instead of men's and women's,, and for people to figure that out with the international signs, you know, but they would learn, some of our wording and that’s a profound experience. As Newell says, there’s no book and there’s no guide for the process of transforming the Abbe Museum from a colonial, traditional ethnographic collection into a fully decolonized museum run by members of the Wabanaki Nations. But because of work like this, the snowshoe path becomes a little bit easier for other museums to follow. Chris Newell: We want to be informative to anyone who would walk through the door. But we also want to be informative to the Wabanaki person. And then by also doing that the Wabanaki people who already know that language come into a space that uses their worldview and then it doesn't become a Bar Harbor institution, to the Wabanaki visitor anymore. It starts to become a home away from home. We are in the land of the Dawn, no matter what. And so the Wabanaki visitor should feel that sense of welcoming one walking into that space. Chris Newell: This is really a passion of mine, a passion that was born out of my childhood, watching my father, you know, making a difference in this world. And that's what I would hope to do. I leave a lofty goal of my future in that I would hope that by the time I am done with this world, that I have changed it for the better, not just for the good of Wabanaki people, but for everybody.…
In the wake of the racist murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor — the same harbor where Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock. In this episode, we examine the relationship of statues and museums. Why do so many call for statues of people like Colston to end up in a museum instead of at the bottom of a harbor? Looking at examples from Dr. Lyra Montero’s Washington's Next! project in the United States, American Hall of Honor museums for college football teams, and statues of Lenin and Stalin in Eastern Europe, we discuss the town-square-to-museum pipeline for statues. Image: CC Keir Gravil - Black Lives Matter Protest, Bristol, UK Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 Tim Tebow Statue at the University of Florida 00:50 Football Hall of Honor Museums 02:02 Tearing Down Edward Colston’s Statue in Bristol 02:44 Dr. Lyra Monteiro 03:00 Episode 77. Washington's Next! 03:12 The “Slippery Slope” Argument 04:56 Dr. Sadiah Qureshi 05:33 Should Colston’s Statue End Up in a Museum? 05:58 Episode 5. Stalinworld 06:42 Grūtas Park 07:32 Episode 25. Museum of Socialist Art 08:20 Museums of Bristol Website 08:40 Number of Confederate Statues in the United States 09:55 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone 10:25 Outro | Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 82. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript The statue appeared in 2011 on the path of my daily commute to the University of Florida, where I was a student. It was a statue of a football player named Tim Tebow, and the strange thing about it was that Tim Tebow was still around. In fact, it was just a few months after he graduated, and it was commemorating events, like touchdowns, that I remembered. I remembered seeing him around campus, and now I was looking at him as a statue. But it wasn’t just a statue. Behind the statue was the entrance to a Hall of Honor which featured football trophies. But the space was not just a room with trophies, it was a story about the football program where the trophies were an inevitable consequence. In short, it looked like a museum. Reader rails and old pictures of the early days of the program were presented alongside pigskin footballs from the 1930s with good lighting. But this wasn’t just at one university. All across the football conference, these trophy rooms looked like museum spaces. At Florida State University, just a few hours away, the trophy room begins with artifacts from and descriptions of the Seminole Nation — even though these are tellingly light on the details. The point was to tie the athletic program’s success with that of historical figures fighting a US invasion. It is all done very deftly — one minute you’re looking at a map of what is now Florida drawn by a US general, and the next, you are looking at a tattered football jersey, the next bronze statue of the story’s heroes. There’s a bridge between statues and museums — they feed into each other. So why do athletic programs adopt statues and museum-like spaces? Because they want to sell us a selective account presented as a neutral archive of the past. [Audio of Edward Colston Crashing Down] Last week in Bristol’s The Centre, Black Lives Matter UK protesters tore down a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent 17th Century slave trader. [Audio of Edward Colston Rolling Through the Streets of Bristol] Protesters rolled the statue through the street and pushed it into Bristol Harbor. The same harbor that Colston’s Royal African Company ships that forcibly carried 80,000 people from Africa to the Americas used to dock. Before it was thrown in the harbor, the statue of Colston had been standing in the center of town since 1895. And it wasn’t as if the source of Colston’s wealth was just discovered last week. Lyra Monteiro: The idea of how do we make visible, for instance, the enslaved people who are invisible at all of these sites of memory that were about white supremacy when they were created. And now they still are, but we don't talk about that. How do we make that visible? You know? That's something that I've been, I've been playing around with for a long time. This is Dr. Lyra Monteiro, professor of history at Rutgers University Newark and cofounder of the Museum Onsite and the creator of Washington's Next!. In our interview for episode 77 of this show, she explains — and answers — one of the arguments against taking down white supremacists statues in the context of the United States. Lyra Monteiro: The slippery slope argument. And the people who make this argument tend not to be the ones who are like. Overtly gung ho and like, you know, it's our Southern heritage to honor Robert E. Lee. It's not those folks. It's more the people who are historians. Sometimes our historians, sometimes like museum folks. The argument that they make is that, well, yes, it's not good that there is a statue to Robert E. Lee. But the thing is if we take him down (and obviously using him to stand up for all the Confederate statues) if we take