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Posted
8 hours ago
I'm researching current good practice in family and informal learning in museums and checked the Kids in Museums website to remind myself of their manifesto. The Kids in Museums organisation played a key role in the Great Museum Debate in Liverpool, in September. They discussed - what is the museum of your dreams? That's a good question and it's a great chance to get a bit visionary and radical. Since then, Kids in Museums have set up a online discussion inviting your ideas on the Museum I'd Like. However, there are no comments yet. I tried posting and there are some hitches that make it hard to do so. In the meantime, the comment I wanted to post is below. Actually, this isn't my dream but the thoughts of three children. I'm working on a dream of my own, to come shortly. If you want to share your dream, try the Kids in Museums site, but you can also post comments here too.
I asked three 8 year olds who have visited some museums what kind of museum they’d like ideally and what activities they like to do in them. Here are some of the things they said:
- We like activities that let you be louder, or be able to talk normally, in the museum.
- We like to explore rude and funny things, and for the people there to let us be rude, and we’d like to draw nude people.
- We like activities that you can be included in, like in the Big Draw when we drew the picture and the singers sang what we drew. You are making the art happen with the artist.
- It would be good if we could make the pictures in the museum more interesting. Can we do a workshop in a gallery where children actually make the things that go on display?
- It would be brilliant if the activity had something you can go in, like a ride round the buildings, like in Curious George.
- We like long activities that can last a whole day or a whole week, if you like doing it. Like the X-Factor bootcamp. Sometimes, if it’s just a little thing, like colouring in, I can’t be bothered to do it. But if I know at the end of a day that we’ll put on a show or something, I want to do it.
- I like watching films in galleries, not when they’re repetitive but when they’re like stories. And I like storytellers and plays. I want them to be funny.
- I loved the crystal blue room (Seizure by Roger Hiorns) – we’d like to visit more strange interesting places that you can explore, like mazes and Alice in Wonderland rooms.
- We love sleepovers, my sister went to the British Museum – you can sleep right in front of a warrior, which is really spooky, and they do lots of fun activities.
- We like to go on hunts, like a quiz where you have to hunt for things.
- We love making things, art and craft – but they have to be different from what we can make at home.
- We would like to join a museum club and get invited to parties and to win prizes.
- And we want the Livesey Museum for Children to come back again as we loved it.
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Posted
11 days ago
Here are a few things that have struck me recently in the museum-y webby world.
Tag Posse
Whenever the topic of user-tagging comes up, someone says 'But how will we get people to tag our thousands of items? Surely it's not that much fun!' Fair point, and this makes a change from the usual worries about being swamped with random and 'plain-wrong' UGC that has to be moderated. Folksonomy works best, it seems, when you do harness the power of the crowd, not just the insane energies of a steam engine enthusiast in Harlow and your own hard-working interns. Nina Simon in her Museum 2.0 blog has reviewed two new experiments in motivating the crowd to tag. One is, unusually, not about tagging artefacts but animal/bird behaviours. The other, the one I joined, is the Brooklyn Posse. You sign up to the Posse and, basically, play Tag with other Posse members. Yes, it is addictive. You are pitted against the Posse and a scale shows when you have beaten other players in adding more tags. The main outcome for me was that I noticed the Brooklyn collection. I looked at the objects (slightly frustrated by only getting one view and not being able to see them as a curator does) and thought about them. My recurring question was where they had come from, because the provided metadata didn't include location or culture of origin. Most of the provided data was about materials, so my tags tended to echo and expand on that, which slightly pulls against the factor that online artefacts are best interpreted in contextual rather than visual-material ways because you can't easily see them 'in the flesh'.
Exhibitions on Freebase
Frankie Roberto sent a message to the Museums Computer Group about his experiment to build up a database on exhibitions in Freebase. He started thinking about this at the Museum Mash-up day before the UK Museums and the Web conference, and later approached Freebase to do this with them. The idea is not just to create a database, but to open up and collate the data that individual exhibiting organisations sit on, to create a resource about past, current and future exhibitions. The data is organised into categories such as 'free exhibitions', 'exhibitions about people' and so on. You can also link these categories together e.g. free exhibitions about people. This is potentially leading to a web service that lets people find exhibitions related to their interests, which I think is pretty exciting and useful. It will be good when international web-based services like this can form part of our national cultural digital infrastructure.
