only got a bit of time here at the internet cafe, but wanted to reiterate some things I already spoke to gullo about...
First of all, I'm glad you brought up the importance of museum as meeting point idea...if we do this right, starting with gullo's idea of establishing some sort of forum to construct basic themes, from which a central board with various members (each of whom have a central role to play as simeon said) can elaborate and dictate. But after that, I still see an opportunity for the public to be involved with the exhibit...gullo, this is where you called it an "exploratorium," but that would not be my choice of words. Imagine if we could somehow get the people to feel the trends that the exhibit represents, to see the confluence of forces which developed the trends, allow the audience to particpate in it so that they see how those trends can be influenced by themselves...in short, it would be at once a museum on cultural production as well as a lesson in cultural production...thoughts????
joel
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Subscribe to The Social Museum's Blog
Posts
Comments
1 comment:
Well here’s the thing. How do we get people to “feel the trends”? No matter what you have in a museum you can never really be part of the exhibit. Even if you have a deeply moving exhibit, or if you manage to create an atmosphere that helps to convey the point of the installations, you’ve still only created a spectacle. If you do anything beyond that you don’t have a museum, you have a social experiment. This is something that can also be part of the museum, though not necessarily within the brick and mortar structure.
ACTUALLY, what we can do is devote part of the museum to works collected by the people taking part in the forum, and then another part that exhibits the results of WHATEVER SOCIAL EXPERIMENT we want to conduct. Hell yes. I think it’s unreasonable for the museum to be immediately interactive (though we can certainly have things like seminars and other activities); there’s nothing lost in the concept by simply conducting a social experiment and then exhibiting the results. Such experiments can be conducted with or without the knowledge of the participants, so the results that we’ll put on display will be much purer than if we introduced them into an environment like a museum and somehow immediately documented their behavior and put it right in front of them, right then and there, to look at.
Think about it; your fascination with the internet’s self reflexivity isn’t even so immediate. When someone publishes an idea on the web, it does get filtered AFTER it’s published, but even that is a continuing fourth-dimensional process. It’s not contained in one whole. For the museum to really be a museum of social behavior, it has to extend outside the whole of its structure. We can’t hope to inspire, document, AND display the trends we’re spotlighting then and there.
Post a Comment