him down, well then where are we going to stop? Because the reason why he's not appropriate for us to honor and public spaces because of slavery. Well, there are other slave owners that we honor in public space, and of course the biggest ones there are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And of course, there's no way in hell we're going to get rid of those statues. Right? What we're going to take down the Washington monument? I don't think so. The idea is it's a slippery slope that we're setting up. If we are starting to tumble down, the minute that we start taking down the statues of people who supported and promoted slavery. Monteiro’s answer to the slippery slope argument is yes, Washington’s Next. Lyra Monteiro: The tone of voice in which I hear the slippery slope argument from scholars and from museum practitioners is, and from, you know, public parks officials is less one of panic and concern about attacking that legacy and much more one of, “Well, that's just silly! Obviously we wouldn't do that.” Dr Sadiah Qureshi, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham writes in _Flux: Parian Unpacked_ about toppling statues, “critics accused protesters of wanting to ‘rewrite’ history. Yet... fail to engage with what is really at stake... namely identifying, acknowledging and removing endemic structural problems of racism in reparative form” A suggestion offered by more than a few people is museums. Why not put the statues of problematic people in museums? Is the bottom of the harbor really the right place for a statue of Colston? Of course, these questions tend to ignore that the bottom of the ocean is the final resting place for hundreds of actual people thrown overboard from Colston’s ships because they were deemed a poor investment for Colston’s company. On Museum Archipelago, we’ve investigated what various Eastern European countries are doing with old statues of dictators like Lenin and Stalin. Monika Bernotas, who was interviewed on episode 5 of this show, describes how her family’s native Lithuania removed it’s ubiquitous Soviet statues from city squares all across the country. The removals were events that helped build the young nation, but once the statues were removed from their original locations, no one knew what to do with them. Many of them ended up at something called Grūtas Park — a kind of half-theme park that includes a massive statue garden. The statues are presented simply and somewhat randomly — each has a little description of the city and square where that statue used to stand. Many Lithuanians and the Lithuanian government have criticized the uncritical approach to the park’s layout. Visitors are free to do whatever they want. Monika Bernotas: Once you get into the actual statue walk, it’s kind of funny because you can do whatever you want. So like, climbing on top of Lenin and Stalin, picking their nose, patting them on the head, doing whatever you want. But I like to think that I have some sort of connection, some sort of understanding, that these images might have been both scary and inspirational at different times in somebody’s life. For me, they’ve been images that were bad. When I was going up I always knew that Lenin’s face that Stalin’s face, these were the faces of terror that drove my grandparents out of Lithuania. But to be able to interact with them on this very humorous level is really interesting. The situation at Bulgaria’s Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia is somewhat similar. The outdoor sculpture garden is littered with statues commemorating Soviet power placed wherever there is room. I’ve visited many times and I’m never quite sure how to react. There’s a lot of power in deliberately taking these statues out of the context they were made for. What once may have been an imposing statue underscoring who’s in charge in a public square is now gesticulating impotently at a rose bush. In Eastern Europe, the statues of Lenin and Stalin were erected during the Communist times, and were swiftly removed when the system fell. In the West, statues erected more than 100 years ago still stand without context. Washington’s Next because the money he made from owning, working, and selling people isn’t a footnote -- it is the reason he was the first president. Even at the Museums of Bristol website, Colston is identified as a “revered philanthropist / reviled slave trader”, in that order, as if the money he gave away to the city of Bristol wasn’t violently extracted from the people he enslaved. It’s not a sufficient answer to put these statues in a museum. I don’t know if there’s enough museum space for all the Confederate monuments in the American South or enough museum space for all the statues of King Leopold in Belgium. But more importantly, the political exercise in selective remembrance neatly packaged as an unbiased archive that statues represent is the same exercise that museums represent. Museums and statues are bridged together -- many of these statues are right in front of the museum entrances, priming the visitor for what they can expect to find inside. Statues and museums share a centuries-long history of supporting white supremacist, colonialist, racist ideologies and helping them flourish, and providing the evidence for them and undergirding them through their placement, through their air of authority, and through their supposed neutrality. The statues of American football players at American universities helps me think about this because the stakes are so low: the rivalry is clear. “Our football team has heroes and a long legacy.” And it is telling that the two tools that were employed make that point are statues and museums.…