Streetview Powerhouse mash-up
This had to happen, and thanks to developer Paul Hagon, here it is. You may have heard about Google driving round streets taking eye-level shots to create a seamless virtual photographic map, plotted onto Google Maps. This mash-up shows old photographs of Sydney streets from the Powerhouse Museum, next to the current Streetview. I wonder if Flickr Commons can organise it so that lots of place-based historic photographic collections, the world over, can be shown next to their Streetview? If this can be connected to a feature that allows people to add memories and knowledge about those places, it could be great.
Meeting Flickr at Tate
I am an unashamed Flickr fan and it's getting better all the time. I collect and play with old photographs, so I'm loving Flickr Commons and also groups such as Found Photographs . I administer groups, such as a new one to share images of threatened coastal heritage.
I do a lot of idle musing on all the creative things that could be done with Flickr and its subsidiary applications and services. For example, I blogged last year about how museums could create books using Blurb, taking participants photos straight from Flickr.
On Friday, Flickr and Blurb were celebrating at Tate Britain the launch of a book created by Tate from public submissions related to their Street and Studio exhibition. It was good to chat with George Oates there, the project manager for Flickr Commons, about ideas for developing Flickr to enable more creative curating by users. For example, allowing you to combine your own images with other peoples or from Commons (e.g. saved as your Faves) in various presentations, and being able to combine with different forms of writing. I can't wait to see some of this happen. I have heard some cynicism about whether people really want to curate online with cultural collections. It might be the case that the offer is less compelling within one museum or gallery online, but when you have the potential to mix your own images with 3 billion others on Flickr, working in a well-structured interface and connecting with many thousands of other people, all cynicism fades away. Well, mine does at least, but then I love Flickr. Did I tell you I love Flickr?
For some reason, the Apture weblinks failed in some of this post, so here are the links:
For Tate's Street and Studio Flickr/Blurb book
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/streetandstudio/flickr-winners.shtm
For the Flickr group of Found Photographs
http://flickr.com/groups/foundphotos/
For the Flickr group of Threatened Coastal Heritage
http://flickr.com/groups/coastalheritage/
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Posted
22 days ago
Flow is delivering (with Cimex Media) an integrated multi-partner learning programme and website for the coast and seas in Northumberland. So I wanted to make sense of coastal heritage management in the UK. One reason for wanting to know the bigger picture is a concern about the increasing threat to the coast from the effects of climate change. This threat affects wildlife populations, areas of natural beauty and our cultural heritage, as well as our living towns and livelihoods. The National Trust has just published their report, Shifting Shores, to draw attention to this issue and to promote their plans to conserve their many threatened coastal sites, which includes both environmental and cultural heritage. The NT is one of a large number of bodies responsible for coastal management, and this large number of bodies is slowing down action. I've described before how this confusing jigsaw of responsibility is affecting Happisburgh. The Marine Bill is currently going through parliament, aiming to create a more integrated system for marine and coastal planning and conservation.
My interest in coastal heritage is personal too. My roots are entirely steeped in the coast, with only the occasional inlander cropping up in our family trees. Most of my relatives come from the heritage coasts of North Norfolk, Northumberland, South East Scotland and South Suffolk. Over the centuries, my relatives have made their livings by fishing, coastguarding and the Navy, and now some who are marine biologists and naval engineers. My great grandfather won a medal for predicting the 1953 floods and co-ordinating the rescue when he was the coastguard at Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
This was a devastating and frightening flood but it was not as frequent as the surges that occur now. The coast is also eroding rapidly in places due to an increased wave height and other factors. A map of the UK coast at risk looks as if a child drew round it in thick red crayon, then rubbed away a few bits of the line. Most of it is at risk, with the most worrying portions down the East coast, including the Thames Estuary where the Government is investing massively in new housing, industry and even thinking of a new airport. At least new planning can take account of the threat, but it's harder to protect the heritage of millennia of human habitation around the coast.
Brancaster Staithe is an old village with a round-towered Saxon church and evidence of a Roman fort. Its heritage of fishing (especially for mussels) continues today. Every Spring it floods. The National Trust owns the land here and has invested in shoring up its harbour and flood-proofing its buildings. This is reassuring action but further East, there are plans under consideration for 'managed retreat', letting the sea breach 15 miles of coastal defences, letting it in for 5 miles, taking 2500 acres of NT property, thousands of homes, ancient churches and windmills. This is where I grew up, my homeland. It is just a proposal for now, and in theory managed retreat is logical. But it hurts!
