In the framework of the so called information society, museus are no longer the temples of wisdom they used to be. Many such centres think about how to attract visitors and how to make their exhibitions and collections more accessible to audiences of all types. The use of information technologies and, above all, a clear educational mission, are now emerging as the basic ingredients for attracting visitors to museums. And, above all, for ensuring that they enjoy their visit.

The time has come to take a more active part in culture

When technologies are introduced into the world of art, as in other social sectors, they have always needed an “assimilation period”. According to a study conducted by Dosdoce last year, our museums are still hesitant about introducing new technologies not only into their rooms, but even as a strategy for communicating and bringing their activities to wider attention. For Javier Celaya, who directs the institution and headed the study, Spanish art centres not only are not making the most of available technologies that are simple and accessible, but continue to work with a model of vertical communication. In the age of blogs, Wikipedia and, in general, the net understood as peer-to-peer conversation, institutions still keep up practices where they hold the power and are the vehicles for a sole “official” discourse from above (the communication department or education services) to below (media, readers of the press, but also visitors to the centre and users of its websites).

Faced with this scenario, few centres allow, for example, the public to express their opinion, offer their point of view on a particular work or exhibition, not only on the premises, but, much simpler, through their webpages. In a word, even in the era of the reviled “museum shows”, possibly some still perceive “Art” as a “sublime” discipline, to understand which the lay audience needs a “one-off” explanation, in the framework of a univocal communication (whether in the form of a guidebook, audioguide, room notes or web page).

Education, a growing demand

All these issues are also marked by crisis in the form of transmission. Now, with immediate access to information, horizontal organization and the questioning of the idea of one authority, museums and centres need to think about new models for attracting and communicating with their audiences, and about what it wants to transmit via the process. In this respect, one figure that is growing in importance are the so-called “educational services”, responsible for conveying that message to the audience, whether the audience is expert or not. They should ask themselves whether, at the same time, they are also helping to promote dialogue and gather opinions. Just as we saw that educators are thinking about values and subjects that go beyond exercises and syllabuses, through this type of activity many art centres are launching debates on particular questions, relating creation with current facts, or suggesting dynamics that are enriching for their audiences. And, often, as we have already seen in recent educational experiences, the activities serve as a point of departure for discussing issues related to contemporary society and its values.

It is worth saying that these educational departments are becoming more and more important with the museum structure. In a recent A-Desk blog interview, Vicente Todolí, the director of the Tate Modern of London, was asked about the growing tendency to “turn art centres into educational centres”. According to Todolí, this is because of their public funding, but it is also a way to “create the audience of the future” as well as being “the only way of dealing with diversity” and providing access to culture to “people from not very developed areas”. In the interview he also states that this is “a phenomenon that is going to grow in the coming years”.

The question of before and after

This is something that all the centres are clear about, as Gloria Valls explains from Caixaforum, the Barcelona headquarters of the Fundació La Caixa. From the very inception of this foundation, activities in principle “aimed at schools” were started. When the Caixaforum centre opened on Montjuíc hill, the activities were centralised there. The targets of their workshops, concerts and other offerings are children, families and senior citizens, although “basically they are aimed at children”, as Valls specifies. The activities always have as their starting point an exhibition in order to establish “crossover relationships between artistic disciplines and historical moments” using “the referents of children to put the works in context.”