Old Sturbridge Village is a living history museum in Massachusetts depicting life in rural New England during the early 19th century. But the early 19th century isn’t specific enough for the site’s historical interpreters—to immerse visitors in the world they’re recreating, knowing exactly what year it “is” matters. Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village was tasked with choosing that “default” date. He chose 1838 in part because the social and political change of that time period would resonate with today’s visitors. But there’s another aspect of the year that will resonate with visitors today once the museum reopens after closing due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s. In this episode, Kelleher describes the difference between first and third person interpretation, and how visitors might react to seeing 19th century costumed interpreters with modern facemasks. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 What does the word interpreter mean? 00:56 Tom Kelleher, Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village 01:34 Old Sturbridge Village 02:30 First-Person Interpretation 03:30 Third-Person Interpretation 05:35 “Who’s the president?” 06:50 Picking a default year 07:40 How people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s 09:30 Living History Museums Interpreting Pandemics 10:00 Interpreters in facemasks 10:44 Archipelago at the Movies 🍿 11:56 Outro Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly. Join the Club for just $2/month. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show; Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️ , a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums; Logo stickers , pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door; A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 81. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] Tom Kelleher first learned what the word “interpreter” meant when he applied for a job at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Massachusetts. Tom Kelleher: They posted a job for a research historian and being young and firstly minted as a historian. I thought I knew everything and I applied and they called back a few weeks later and said, I'm. Sorry, you didn't get a job. Tom. Um, and I went to hang up saying, thank you because it was nice of them to tell me. And they said, would you be interested in being an interpreter? And I thought for a minute and said, well, my Spanish isn't that good. I don't think I could do that. And they said no you don't understand. The people who explain the past are called interpreters. They interpret the past for the present. Today, over thirty years later, Kelleher is Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts at Old Sturbridge Village and one of the museum’s longest-serving employees. Tom Kelleher: Hello, my name is Tom Kelleher. I’ve been working in the living history field, which is wearing the clothing of people of the past and trying to have the past make sense for the present. I work at a living history outdoor museum in Massachusetts called Old Sturbridge village. And I literally and figuratively wear a lot of hats. And one of them is, I'm the one in charge of initially training all our new costumed historians or historical interpreters depending on what term you like. A living history museum recreates historical settings to simulate a past time, providing visitors with an experiential interpretation of history. Old Sturbridge Village is a living history depicting life in Rural New England, set on a couple of hundred acres. The museum features over 40 historical buildings -- most are antique buildings that have been moved and restored to the site. There’s also three water-powered mills and a working farm with animals. Tom Kelleher: It's not a recreation of the town of Sturbridge or anywhere else. It's more like a slice of life, a historical sampler. So in a couple hours of walking around, a day of walking around, you can get an idea of what life was like in early 19th century New England. And one of the ways the museum gives visitors an idea of what life was like in early 19th century New England is historical interpreters. In the business of historical interpretation, it turns out, there are two broad categories: first person interpretation and third person interpretation. Tom Kelleher: What's called first, first in a role, playing, pretending you're a person from the past explaining how the past worked over a particular time and place. You, me as the historian pretends that I don't know anything past whatever year I'm portraying. For example, Plymouth Plantation, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, there are costumed staff that pretend it's 1627. They have this confusion thing, which then I think puts a burden on the public because then instead of being an interpreter, you're not making things clearer, which is what an interpreter should do, but just confusing the situation. An example, I give my new staff all the time of bad roleplaying interpretation is people ask, where's the bathroom? And you get this at some sites, you know, you say, excuse me, where's the bathroom? And they go, “Bath? Why I haven’t had a bath! You'll catch your death of cold bathing. I wash my face, I wash my hands with water, but oh my, why would anyone immerse themselves?” So you know, the kid there, he got a kid who needs to go to the bathroom, for heaven's sake, just point right over there! The historical interpreters at Old Sturbridge Village interact with visitors in third person. Tom Kelleher: When you're in third person, you're wearing the costumes, the clothing of an earlier time and place. And you're doing the work of an earlier time in place, but you are not pretending that the people you're talking to are wearing strange clothes and our magic inventors with all their electronic technology. You just try to have conversations with them to try to relate to how the past in present, interact, or as I like to say, you don't know where you are until you know where you've been. And so I think while I do a lot of role playing at Old Sturbridge village, most of us are not in character at any one point in time, but we're just portraying the past to try to make it make more sense to the present. In a museum without historical interpreters, the date and place don’t necessarily have to be specific. But a historical interpreter exists in a specific date and place. Whether they are first person or third person interpreters, the visitor experience depends on that anchor in time and space. Tom Kelleher: One of the drawbacks if you will of living history of portraying clothes is, is that you do have to narrow down your time period. And truthfully, we as an institution at Old Sturbridge Village, wrestled with that for a number of years. When the museum was founded, we opened to the public in 1946. It was kind of like, well, you know, about 200 years ago, about 1800. About, about, about, it was hazy. But they weren't doing a lot of costumed interpretation at the time. But in the early 1970s, Old Sturbridge Village and a number of other sites in the United States and Canada especially started getting serious about making sure our clothing was more accurate. And the tools and