Heritage management policy is about conserving where possible and, when it's not, recording it before it goes. This recording of heritage can involve communities and it can be therapeutic for people to be involved in it. Sometimes, people do it themselves. For example, here's a Flickr group called Disappearing Norfolk, inviting people to submit photos of the parts of Norfolk scheduled to change drastically. Sometimes, people are involved through organised projects, such as Holding Back the Tide, an HLF-funded project co-ordinated by CoastNET, collecting stories, pictures and artefacts from East Anglian communities about coastal change. The blog shows evidence of some great schools projects. (Note that the HLF told the project owner that this was the first HLF-funded project they had seen to have a blog, in 2008, which seems extraordinary.)
It would be a positive move to see community heritage projects like this expanding, using the power of the web, led by agencies such as English Heritage, National Trust and Natural England working together. Perhaps DCMS can consider how to support such collaborative working when the Marine Bill comes into force...
In the meantime, I've created a Flickr group for people to record images of threatened coastal heritage:
http://flickr.com/groups/coastalheritage/
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Posted
27 days ago
In the back-up files and on the shelves of all the UK's cultural institutions sit thousands of reports: feasibility studies, research, evaluations, manifestos and action plans. Some of these were rigorously researched, cogently argued and well presented. Some of these were produced with minimum angst between client and author. These are the ones most likely to be read and distributed, and to have some impact. Of the ones in that category, many have been authored by Rick Rogers.
Sadly, Rick died on Sunday, still working on the second report from the Culture and Learning advocacy project led by the Clore Duffield Foundation. He had been suffering from cancer some time but continued to work, passionate as he was to articulate the value and qualities of cultural education.
Frequently the media decides to profile the 'hottest stars of the cultural world', showcasing the directors, curators and artists. Rarely do they showcase people who work in cultural education and even less do they showcase people who work behind the scenes of cultural education in doing the research, evaluation and advocacy that underpins the quality of its provision. It's almost impossible to find Rick when you Google for him, because he didn't need to promote himself and because of so many other shining stars, Richard Rogers the architect, Richard Rogers the Australian artist, Rick Rogers, an actor. But deep in those search results, there are bound to be many reports that have stood the test of time.
Not only for his work will he be missed. He was an incredibly sweet and calming person, a real pleasure to work with.
Donations in his memory can be sent to the Wigmore Hall Trust, to support their work in bringing children to music. Online donations here.
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Posted
1 month ago
I went to the BFI on 30th September for a panel debate: Fast Forward, Cultural Institutions and Public Service Broadcasting. The keynote was Peter Bazalgette, reprising a speech he had given to the Royal Television Society, which he said "went down like a cup of cold sick". It didn't have that effect on me because I was heartened by Bazalgette's vision in this speech for a public service search, an online aggregator of culture, not just culture from the BBC but from the whole UK cultural and creative sector. Unfortunately he seemed rather dismissive of his own idea, probably because of the whiff emanating from its reception at the RTVS. It meant that the idea didn't really take shape through dialogue in this forum.
Peter Jenkinson, the Chair, asked if we are really hurtling fast forward into a digital revolution or just standing still. What effect will the Ofcom review of Public Service Broadcasting have in forging a new future for the cultural sector and broadcasting?
The context was outlined: A collapse in advertising, young people not watching TV so often, the dumbing down of programming (ref. 'Snog, Marry or Avoid'), children's and arts TV are both threatened. However, there is great opportunity in the creative community being proactive, creating their own media channels and content. Artists have failed to take part in making TV but a merging of broadcast and new media can change this. Public sector reform is about how to stitch people into this reform in a role of co-creation, with audiences now becoming the film-makers, curators and critics. TV is deeply affected by Reithian values, but people are no longer happy with this condescension, in the age of We Think.
Peter Bazalgette then talked about his RTVS speech and the cold reaction to it: He said broadcasting was about more than BBC and C4, that these broadcasters were presumptuous and boring, that the BBC actually feeds off regulators, that it's a closed world and so on. The options for Ofcom on PSB reform boil down to the question about how to fund C4, through a part of the BBC licence fee or other options. Andy Burnham has recently said that he wants to get on and enable this by January, so it seems the DCMS has made the decision.