Despite the fact that currently most of the workshops are conducted following the visit, the head of the centre’s educational services says she is an advocate of prior exercises that help to put what is going to be seen in context as well as “stimulating the children’s curiosity.” In this respect, a standout is material for schools in which an exhibition becomes a “centre of interest” for different materials. A way of structuring classes that we already saw in the experiences recounted at the Multiple Intelligences Congress. But what is the role of technology in all this? Caixaforum is thinking about putting the small works of art resulting from the workshops and activities on the foundation’s webpage. In fact, recently five songs written during the “RAPsodas” workshop dedicated to the history of hip hop were presented at a concert by real representatives of this musical genre. And it seems important that the product of this learning should go on to form part of culture and society. In fact this workshop is an excellent example of how activities serve to discuss values beyond the practice of the art in question. In“RAPsodas” the audience is attracted by an explanation about a genre well known to our teenagers: rap. From this “hook”, the audience engages in an activity directly related to the school curriculum: writing a song, where work is done on literary aspects such as rhyme, language, etc. Although the final goal is to foster group work in an orderly and democratic way. The value of respect for one’s neighbour and the importance of solidarity and collaborative tasks is something that was also included during the explanation, as one of the positive principles of these “rappers”.

Works of art in class

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona is also backing pre-visit work. As Jorge Ribalta, Head of Public Programmes explains, the experience “is structured in two phases: first museum staff explain the Collection in schools and then the visit is made.” For Ribalta, “the idea is to create debate about the period covered by the collection”, from the postwar to present day. “They are historical subjects that generate debate, but this should be relevant and useful for different disciplines and for contemporary life”. Another way of stimulating interest a priori is by means of Expressart. This didactic material created by the centre itself consists of a case with a series of small objects that bear a relationship to the works in the collection. The material may be used openly, as a central element in various subjects, from plastic expression to sciences. According to teachers’ experiences, these objects serve as a starting point for open classes in which the dialogue and interests of the pupils themselves ultimately determine the subject matter to be dealt with. What is encouraged is that the pupils themselves express themselves and become able to get documented and elaborate the materials. Backing this “previous work” obeys the centre’s interest in “involving teachers in the life of the museum, which, in fact, should form part of the school curriculum”. In Ribalta’s opinion, the fields of education, culture and research “are separate in contemporary society, and this is a mistake”. Similarly, an appeal is made to “networking, between centre, school, and family” to “offer models and experiences that go beyond the space of the museum”. This work is necessary especially in the area of contemporary art where, in addition, “the many prejudices aroused in the lay public need to be overcome.”

Promoting participation

Technology can be a tool of communication, not only between museum and audience, but between visitors and works. Virtueel Platform is engaged in the specific study of these materials, the communication between the culture industries and technology. It is an institute funded with public funds which, since 2001, has tried to build bridges between organizations and firms dedicated to technology and culture. We spoke to Martine Posthuma de Boer, director of programs for this institution, about one of the most recent workshops held at VP: a seminar on museums and technology. “I believe that there is great potential in the content available in museums. If we create well designed applications we can contribute a context that gives meaning to all this content. To date, museums have been concerned above all with digitization and not contextualization”. For this organization, the cultural sector must enter the virtual and digital domain, since they are new channels for contacting the audience.

In addition to making use of new media, ways of experiencing culture are also changing. “Present day culture is about creating and ‘doing it yourself”. The interactive media have encouraged participation. Cultural organizations should anticipate the possibilities of participation in this networking society.” Or what amounts to the same: “Our culture deals with relationships and social dynamics”.

“Take -away” art and heritage

In this respect, last summer Vitueel Platform organized the Take away the museum workshop, in which both professionals in museology, documentation etc and from the technological field took part. The moderator of this workshop, Dick Rijken, formulates one of the main conclusions reached: “There is going to be less certainty about what is real and more space for errors and, above all, more for pluralism”. That is, these new experiments encourage participation while trying to eradicate the prejudice of the “unique meaning” of the work, which is precisely what inhibits the spectator.

Martine explains some of the experiences carried out at Virtueel Platform. For example, he talks about the collaboration of two museums dedicated to music (Gemeentemuseum of The Hague and Wereldmuseum of Rotterdam) with 3voor12.nl, a Dutch online radio station. “The centre has a major stock of antique instruments from different parts of the world, which are difficult to find outside museums and which hardly anyone knows “what they sound like”. The Dutch centre uploaded to this radio service a series of samples of these instruments. This experiment made available to the public a series of music which would otherwise be inaccessible, allowing listeners not only to hear them, but also to use them freely, both for copying and “remixing” them or incorporating them in their own compositions.