techniques we were using, the recipes the ladies would cook in the houses, that kind of thing, were more authentic. And it started dawning on us that you couldn't just show a 50 year old span. I mean, if you're trying to show a 50 year time span from 1970 to 2020. How should people dress? How should they act? What kind of devices should they be using? And so it gets confusing. An example is a visitor asking an interpreter: who’s the president? For first-person interpreters at Plymouth plantation, that’s a difficult question to answer: in 1627, not only was there no United States or heads-of-state who used that term, organizations that might have used the word president were few and far between. But even for a third person interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, answering that question requires a specific date. Tom Kelleher: Well, it depends. Andrew Jackson was president from 1829 to 1837 Martin van Buren was president from 1837 until 1841. So what specific year are you in? And so they might go into the shoe shop and ask the Shoemaker, “who's the president?” And it'll say, Andrew Jackson, and he'll be right. And the same people might be in the printing office later in the day. And the printer says, Martin van Buren. And the guy said, well, wait a minute. The guy in the shoe shop thinks it's Andrew Jackson. So we decided that you have to pick a year. And frankly, about 10 years ago, the administration told me, “Tom pick a year.” I agonized and justified it. And I arbitrarily, not arbitrarily, but with a lot of reasons that nobody needs to know about, picked 1838. And so that's our default year. We don't really make a big deal of that to the public, but our staff knows that when push comes to shove, when somebody asks, what year is it, who's the president? We’re 1838. Picking a specific date also allows the museum to go back in time. People in 1838 would be using objects and recalling events from earlier decades.Kelleher points to more rapid means of communication, widespread substance abuse, a widening disparity of wealth, rapid technological development, rising consumerism, and growing political divisions as aspects of the 1830s that resonate with visitors today. But there’s another aspect of 1830’s that resonates with visitors today -- or at least it will once the museum opens up again after its closure due to Covid-19: how people in New England responded to the Cholera Pandemic of the 1830s, also known as second cholera pandemic. Tom Kelleher: At Old Sturbridge Village, we interpret health and healing a lot of ways. Cholera is an infectious, uh, bacterial disease, usually from poor sanitation. Is that still fairly prevalent on the planet. In the 19th century, people didn't understand until the late 19th century, didn't understand bacteriology didn't understand what caused diseases, how diseases are spread. Even more so than Covid-19, it was very scary because even though there's a lot that's unknown. The second cholera pandemic would have been in recent memory to people in 1838. And even before the current pandemic, Old Sturbridge Village portrayed 19th-century diseases and medicine as part of its presentation of the lifestyles of the time. Tom Kelleher: We do sometimes talk about the cholera epidemic and we talk a lot about a lot of diseases. I mean, the early 19th century was a time when people didn't really have a germ theory. So there was especially in the popular mind, there's very little separation between the spiritual and the physical world. There were ideas then. There was a health reformer in the 1830s named Sylvester Graham who had made a name for himself as a temperance preacher, preaching on the evils of alcohol. And he took advantage of the cholera epidemic when it came to the United States in 1832 and basically started advocating a vegetarian diet, very regular meals, no snacking, whole grain breads. So he guaranteed that if you followed his regime that you would not get cholera. A lot of people then, in the 1830s, blamed immigrants for the cholera.Softentimes, people do point fingers and scapegoat. It's “them” making “us” sick. Kelleher sees living history museums as uniquely suited to interpret public health, historical pandemics, and medicine. Tom Kelleher: Some sites actually have special event weekends that focus on epidemics. There's a place in Georgia called Westville that used to have, I think, yellow fever days, and they'd have a weekend about the panic when a yellow fever epidemic would sweep through the American South. Old Sturbridge Village, like most museums, is currently closed to the public. The farm animals and gardens are being tended to. As Kelleher and his team plan for the reopening, they know that the costumed interpreters will sport a new item of clothing when the museum opens: an anachronistic face mask. Tom Kelleher: Our museum, when we reopen, we, the costume historians are going to be wearing face masks. I mean, we're not necessarily in roll, but it is the 21st century, and that's going to be a constant reminder to the public that, you know, we're in a different time and place: not so much in the 1830s, a different time in place, but during the Covid-19 world. So yeah, I think it will be a constant reminder and perhaps even a minor shock to people that is going to be a necessity because we are, we're where we are. And how people are gonna react to it and deal with it. I don’t know. [Outro]…
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Museum Archipelago
1 80. British Museum Curator Sushma Jansari Shares Stories and Experiments of Decolonising Museums 15:25