The BBC i-player has already seen 160 million downloads but the license fee is based on ownership of a TV, so that funding system is irrelevant. The BBC itself is not irrelevant, because within the mess of the internet you need more trusted sources of information and the ability to nurture talent that the BBC offers. He insisted often that his view was 'let's change it but only a little bit'. He wasn't arguing against regulation or public ownership but suggesting identifying parcels of money (for example by privatising Radio 1 and 2) to diversify and modernise broadcasting. He can't see why ITV and C5 should have to make public service content. The regulators are obsessed with plurality, which is a fig leaf: The news agendas of C4 and BBC are identical so how can this be described as plurality?
So, what would he do with the released funds? He recognises, rightly, that one of the biggest issues in online 'broadcasting' is search to find the best free and authoritative content. He proposes 'Boggle' as a public service network for online/streamed interactive broadcasting for multiple forms of media, so that the whole cultural sector can channel their content. He suggests you could create an opera community for peer to peer review, streaming opera to remote audiences etc. He thinks all these things are already happening in a fragmented way and there is no conversation about it between C4, BBC and Ofcom, even though there are many opportunities to advertise to online engaged communities with targeted content.
Questions were raised:
Louisa Bolch asked: If a large part of public service media is about science, how will such a cultural service deliver this? Bazalgette's reply focused on the second part of the question, which was about how, if you force C4 to be more commercial, will they deliver science programming. He said that that giving public money to broadcast companies also takes away independence. If he had been more positive about his proposal, he might have replied that an online cultural aggregator doesn't preclude science content and could involve the UK's many science museums, foundations and communication bodies in its creation.
Baroness Lola Young raised the question of access and diversity. She referred to Bazalgette's notion that the 'three Nicks', the directors of the Royal Opera House, the Tate and the National, can be supported to create public service media, asking 'where is the space for the smaller voices who can't find the space?' Bazalgette felt that his vision was about real plurality that could be afforded by creating a much more open field that supports smaller voices to find better channels and funding for their work.
Louisa Bolch asked at least twice where the money would come from for all these organisations, as the cost of making culture to broadcast is so great. Her question wasn't directly answered, but Bazalgette had already mentioned some pretty large sums of money e.g. £160 million, and made a few suggestions on where the money could come from. What he could have said was that cultural content doesn't have to be so expensive if you support smaller organisations and individuals to create it, those who can be more ingenious on smaller budgets. It is possible to crowdsource good quality content. Also, there is an enormous amount of cultural content which could be more affordably generated by the clever digital curation of cultural collections e.g. film and theatre archives.
The ex-arts editor from C5 said that Andy Burnham doesn't address radical ideas about digital strategy and asked if there is a more softly-softly way to build on existing systems of funding to create and distribute culture more broadly?
Bazalgette said that the BBC will be forced by necessity to convert to an approach in which they really partner with others and don't crush them in doing so. He reported that C4 has 'stitched up' with Andy Burnham a list of public services they can offer in exchange for public funding, but feels that C4 has no special right to this arrangement and that all kinds of organisations could do it.
I suggested that Bazalgette should look beyond the Arts sector & ACE to collaborate on his public service search vision with the cultural collections sector, where there are people dealing with questions of aggregating cultural content online through strategic projects led by MLA, Culture 24, museum directors and others (and not just individual organisations like Tate). Louisa Bolch dismissed this as 'MLA TV' with a laugh, but John Newbigin, chair of Culture 24, supported my suggestion. He said that although the cultural sector is tiny, economically, compared to TV there are synergistic ecologies that could reap great benefits, with the broadcasters acting as aggregators and nurturers of creativity, opening up their archives and cuttings to others, for example.
I hope this discussion can continue, and involve the cultural sector as they collaboratively pursue a strategy for digital innovation, and isn't just dismissed as Bazalgette's silly Boggle idea as the DCMS sew up public service broadcast by the end of January.
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Posted
1 month ago
The Labour Government has put in place countless policies and funded projects to tackle the deprivations faced by children and young people living in poverty. They cannot be accused of not caring about this issue. However, the gap between rich and poor is worse now than it was when they came to power in 1997, and is as bad as it was in 1961. 1.4 million children in the UK now live in severe poverty, which means that their families survive on an average of £19 a day. Meanwhile, the middle classes are growing a fat upper layer, with more families whose lives are over-rich with 'accomplishment classes', long-haul holidays and home extensions to accommodate their cupboards stuffed full of...stuff. The growth of the financial industry against the decline of more traditional industry has led to some people growing much richer while others grow poorer. Labour's flagship policies of tax credits and the minimum wage are welcome but do not go far enough without a reform of taxation. The Labour target of halving child poverty by 2010 looks even more impossible with the threat of recession.