Within the framework of this workshop some interesting ideas were launched (which for the moment have not led to real projects) about how to use the potential of technology for the diffusion of culture. The workshops were led by Ulla Maria Mutanen, who set up ThinkLink.org, a project where designers, artists and artisans can “tag” their work, and by Mediamatic, a studio that has developed Symbolic Table, an interactive table that shows information about objects tagged with RFID technology. Both projects, unlike the proposals from the workshops, are actually in operation. The main premise of these workshops was that the ideas should start from the relations between software, object and personal relationship. Again, then, we come back to the need for users to interact. One of the participating groups thought of the possibility of replacing audioguides with a system of key words or tags suggested by users themselves. Using this same technology, the itinerary of each visitor could be be identified, saving these “sessions” for subsequent visits. Visitors could find out whether others share their key words, thus encouraging interaction amongst them. Another of the groups taking part had a similar idea, in this case by putting RFID labels on a card next to the object. The visitor could take the cards of the items they were most interested in and use them later to obtain more information from the Symbolic Table.

When the spectator defines the object

Experiences of this type are proliferating throughout the world. Thus, the Steve project attempts to explore the power of user-generated descriptions (in the style of applications like image-sharing services, such as the popular Flickr, or bookmark sharing, like Del.icio.us) in order to attract and improve online access to museum collections. Steve is a publicly funded initiative from the Art Museum of Indianapolis in which essentially, volunteers take part from different North American museums. For this project, the possibility of users describing works in their own words, and not from the specialised language of commissioners and art historians, can help other spectators to find interest in them. According to the Steve promoters, often, what visitors to an exhibition remember about the items is not described in the documentation provided by the museum. For this reason, they seek a rapprochement with user-created terminology, creating descriptors that can then be used in the information generated by the museums.

Works or exhibitions?

Despite the excellent intentions of these experiments, we acknowledge that there certain issues. In a recent article in El País, the journalist and music critic Diego Manrique talks about MP3 players are somehow “finishing” with the internal narrative of albums to extol the minimum ‘unit’ of the song. Saving distances, the experiences described here appear to encourage spectators to get close to works independently or to create their own itineraries within the framework of an exhibition. In a word, as in so many other disciplines, the decontextualised unit is prioritized over the more complex discourse. An exhibition is not a succession of independent works; rather, the works are interrelated and become a vehicle for global discourse. The proposals for “social tagging” or the elaboration of self-generated itineraries (by means of RFID technology, for example) would seem to force the spectator to ignore this “narrative” idea proper to an exhibition project. For her part, from her column in The Guardian, in reference to the Steve project, journalist Lindsay Irvine questioned the utility of the experiment and criticized the fact that the works are presented with no information other than that contributed by users. In this way, Irvine continues, there is a possibility of knowledge being reduced to its lowest common denominator; one of the problems that cause searches on art to fail is, precisely, basic user errors such as wrongly spelling the names of artists or works. Here a basic problem is how to keep a balance between rigour and proximity to the audience.

Conclusions:

The structure of communication has changed and it should also be transformed in the field of culture if a connection is to be made with audiences. One of the most efficient tools for “explaining” content and also for encouraging dialogue are the educational services of museums and art centres. These departments propose different methodologies to make the exhibition visit richer and to serve as a centre around which different material can revolve.

While in this country museums still have some qualms about adopting the so-called web 2.0 technologies that facilitate participation and “conversation” between users, we have found different experiences in both the US and Europe which give visitors the power to generate their own content, to classify works with a language closer to their own, or to create their own itineraries for visiting exhibitions. The sum of all these ideas, while the rigour proper to these centres is maintained, may result in something akin to the “museum of the future”.

Utani