The British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum. So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the museum by South Asian collectors and presented photographs of a modern Jain Temple in Leicester, where she’s from. In this episode, Jansari talks about giving visitors the tools to think about the colonial interest in items in the collection, why she started her excellent podcast, The Wonder House, and how not to let the decolonization movement’s momentum evaporate. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Seleucid–Mauryan war 00:45 Megasthenes 01:30 Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum 02:00 How Events Are Transformed Through History 03:00 Decolonising Museums and Collections 04:21 39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum With James Delbourgo 04:50 Empire and Daily Life in the U.K. 05:46 Being the First South Asian Curator of the South Asia Collection 06:30 Working on the 2017 Renovation of the British Museum’s South Asia Collection 08:00 Creating Unexpected Moments in the Gallery 08:15 Mathura lion capital 09:30 Visitation Trends Since the Update 10:58 “Not Just One or Two Tweaks” 11:10 Why Jansari Started The Wonder House Podcast 12:10 “Every Movement Has Its Moment” 12:30 Subscribe to The Wonder House Podcast Apple Podcasts 13:30 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS 14:28 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue. Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them. Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum . Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 80. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] There’s a way to look at history that focuses on the events themselves. And then there’s a way to look at history that focuses on the fallout. In the 4th century B.C.E., Seleucus who was one of Alexander the Great’s successors, and Chandragupta, who was the first Mauryan emperor in Northern India, met for the first time by the banks of the river Indus, and they had some kind of military encounter. What kind of military encounter? Well we don’t really know. What we do know is that, following the encounter, Greek ambassador Megasthenes was sent to the Indian interior for the first time. Sushma Jansari: And he wrote an ethnography called the Indica, and it sort of described India for a Greek audience, based on, personal observation, but also the, you know, there's lots of strange storytelling as well and it, this particular text has sort of formed the, the foundation of Western knowledge of India for generations. And you can just imagine that, soldiers, British soldiers in the 19th century took translations of this particular text with them to the Northwest of India when they were exploring. So it's had a very long life, and it's a particular moment that that continues to resonate. This is Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum. Sushma Jansari: Hello, I'm Dr. Sushma Jansari. I'm the Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British museum, and when I'm not at work, I work on my podcast, which is very much a passion project, and this is called The Wonder House. We’ll get to the Wonder House in a minute, because it’s an excellent podcast, but first, as a doctorate at the University College London, Jansari studied this ancient encounter, of which only Greek descriptions survive. Sushma Jansari: that moment of meeting and connection has been completely transformed. It was transformed during the colonial period by British and Indian scholars. And you have British scholars saying, Oh, you know, so, because once ward, and he defeated this Indian general, whereas the Indian scholars wrote the complete opposite. Their take was that Chandragupta got to defeat this incoming European and he became a great leader and ruler. So actually, because of this uncertainty, I think it tells us a lot about the time we live in right now and how moments have been transformed in the past. What we can study is the fallout -- how people interpret these historic events and how that reflects on the moment they are living in now. And of course, what better way to see -- in the form of a building -- how people interpret historic events than a museum itself. Sushma Jansari: I think this is why the whole idea of decolonizing museums and collections is so important because I think up till now we've all been complicit and telling very partial stories, under the guise of trying to be neutral. And as we know, that neutrality is quite problematic and it tells a very, very, partial truth or partial version of a story. Museums are a great way to see what historic events meant to the museum builders, and I can think of no clearer example than the British Museum. Sushma Jansari: We have, you know, really incredible exhibitions on say, you know, when you're thinking of ancient South Asia, they're often on Buddhism or Hinduism or Jainism. So they have a very close religious focus. But what they don't tend to address, very rarely that I've ever seen anyway, is how did those collections arrive here? What was the colonial interest in that material and how has it been interpreted? How has it been presented? And also why, why in those particular ways? How, how has that changed over the last, you know, century or so? It's too easy to present, so-called neutral view of the ancient past and of ancient religions. But I don't think that's particularly ethical. I think if you’re going to be doing that, you need to be telling that fuller story. In episode 39 of this show, we examined Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum. Funded in large part by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and the Atlantic slave trade, and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, Sloane assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world that became the bases for the world’s first public museum, The British Museum, a place where anybody could freely enter to see the glory of the British Empire. Sushma Jansari: I think empire enfuses pretty much every aspect of life in the U.K., whether we're all aware of it or not, you know, whether it's the names of the streets, we walked down, the, the museums that were founded, the collections, they are hold the structures we still all inhabit. When we actually look around at the museums, most of the museums, I'd say in the U.K., they hold the contents of empire, you know, objects that were collected around the world by colonial officials, by soldiers, by sailors, people working abroad. You can't disentangle the two, when you are telling a story, you need to be honest and tell the whole story, or at least as much of it as you can possibly share. Because otherwise you're telling a very, very partial one that often overlooks the violence of an object's collection. and the situation and circumstances it was created, taken, purchased and brought here to the U.K. to be held in a museum. Today, Jansari is the first curator of Indian descent of the South Asia Collection at the British Museum. Sushma Jansari: In the past, truth be told, I didn't really think about it very much. I think it's only when I look at my curatorial practice and how I approach my role, the collections, who I want to work with and how I realized that actually there is a difference between what I do and what other people, you