Many of these initiatives have affected education and culture. Teachers and cultural educators have been expected to measure outcomes based on the economic (and related) wellbeing of children and their communities. Whilst many of us have been very happy to try hard to engage disadvantaged children and to pay more attention to their needs, it has not always been easy to focus on the delivery of good education and cultural services in this context. Teachers are expected to deliver educational excellence (with enormous pressures on them if they fail), and in order to do this they feel pressured to save children from the effects of deprivation that make success at school so difficult. But saving children from hunger, stress, abuse and so on are impossible while these inequalities remain and without more pastoral support in schools. Many of these initiatives are too partial, patchy, bureacratic and not always reaching those most in need. In the cultural sector, despite the Government's requirement that museums, arts agencies and libraries turn their attention to disadvantaged audiences, it is precisely those organisations who focus attention on the poorest communities, often by being located in them, that are being threatened with budget cuts and closures. The Livesey Museum for Children is one example, closed by Southwark this year despite the Museum's work with many single-parent families through Sure Start, with its Youth Council, with schools and the wider community in what is one of the most severely deprived parts of London. As local authorities cut non-discretionary services, these museums and arts organisations will now be looking towards charities, many whose incomes depend on share prices, and on corporate sponsors, many who will be reducing their CSR budgets.
Hopefully the financial crash will lead the Government to look at more radical approaches to inequality before they lose the next election to a party that is hardly likely to consider higher taxes and stricter controls on the financial sector.
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Posted
1 month ago
We went to Drawing on Life, the launch of the Big Draw 2009, at the weekend. This year's drawing festival took place at the Wellcome Institute and University College London. The theme was 'life': Biology, bodies, health, wellbeing, evolution etc. Quite a few of the sessions were booked up, so we just wandered around the open access activities, and there was still too much to do. We had hoped to do life drawing. My 8 year old has expressed interest in doing life drawing, as her dad has done so much of it, but the opportunities for children to draw from nude models are pretty limited! However, the life drawing workshops were fully booked from the get-go, so that was out. Interesting that the most traditional activity in a festival full of visual experiment was so popular.
The highlights were:
- Drawing whilst singers made extraordinary sounds in response to your marks - and controlling someone's voice is quite strange.
- Making votive objects from wax and sheet metal to add to a shrine. Rather than your sick bits you were asked to make a votive of the body part you most appreciate. I'm kind of proud (I think) that my daughter made a bottom. I guess if you didn't have one...
- Wandering round the UCL building, a hive of activity, drawing from animal skeletons and just drawing whatever you liked on a vast sheet of paper.
- Talking to Finlay Taylor, an artist who lets snails make drawings in books - The Origin of Species and other Darwin-related books.
- The biggest highlight of all, the Skeletons exhibition, too rapt to draw, just looking and talking about growth, disease, decay, bones, mortality, change, time...
Before the event we got warmed up by playing with the digital drawing games on the website, especially Sketch Swap. This is quite addictive, as every time you submit a drawing, you get one back from another player. The only thing we don't like about it is the predominance of Japanese Manga big-eyed characters in the drawings you get back. The best manga is great, but stereotyped monomaniac conventionality is not.
We do a lot of drawing in our family. We've invented at least 90 drawing games or collaborative drawing challenges, still needing to be taken to a publisher! As a result, my daughter feels entirely comfortable with drawing (or visual communication of any kind) and isn't suffering from the 'getting it right' complex that sets in for most 7 year olds. I'm convinced that primary schools neglect visual communication, causing this complex. Drawing only happens in Art & Design, timetabled for short sessions once a week or less, and only when the activity IS drawing. Occasionally, children might be allowed to add an illustration if they finish their written work early. If we accept that education is about enquiry into the world, and creating new ideas to affect the world, rather than learning to read, write and add up, then drawing and visualisation have a major role to play in this. It should be happening as often as children open their mouths to speak or put pen to paper to write.
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Posted
1 month ago
I'm niggled by this report about a teacher, parent & children survey that will feed into the Rose review of the Primary Curriculum. It may be that the reporting is oversimplifying, but it seems to me that the survey is too unsubtle. Apparently, stakeholder views suggest that RE, geography, design technology and history should shift to make room for guidance on sex, drugs and relationships, and personal development in general. Why should we always think in terms of room in the curriculum? Why do we always approach curriculum change as shuffling factoids like packs of cards? Why don't we think about how content is taught and explored, so that it can be more powerfully and meaningfully delivered?
