A quick question for you

Hot on the heels of our fascinating plenary at Museums and the Web about Sleep No More and immersive theatre and museums, I went to a very different kind of immersive experience – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – an immersive, puzzle-based, interactive experience developed by 5 Wits, who also did Operation Spy at the International Spy Museum. It’s sort of the polar opposite of SNM; family-friendly, group based, and very explicative. And it worked on a number of different levels than SNM. Particularly the game-based elements of it. So I’d like to conduct an experiment with your kind condescension.

Think about the experience of being in museums and why you like them.
Now think about games you love. Board games, videogames, whatever…
Holding both those in mind, can you put them together and tell me what you see?
Which games sprang to mind? Why?

Museums and the Web 2013 thoughts

Museums and the Web 2013 in Portland Oregon was an action-packed few days of intense conversations and great food for thought.

Portland food trucks. You just can’t go wrong.

Danny Birchall and Susan Edwards have both written great summaries of their experiences at the conference and I recommend both. It’s always fascinating to see how varied people’s experiences of the same event can be, and also how some of the same idea wind up poking through everyone’s sessions.

 Games, gamification, and play in museums

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’m not a huge fan of gamification (ack!). The series of posts I wrote last year have continued to be perennially popular, no doubt due to high frequency of buzzword usage in them. Start here if you want to read them.  The gaming session led by Bruce Wyman, Sharna Jackson and Kate Haley-Goldman was a delight to be in. The speakers know games, make them, study them, and they were able to turn a critical eye to the current popularity of slapping badges and leaderboards on anything and everything and separate some wheat from the gamified (ack!) chaff. I was glad to hear people highlight the distinctions between games and gamified (ack!) activities and play, and the back and forth between the audience and the speakers was high-energy and high-quality. This talk was a great grounding for Rob Stein’s excellent update on DMA’s new free membership program, DMAFriends, which seems to be a very successful application of game mechanics to a traditional museum loyalty program.  More on that later…

 Immersion and affection, or relationship-building

One of the great joys of these events is the extent to which we don’t talk about technology. For me, one of the persistent themes of the conference was connecting with our audiences on an emotional level.  Larry Friedlander’s opening plenary, When the Rare Becomes Commonplace: Challenges for Museums in a Digital Age, started off quoting Psalms and Shakepeare before launching into emotional appeals to connect with people in meaningful ways. You should watch it. Dana Mitroff Silvers led off her session on design thinking by saying that a design thinker’s first task is not to understand, but to empathize with who they’re designing for.  There’s also a website now for design thinking in museums. Luis Mendes, in his brilliant lightning talk, wondered why there were so many books on anger management but none on what he called affection management. His thesis about the centrality of relationships and building structures to grow them often referenced digital technologies as tools to achieve this, but only as tools. “I do believe these are the days of miracles and wonders, and the signs are popping up everywhere.” Yes, indeed!

This drumbeat of emotional appeals echoed a number of conversations I had about immersive theater throughout the conference. I’ve written about Sleep No More before and alternative models of exhibition development, and I’m no nearer to clarity than I was when I started, but other people are wrestling with the same concepts, which is heartening. And my major a ha moment of the conference came after talking to Suse Cairns about her experience of SNM, which involved stalking an actor, getting dragged off into a secret chamber, unmasked and stuffed in a closet while having poetry spoken to her. It also involved being given a gift – a locket she brought with her to the conference as a token of her experience. I won’t try to do her story justice, suffice it to say that it was deeply meaningful to her and connected her to the action and actors in a way I didn’t experience.  And that allowed me to see that I’d been focusing on the wrong part of immersive theater – the immersion – when what was powerful was the emotional connection and the immersion was just a mechanic for encouraging that.

Suse’s locket. The paper is full of seeds. Ask her about it.