know, in a whole range of institutions bring to their role and at first I was really uncomfortable about that. I thought, my goodness, you know, is it just because of who I am and what I am? What about, you know, my academic side, and you know, all of that and my skills and knowledge, but actually I think it's. My ability to do my job is it's somehow richer. I bring a slightly different perspective to what I do and how I do it. The South Asia Collection at the British Museum is so enormous that it can capture the sweep of history of South Asia, from the Paleolithic period to the present day. The gallery reopened in 2017 and before that, it was last refurbished in 1992. Sushma Jansari: It just happens to be the largest gallery in the museum, so, Hey, no pressure. and I. Yeah, exactly. And everyone's looking, you know, the, so, you know, try not to fail on your first go. So it was, it was really tricky. and so we started by thinking, well, who actually comes to the museum and does, I mentioned over 70% of our audience comes from outside the U.K.. And if those people, a huge proportion, they. They're not very well versed in the history, cultures and religions of South Asia, so how would you present your collections in a way that shares this really incredible part of the world with people who don't know a great deal about it? And so we, decided to have a chronic thematic kind of approach. So we started with the paleolithic, which is about one and a half million years ago, and ended at the present day. The encyclopedic collections at the museum permits us to be able to do something like that. And as part of that, I sort of worked on the ancient to medieval sections, which is, the, the, the collections I cover along with, the bulk of the anthropological collections and also the textiles. It's got a mammoth collection that I look after. But as part of that, I was very keen to introduce moments where, you know, slightly unexpected stories and people were presented. So for example, in the main aisle, you walk down, one of the first sculptures you encounter is the Mathura lion capital, which dates about the first century A.D. And it was actually excavated and request to the museum by a South Asian collector, Bhagwan Lal Indraji. And I put a portrait of him on that, on the label as well as a little bit of text explaining it. Cause I wanted people to be confronted by South Asians in the South Asia gallery. It's not enough to, you know, display “their” culture and “their” collections and “their” history. I think it has to be a shared enterprise and, you know, in another section, for example, in the Jainism in Western India, the medieval section, I included photographs of the Jain temple from Leicester, which is where I'm from in the U.K.. I wanted to show that the sculptures on display, they are just as much part of British culture, as it was, you know, back then in the medieval period, it's not just some alien religion and alien culture. It's, it's our shared culture now. I think it's really important to sort of connect the dots. So you do share this, sort of broad sweep of history and culture, but then you want to also intersperse it with these other really important moments linking, you know, who and what you might see around you as you're going about your everyday life in the U.K. and linking it with, with the past as well. I asked Jansari if she’s noticed changes in who visits the gallery and how much time they spend there since the update. Sushma Jansari: I'm very interested in who's there, how they engage with different displays, how I can sort of tweak them to make them more engaging. And I have definitely noticed that there are more, South Asians in the gallery space, the South Asia section. This is a really tricky one because, although you hope that a museum is for everybody. The reality is that as you say, a lot of people don't feel that the museum is for them and it's, it's, it's, it's terrible because obviously the museum is for everybody, but once again, when you have very neutral displays and people aren't addressed. People aren't consulted, you aren't working with members of the community. I think it's understandable why they might feel somehow excluded from these spaces. And you know, we've all had moments where we've been chatting to people and they assume that a museum is not for them. It's somehow seen as a very different othering space. And when you see the workforce inside the museum, also predominantly white, and. There are very few members of, you know, black and minority ethnic staff in the museums. Once again, what sort of message are you trying to share with everybody else? You're saying, Hey, come come to our museum, but you got work here. You know how, how. How do you change that? And I think it's not just one or two tweaks. I think it's a fundamental reimagining of what exactly a museum is and who exactly this museum is for and how do those parts come together? I'm not sure that we yet have those answers, but what I think is really, really important is that we start having these conversations and we start experimenting. And this is one of the reasons why Jansari started the Wonder House podcast. The podcast, which is completely independent of the British Museum, is a way for Jansari to share the most innovative contemporary approaches to decolonization. Sushma Jansari: And so I got in touch with some people whose work I really respect, and I asked them if they were willing to talk about their work, what they learned, what they, what they thought didn't work quite so well, and share their stories and experiments with decolonizing so that everybody could have a chance to listen in on a friendly conversation. See what aspects might work for them, their collections, their institutions, and sort of feel supported and encouraged to experiment. What I love about The Wonder House is being able to listen in on these conversations that might not be happening in museums themselves, but are happening at coffee houses and pubs nearby. And the show explores the scale too -- you hear Jansari, who works at one of the largest institutions in the world in conversation with people who might be their museum’s only curator. Sushma Jansari: Because I think I really worry that the decolonize that the decolonizing museums, sort of incredible energy that it has right now. It's quite easy for that to evaporate. Every single movement has its moment, and unless we embed this kind of, knowledge and approaches, it's