The Primary Curriculum currently delivers detailed fragments of relatively unconnected subject content. The school day skips around topics, from Dr Barnardos to electricity circuits to spelling tests, with no connections made between them. The process of planning schemes of work is about 'covering content' rather than developing children to engage with the world. The learning opportunities do not give enough agency for children to use what they have learned to help solve problems for their schools, communities or the wider world. If children need 'personal development', it should be about their agency to affect the world, not just guidance on how to protect themselves from the risks of violence and sexual disease. The greatest risk they face is coming from the methane chimneys shooting out of the melting Arctic, against which the risk of chlamydia pales into insignificance.
It's 10 years since the publication of the Crick report into Citizenship, which introduced it as a subject in the National Curriculum. The trouble Citizenship has faced in gaining acceptance is that it isn't a discipline but is a radical approach to how pupils can be treated as thinking individuals who can make a contribution to their world. The next ten years should see Citizenship becoming an essential dimension across the curriculum, without losing the distinctive nature of its contribution to education. It offers the key to a more powerful and meaningful delivery of the National Curriculum in England, one that should look to Scotland for their simpler and more coherent approach to subjects.
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Posted
2 months ago
Thanks to a new comment on my post about Rebecca Birch's Happisburgh work, I've been thinking again about the value and limitations of photography for capturing or re-evoking a place or culture as it passes. Where photographs alone provide highly textured fragments, evocative in themselves, they need context and animation. Rebecca's performance is an integration of drawing and conversation, an effective way of visualising ideas and physical phenomena, with visual and verbal language weaving together each doing their job, remaking a landscape dynamically between two people, witness and questioner. The shape of this imagined landscape shifts and grows with new knowledge, linking together the clear fragments, the mental snaps. This thought coincided within minutes with three other things entering my inbox:
- Freeze Frame: National Maritime Museum's set of old photos of Inuit and Arctic exploration on Flickr Commons.
- Rebecca's exhibition of her new work, Great Northern, a film she made while resident in the northernmost town in the Canadian Arctic. This town is about to undergo radical expansion as a new pipe will feed gas to Edmonton.
- In my mental inbox, reading the section on the Arctic in Jay Griffith's Wild.
I was also working on a paper I will be giving at a conference on Digital Archiving, about recontextualisation of cultural artefacts, and how this has changed with the shift from analogue to digital curating. Recontextualisation is linked in some ways to the repatriation of cultural property and to an ameloriative restoration of lost ways of knowing. These photographs of Inuit could simply be contextualised with a geotag and a date, but if we open our eyes to the importance of the Arctic for our planet and rapid changes taking place there, these photos cry out for far richer contextualisation.
The images of Inuit are interspersed with photos of the explorers and their ships, showing us the context in which these people were seen. The photographs are crackled and smeared around the edges, as if the lens we look through is frozen, reminding us that we are seeing through a device to bring us these images from such a forbidding place. We see, and are struck by, the extraordinary Queen Amidala hairstyles of the Inuit women, surprisingly exotic and decorative. What we don't see is what they are saying and what they know about their landscape.
One valuable aspect of Flickr Commons is that comments and tags are invited from anybody, hopefully increasing the demotic knowledge about the images and their context. I wonder what knowledge can meaningfully be appended to these images, particularly whether Inuit or people with expertise about the Inuit and the Arctic will engage with them. We are free to write whatever we like and most comments will be simple appreciations, emotional responses and perhaps questions, but other Flickr Commons sets added earlier have generated responses that do add to curators' knowledge.
I also wonder about the gap between what collections curators need to know and what 'we' (everyone) needs to know about the Arctic, how people used to live in it, how they should continue to live in it, what its future will be and what will be the impact around the planet. It has become a cliche and joke that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. Griffiths describes how essential for survival are these precise terms for the many features and changes in their landscape. However, children are not taught these words at school. "As the words for ice and snow are melting away with each elder's death, so the knowledge they contain is melting...The elders are word-artists of a melting world." Is it possible to help the Inuit retain their knowledge or will it inevitably go as the ice melts and Arctic people survive instead on supporting the oil industry (if they are able to)? If the many words for snow are recorded in some crystalline digital repository, such as Bob Geldof's Dictionary of Man, will they ever be taken out and used again in their rightful context, or only in nostalgic novels and films that show us what we have lost?