Ending with a bang 

I was part of the closing plenary on immersive theater with Seb Chan and Suse Cairns (heaven!) along with Diane Borger, producer of Sleep No More, who joined us via videochat from locked-down Boston, which was another theme of the conference I won’t get into here. Seb did a great job of drawing parallels between how a theatrical event like SNM gets created and big museum traveling exhibitions. It was interesting to compare the per square foot costs of both and how long each took to recoup their initial investment. Sleep No More won. Hmm…

Also, all three panelists, as well as many in the audience had a common experience of having a hard time getting into SNM.  This idea of having to work hard to get into something seems kinda crazy and the opposite of how museums function, but I can’t help wonder if building that kind of anticipation has value in our work. Must ponder…

All in all, an hour was went by way too quickly, and I don’t think we did more than launch the opening volley in what I hope will be a much longer, more fruitful conversation. I love the way this cohort is willing to look outside the field for inspiration while retaining a critical eye, and I hope by next year one of you will have something interesting to report on.

What was your experience of the conference, locally or remotely? Were there themes that arose for you? I’d love to hear about them!

Gap week!

For the first time in longer than I can recall, I have nothing I have to do for work. I’m between jobs, having what a friend decided to dub my “gap week”. Instead of unpacking my boxes from my old office, or spending all day reading up on the strategic plans of my new employer, I’m reading stuff I’d squirreled away, sometimes years ago that I thought I’d “get around to” in quieter moments. Susan Stewart’s “On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection” is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read lately. It’s written in a dense, but lyrical style, in the way that only a literary critic/poet could write.  More on her later.

I also finally reread Adorno’s “Valèry Proust Museum” essay and the opening of that leapt out and smacked me,

 “The German word museal [museum-like] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying.”

And that’s just the beginning! He goes on to compare art museums to sepulchres and much, much more! There’s a lot more to unpack in there, but for some reason this statement about vitality made me think about why I get so excited about digital technologies in museums. A lot of that excitement has to do with their potential to create new kinds of connections between people and places and objects. Here’s one quick example of how.

Months ago, Britanny Beck from MyOrpheo shared a sweet little story with me that encapsulates a lot of what excites me about digital technologies and heritage.  It’s a simple story, involving a guy, a gal, a historic building, and an audiotour.

The Clock, courtesy of MyOrpheo

Adam and Erica live in New York City. Erica’s favorite place in town is Grand Central Station.  On one of their dates, they took the new audio tour of the station, which Erica loved. Adam decided using the audio tour would be a perfect way to ask her to marry him.  He contacted Orpheo and pitched the idea of replacing one track on the tour with his proposal and then giving her a special unit with the new tour on it.

Let’s take the tour!, courtesy of MyOrpheo

Being very good sports, MyOrpheo agreed to cut a special track and Adam was left with the job of arranging a plausible reason to take the same tour again.  That’s what friends and family are for, right? So, Erica’s brother and sister-in-law conceived of a sudden burning desire to take the audio tour of Grand Central, and Erica fell for the idea of it being a double date. When she and Eric got to Vanderbilt Hall, instead of getting information on the room and its architecture, she got a marriage proposal. Eric got down on one knee, and the rest was history. Well played, Eric. Well played.

The special audio track, courtesy of MyOrpheo

The relative ease with which one can customize digital media and the ability to create personal experiences are truly revolutionary. As is the shift in mindset of organizations to be able to even consider letting people appropriate their tools for their own ends.  That’s worth getting excited about!

US OpenGLAM workshop!

US OpenGLAM workshop!

Hey, I guest blogged over that the OpenGLAM website on a workshop I attended last week in Berkeley. Expect to see more about this in the coming months (hint, hint!)!

What can museums learn about immersive theater?

Solitude of a Darkened Life by Flickr user @Photo

One of the most unexpected outcomes of taking a new position was my new boss asking me if I was interested in attending Museums and the Web 2013.  I’ve been going to MW as often as possible since the late ‘90s, and never fail to come away rejuvenated and full of new ideas.  Most of the people I consider my closest professional peers are folks I first met at MW.  So I said, “Yes, please!” and am counting down the days til I arrive in Portland.