going to evaporate and not just the collections, but also, you know, the simple fact that you know, many of us who work in museums, you're often one of the only one or two. black and minority ethnic people in an entire institution. That's not easy. Jansari studies the ancient world, but now she is at the forefront of modern museum interpretation, printing not just the event, but also how the event rippled through history. Remember the story about Seleucus, and Chandragupta from the beginning of the episode? Sushma Jansari: And in fact, that Indian interpretation of that moment has won out. And actually if you read, historical novels, modern comics, if you watch, Indian films and Indian TV series, that's exactly the vision of Chandragupta that we have now. It's evolving all the time. you know, ideas are being shaped and reshaped, almost day by day at the moment. And I think that's really exciting. [OUTRO] Sushma Jansari: I remember one time I saw somebody just from the corner of my eye looking, really, it looks as if they're really focusing close on a particular textile. I thought, Oh my God, what is it? Know what's going on? So I wandered over and actually she had a compact out. I was applying her lipstick, so it's always good. You know, you assume you created this amazing display, but you know what?…
The modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent. Museum exhibit developer Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop says he’ll be reluctant to use hands-on exhibits once museums open up again. But he hopes that future hands-on exhibits are more meaningful because museums will work harder to justify them. In this episode, Orselli predicts what hands-on exhibits could become, the possibility that the crisis will encourage museums to adhere to universal design principles instead of defaulting to touchscreens, and how Covid-19 might finally put an end to hands-on mini grocery store exhibits in children's museums. Topics and Links 00:00 Intro 00:15 Hands-On Exhibits in Museums 01:00 Michael Spock 02:04 Paul Orselli 02:40 The Growth of Hands-On Exhibits 03:30 “The last thing I want to do is rush into a super-crowded museum” 04:40 “Empty Interaction” 06:50 27. Yo, Museum Professionals 07:30 The Future of Touchscreens 09:14 Universal Design Principles 10:20 The End of Mini-Grocery Store Exhibits 11:00 “Constraints Are A Good Thing For Creativity” 11:40 Archipelago at the Movies : National Treasure is Now Free for Everyone 12:15 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS 13:10 Outro | Join Club Archipelago Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue. Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them. Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum . Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 79. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript [Intro] The modern museum invites you to touch. Or it would, if it wasn’t closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. The screens inside the Fossil Hall at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC say “touch to begin” to an empty room. The normally cacophonous hands-on exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco sit eerily silent. And the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia-- which is inviting you right there in its name--has presumably stopped running commercials. Please Touch Museum Commercial: “No need to keep your hands by your side here. Exhibits are rich in detail, encouraging children to touch, feel, and see the way everyday things in our lives work… to learn more and to plan your visit, visit pleasetouchmuseum.org. Interactivity in museums in the form of hands-on exhibits has been a trend since 1962, when Michael Spock, director of the Boston Children's Museum, removed “do not touch” signs from the display cases. Since then, hands-on exhibits have served as a way for museums to indicate they’re free of their paternalistic past; that knowledge doesn’t come from on high, but instead comes from the vistor’s own curiosity, investigation, and play. Paul Orselli: Traditionally in science centers there were all of these science content that lend themselves to physical and interactive demonstrations and in a children's museum, they were very much concerned about multi sensory approaches and engaging, different types of learning styles. You know, full body and kinesthetic. When the bulk of your audience is preschoolers, they can't read, so you need to engage them in some other way. I think that's traditionally where interactive have lived in science centers and children's museums. This is Paul Orselli of Paul Orselli Workshop, who knows a lot about science centers and children's museums. Paul Orselli: Hello. My name's Paul Orselli. I'm the chief instigator at Pow: Paul Orselli Workshop. That's my company that specializes in museum exhibit development and consulting. Before I started running my own business, and I worked inside museums, I sort of oscillated back and forth between the science center world and the children's museum world. But hands-on exhibits spread further than science centers and children's museums. They spread to art museums and history museums and natural history museums too. Paul Orselli: And I think the reason that interactive approach expanded was that those other types of museums realized that this interactive or immersive approach helped them reach a broader audience. As more and more museums become more and more concerned with reaching a broader audience, one of the opportunities for them to explore, or one of the tools in their toolbox are interactive exhibits and experiences. So, the question is, will visitors still want to use hands on exhibits once museums open again? Is the trend that started in 1962 over? Paul Orselli: as a museum designer and as a visitor, the last thing I think I want to do immediately after museums open up again is to rush into a super crowded museum. We're sort of training people in the era of covid-19 and maybe future pandemics to socially distance and be careful about touching surfaces and objects and so on and so forth. Part of me wants to say, especially as it relates to children's museums, even before covid-19, it wasn't like they were the most rigorous cleaned places in the world. So the thing is, it's kind of hard, for my friends in the museum world with a straight face to say, well, we're. We're just gonna, be more rigorous with our cleaning schedules and our