Incidentally, the National Maritime Museum website does have a good range of resources that provides context to the Arctic photos. This one, devised and written by Flow for the NMM, about the North West Passage provides up to date context about global warming and changes to the Arctic map.
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Posted
2 months ago
Another Southwark-based museum is threatened with closure, this time the London Fire Brigade Museum. Val Shawcross was chair of the London Fire & Emergency Planning Authority for 8 years, and although the Museum didn't get a lot of money throughout this period, it survived and did great work with schools, elders and ex-firefighters. It has rich collections to support learning and reminiscence of the Blitz in particular and 20th Century London history in general, including paintings and 300,000 important photographs. Val Shawcross is a strong supporter of museums and their educational work and has been a really marvellous help to the Friends of the Livesey Museum for Children. Now, Tory Cllr Brian Coleman is the new chair and he has outlined plans to cut the LFB, with the Museum at the top of the list. This article gives an insight into the 'thinking' that informs decisions to cut museums that have been underfunded.
He says 'we shook the cobwebs off the door as we opened it', suggesting that nobody visits the Museum. One supporter wrote to him in protest and received a curt response saying that the Museum is stuck in the 50's and has no disabled access so it doesn't deserve to stay open. Despite describing it in such paltrifying terms he also calls it an indulgence. He seems to think that the Museum (or collection) should not stay in such a luxurious historic building near to the tourist hub of Bankside, yet that the Museum doesn't attract visitors because it is in the wrong place. There is no other place for the collections to go: The Museum of London can't take in 7 fire engines and all the rest, and if they can't, who can? Coleman wasn't suggesting "that we shove the stuff on eBay or whatever", but if there is no alternative home that is the equivalent of what will happen. This is the lead museum in the Subject Specialist Network for collections relating to fire services. The network's collaborative work would surely come to an end if the LFB Museum is closed. The annual operating budget at £84k is one of the smallest in the sector I have ever come across. The cost of dealing with the distribution of the collection, redundancy payments, the sale or repurposing of the building, the reputation damage, the alternative provision of its services and so on needs to be factored in. Above and beyond these pragmatic considerations, the crucial factor is that the Museum provides a place for collective memory and celebration of the role of the Fire Brigade in London, in particular during the wars. To support the Museum sign the petition here.
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Posted
2 months ago
The links on my blog posts are looking a little varied these days. That's because I've started using Apture to make it much easier to link to more varied content and to make the linked content more interactive within my webpages. You can embed media such as videos or photos so that you don't need to import and store media in your blog's library. When you're reading, because an Apture weblink comes up within my website you can skim it in a small window rather than leaving my site. Also, when I'm editing and adding links, I don't need to open lots of new browser tabs to source them. It isn't perfect, or rather, I'm not yet a perfect user. I would like del.icio.us to be one of the options in the media hub. The auto function, where it applies Apture to all your links automatically, is very patchy. If you want to change the colour of your linked text it annuls the link. But, apart from those quibbles, I think it's really exciting.
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2 months ago
Mark, my co-director of Flow Associates, returned from the BA Festival of Science saying that Professor Michael Reiss, the education director for the Royal Society, had said some really sensible things about religion and science. He had said teachers should be able to respond to questions from students about creationism and not prohibit critical talk about key issues in science. Nothing shocking about that, I thought, considering the importance of science literacy in the new curriculum. I did wonder how Reiss could negotiate his own active Christianity alongside his hard-science belief in evolution, but I accept that it is entirely normal for people to fully take on some aspects of a faith tradition whilst rejecting some of its more archaic tenets. Personally I couldn't do that, and can only identify with an ecological mindset as its more archaic tenets of living in harmony with nature seem to me entirely rational, but I tolerate the fact that others live with contradiction.