I’m excited to attend for many reasons. This will be my first conference as an art museum professional so it’ll be interesting to see what sessions and speakers now seem valuable/relevant/important to me in my new role. I have a lot to learn, and I hope to take away a lot.

Museums and the Web is the bookend conference for the Museum Computer Network conference, and a great deal of planning and plotting will take place at MW2013 that will influence the shape of MCN2013. It’ll be great to be there for those conversations.

Since I wasn’t expecting to go this year, I paid no attention to the program until recently and therefore am not chairing a session, presenting a paper, running a workshop, etc. I can go and hang out and soak up the event, and that feels like a real gift. Thank you PEM, and Jim!

I didn’t get off completely scot-free, and that’s what this post is going to be about. I wrote some time ago about going to see Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in NYC, as have others. It turns out the Diane Borger from Punchdrunk is going to give the closing plenary on immersive theatre and museums, and I was invited to join the panel with Diane, Seb Chan, and Suse Cairns! I am tremendously excited to be part of what could be an important community discussion and have been reading up on immersive theatre and thought it’d be worthwhile sharing some links for those who don’t yet know what immersive theatre and why it’s something museums might learn from.

Recent immersive theatre & museums articles

What can museums learn from immersive theater? | Museums and the Web 2013

Diane Borger is the producer who brought Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More to the US in 2009 (http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/sleep-no-more). After an extended, sold-out run, the immersive theater production moved to New York, where it continues to play today (http://sleepnomorenyc.com). Please join Diane and Punchdrunk’s many museum fans and critics for an inspiring discussion of what museums can learn from immersive theater led by Seb Chan, Ed Rodley and Suse Cairns. We are all sure to be transformed by the experience!

Mark Dion’s “Curator’s Office”

Mark Dion, ArtForum

In ”Curator’s Office”, books, furniture, and personal effects do not reveal their collector’s taste or knowledge, but rather spin a fictive tale about a curator gone missing in the 1950s in a period of American anticommunist paranoia.

ht to Robin White Owen (@rocombo)

 The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games

by Jamie Madigan

Though it is focused on videogames, I think most (if not all) of it is relevant to both immersive theatre and to museum experiences.  The unpacking of immersion, or “presence” as its called in the psych literature I found very helpful.

ht to Suse Cairns (@shineslike)

A Waking Dream Made Just for You

By Chris Colin, New York Times

Perhaps the most extreme example of immersive theatre I’ve heard of yet; a production hand-crafted and personalized for an audience of one.

Lithuania’s Soviet nostalgia: back in the USSR

by Dan Hancox, The Guardian

Feeling nostalgic for the good old Soviet Union? Then head to Lithuania, where several theme parks let visitors feel exactly what it was like – right down to scary, abusive guards.

Immersive theatre and the anxiety of choice

By Tara Burton, New Statesman

Immersive theatre is about turning the traditional power dynamics of actors and audience on their head. One potential outcome of that is anxiety in the audience. This certainly resonated with my own experience of Sleep No More. 

Is theatre becoming too immersive?

by Alice Jones, The Independent

Alice has been put on the spot by actors time and again – and she’s sick of it

Interactive theatre: five rules of play from an audience perspective

by Miriam Gillinson, The Guardian

A useful little breakdown of how immersive theatre can let down their audiences.

How I learned to love immersive theatre

by Mark Lawson, The Guardian

This example of site-specific and non-text-based theatre, Robert Wilson’s “Walking”, sounds amazing, and since it relies on the landscape, seems like it could have utility in a museum setting, where the setting itself is often an object to be interepreted.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Though a lot of immersive theatre seems to lean heavily on adult themes, this Young Tate performance, staged around  Tate Liverpool’s “Alice in Wonderland” exhibition,  goes more for a ”darkly playful and absurd experience”, as it  invites the audience to journey beyond the exhibition and through the looking glass.