cleaning regimen. I mean, are you really gonna trail after hundreds of visitors in a, in a decent size museum and sort of wipe down everything they've touched after they touch that. One thing that Orselli can see happening is that hands-on exhibits will need to work to justify themselves a little harder during the planning stages. He sees the end of so-called “empty interaction.” Paul Orselli: There are lots of good examples, but maybe there are also some examples of things that I would consider primarily empty interaction. And a good example of that is a flip label. You know, here's one piece of texts and information on a little flap or a door, and to encounter the rest of the information or to get an answer to a question, you have to open up the flap and you get the rest of the textual or graphic information. I mean, that's interactive in the sense that you had to do something to sort of complete the informational circuit, but that might be about the lowest level of interaction possible. When I teach graduate students, one thing I often say is the flip label is the last vestige of an exhibit scoundrel. You know, it's like somebody who's not really somebody who's not really putting in the work, you know, they just sort of mailed it in. “Oh, we can put a bunch of flip labels here, or we can put a flip label here, and then that's something for kids to do.” It's sort of a challenge because now that I mentioned that about flip labels, it's sort of like, whoa, could you actually design a flip label experience that is more of a conversation or open-ended or engaging in terms of an intellectual sense and not just sort of this base level, tactile or mechanical sense. And, you know, I'm sure you, I'm sure you can. It's that when it's misused or thoughtlessly used. You know, the end results are just bad. We can't just so glibly and unthinkingly employ something like a push button as we did before. And I, and honestly, I don't know that that's a bad thing because then it sort of forces us to think, well, how could we provide a satisfying experience and what are the interfaces or other kinds of opportunities that we could provide that would let people, you know, that would carry the content, that would carry the emotional ideas that we want to carry across? In episode 27 of this show, I argued that there’s a certain type of content that digital media is best suited to: systems simulation. Understanding Concepts like climate change requires thinking about how complex systems interact with one another, and computer simulations allow for that type of enquiry. It’s almost like a video game: visitors try to find the edge of the rules of the world, expect in an exhibit about climate change, those rules are the rules of atmospheric and oceanic physics. Right now, the best understood and most common interface to digital media is a touchscreen. Paul Orselli: There is a certain segment of people who love their touchscreens. You know, they would, if they could fill up their museum with touchscreens, they would do it. And you know, again, I'm agnostic, touchscreens and touch tables: they are amazing tools, but now we have to be realistic. So now you're going to bring somebody into a new museum and ask them to crowd around with several other people and poke at a touchscreen after what has just happened in the world? That's a toughie. So what are some interfaces that allow visitors to interact with digital media, without a touchscreen and without requiring the visitor to touch anything with their hands? Paul Orselli: And if I think for example, of a large floor projections system. Where you could even just tap with your foot to control some different parameters or different people may be on the different corners of this large projection area could be controlling in real time different parameters. I could imagine that actually being a positive and a worthwhile experience that still takes into account a social aspect, but also a social distancing aspect as well as, you know, something that is sort of full body and it doesn't involve people touching their hands and that you don't have to sort of sanitize the floor cause people are tapping it with their feet and doing things. In his most optimistic moments, Orselli hopes that a new approach to hands-on exhibits can bring universal design front and center. Paul Orselli: Flexibility or control with something like tapping of a foot, which could easily also be somebody wheeling their wheelchair over the active area too. I mean, I think this brings the notion of universal design to a different place and a positive place. You know, these, these limitations and this triangulation between post Covid-19 perception and the notion of universal design. I'm going to be optimistic, and maybe that puts us in a, a better place, in a more thoughtful place, in a more satisfying place, ultimately, in terms of interactive experiences for visitors, which I suppose is really what this sort of all boils down to. How supported are museums as institutions in the various countries or parts of the world where they exist or how resilient our particular museums or museum structures that let them withstand these sorts of events. But Orselli sees a silver lining: an end to all those mini grocery store exhibits at children's museums. Paul Orselli: Although this might finally be like finally be a good reason for all the children's museums in the world to get rid of those horrible mini grocery store exhibits! A small room filled with lots of tactile objects that kids are just constantly pouring over and checking out and throwing into their mini baskets, and then they get put right back on the shelf. Already already it's a gigantic entropy experiment, so if you're going to keep that experience, are you, after everyone has touched something, hundreds of things, wipe and disinfect them all, and then replace them for people, you know, to just do this. I think constraints are a good thing for creativity and now we've just been thrown some public health and perceptual constraints. And we have to, we have to think about that because certainly our visitors are going to be thinking about that. Then if we don't show that, at least we're sensitive to that. Our visitors could rightfully think that we are insensitive. Not only to those design constraints and those design considerations, but insensitive to them as people who want to have fun and want to be safe. [Outro]…
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