Any other great examples I’ve missed? Let me know!

On leaving and arriving

The junk in the bottom of the desk.

A long silence on the old blog. It is a well-known fact that an idle blog is a dead one, but this has been more of a medically induced coma.  It’s not that I’ve been lazy, just preoccupied.

I submitted my resignation on Wednesday and am leaving the Museum of Science, some thirty-odd years after I first walked through the doors as a very junior Junior Volunteer. And the planning, worrying and waiting that accompanies leaving an institution after so long has consumed most of my brainpower. It’s exciting, scary, and very odd to think of myself going somewhere different every day. Grad school feels like a walk in the park compared to the prospect of diving into a new job, and a completely new culture. But, dive I will.

I have accepted the job of Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and for the next four years will be managing a wide range of media projects projects for their temporary exhibitions *and* preparing for the 2017 reopening of the museum, which will entail 175,000 square feet of new exhibit space and a complete reinstallation of the collection! They don’t lack for ambition at PEM, and that’s exciting! My interest in the intersection of the digital and museums is pretty obvious if you’re reading this blog for more than the first time, and my position at PEM will be a great opportunity to turn ideas into practice. A trifle overwhelming right now, but invigorating.

Which doesn’t make leaving any easier. When you’re engaged in project-based work, there’s never a good time to leave other than at the end of a project, and like so many other colleagues, I rarely work on only one project at a time any more. So I’ll be leaving loose ends that my coworkers and friends will have to tie up. That’s a hard thing to come to terms with, but that’s the reality of it. I won’t see the final version of that interactive. I won’t be at the opening of that exhibition. I will have not any stake in who the Museum hires to fill vacant positions, including mine.

Time to mount up and move on.

And arriving

I’ll be at Museums and Web representing my my new employer, so if you’re in Portland, do come by and say, “Hi!” I’ve been going to MW since the late 90s and always gotten something out of the experience. I’m really looking forward to going in my new role, to see the conference with a fresh perspective and different questions and hopes for what I can learn there. It’ll be fun to be an oldish newbie.

Which brings me to my first question for you:

What resources would you recommend I check out, as a freshly-minted art museum professional, to get a start on understanding the state of art museum educational theory and practice? 

Anything is fair game; books, articles, websites, people, places outside the field worth looking at, etc… I know it’s a broad question, but it’s intentionally so. I’m in the divergent phase of my research and I like to throw the net wide and gather as many data as I can.  There’ll be time later to process and converge. For now, I’m hungry and I hope you’ll feed me. And don’t limit yourself to technology. As an example, I’d been dabbling a bit in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) at the Museum of Science and wondering how they might apply in a science museum context.

I’m also an experiential learner, and like to immerse myself in places. I’ve always got a list of museums I’m dying to go visit, but I’d like to ask one more question of you:

Which art museums are on your top ten list of institutions doing interesting work?

I know, I know… It’s another stupidly broad question, but bear with me, OK? I’m new to this! If you could tell me a museum that’s on your list and what about it puts it there, I’d be grateful. As an example, my personal list includes Cleveland Museum of Art because of the philosophy behind Gallery One, as well as the technological details of implementing it. The list also includes Dallas Museum of Art for their “DMA Friends and Partners” program. Ditching paid admission and membership for an interaction-based economy is endlessly fascinating to me and I look forward to seeing how it plays out.

As always, I look forward to your thoughts and input.

Drinking About Museums: Boston TONIGHT 2/28!

 

Pints of beer by Flickr user spli

February’s Drinking About Museums: Boston will be simple and social. Join us at CBC and let’s talk! If you don’t see us, they may have stuck us in the back.  If all else fails, tell the maitre d’ you’re one of “those museum people” and they’ll point you in the right direction. Hope to see ya there!

Cambridge Brewing Co.,1 Kendall Square #100, Cambridge, MA,