Just as I was musing on this I saw a Guardian report from the Festival stating that Reiss had said creationism should be 'taught' in schools, fanning the whiff of a scandal. Then, today's Observer reported that Reiss' 'Creationism call divides Royal Society' and that Nobel laureates Sir Harry Kroto and other big-hitters in the Royal Society are calling for his resignation. In the same paper was an opinion piece against Reiss from Robin McKie, 'Our scientists must nail the creationists'. McKie sniffs at Reiss' claims that he was misquoted and does not engage with the core issue Reiss was dealing with, that is, the place of science ethics in the curriculum and the world-views of pupils from different cultures. None of the reports consider the distinction between 'teaching' and 'exploring' a subject. They only voiced assertions that creationism has no place in 'school laboratories', only in Religious Education. This way of thinking assumes that school learning actually goes against the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment and enquiry. It assumes that young minds can only be empty vessels into which proven facts, canonical within each discipline, can be poured. The Guardian did give Reiss space on its blog to set out his stall, in 'Students must be allowed to raise doubts about evolution'. If I was in his situation I might have said quite a bit more. For example, what he could say is that it is now the legal right of children to express their views and to request any information that they wish for. If all teachers foster a culture of questioning, discourage dogma and ensure that enough time is spent exploring the richness of biodiversity as evidence of evolution, it should not be necessary to ban discussion of different world views. It is more likely that open-minded discussion of creationism will take place in the science curriculum because it is now essential that teachers encourage debate of science and society. If it is relegated to Religious Education, it will be treated as a valid perspective with no proper exploration of the scientific evidence against it. National Curriculum Religious Education, however open-minded many of its teachers may be, is structured according to a heirarchy which privileges Christianity and the other 'beliefs of the book', which makes rigid taxonomical distinctions between interconnected world views and which will not accept Humanism within its discourse, as evidenced here: 'Humanists sue as exam agency blocks GCSE'.
The latest news in 'Professor steps down over Creationism row' is that Reiss has resigned.
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2 months ago
I popped into the
Natural History Museum to catch the exhibition about their
Darwin's Canopy commission. With
Darwin 2009 coming up, the Museum wants to replace the painted ceiling in its vast entrance hall with a contemporary work inspired by Darwin. They have commissioned proposals from a number of artists, including Mark Wallinger, Christine Borland, Richard Wentworth, Rachel Whiteread and so on. The usual YBA suspects, though thankfully not Tracey Emin. The exhibition is big and considerate for the visitor, with well-designed sections about Darwin, videos about the architecture of the museum and the commissioning process, a reading section, volunteer interpreters and 'trees' for you to pin your thoughts on.
Some of the canopy proposals are interesting and well produced. I liked United Visual Artists evolving computer drawings made into 3D forms that would cover the ceiling like gorgeously erupting foliate growths. I thought Rachel Whiteread's animal footprints were uncharacteristically sweet, as if some animals had been padding around on the ceiling. I was entirely underwhelmed, though I usually like his work, by Mark Wallinger's scroll of illegibly dense and seemingly random words. (I think I would have been more engaged if I hadn't been there with a dyslexic who was immediately repulsed.)
The winning proposal was by Tania Kovats, for a giant cross-section of a single tree stretched across the grid formation of the canopy. I love trees (almost more than anything else in nature). I love the symbolism of the tree of knowledge. However, I was fairly unimpressed by the way this proposal was presented and found it hard to visualise how it would work in the space and how it would be materialised. Before leaving I took a good look at the current canopy paintings. They mostly show trees and bushes, and William Morris-like tesselated patterns of flowers. The gilding, muted colours and the Victorian styling are beautifully appropriate to the Gothic architecture. It may be less striking than a single tree, but it provides a much better evocation of the context in which Darwin was working: The 19th century institutionalisation and 'boxing up' of knowledge, the encroaching secularism and backlash against it, the use of sacred architectural forms to edify and formalise new scientific knowledge. Partly because of this foyer the Museum is called a 'cathedral of nature'.
The only publicity I've seen for this exhibition and commission in general was this critical piece
'Why don't art and science mix?' by Jonathon Jones in his Guardian blog. He writes that the artists have trivialised the science, simply used ideas as springboards for their own indulgences, and questions whether this art does anything to make us think about evolutionary science. It would be an interesting challenge to carry on this commissioning process by opening it up to public participation, but using virtual space to show the ideas. How can we improve on the artists' proposals and extend scientific and philosophical understanding too?
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2 months ago
I'm reading Jay Griffiths'
Wild: An Elemental Journey. At last. What took me so long? It is proof that we still need literature in our multimedia culture. Maybe Griffiths would be just as poetic and say just as much as in this book if she had been commissioned to make a TV programme like
Bruce Parry's Tribe. But I doubt it because she would have been subject to the commissioners, the editors, the whole TV business that doesn't truly let authorship flourish. I loved Tribe but it had only a fraction of the politics, the passion, the contextual richness and the poetry of Wild.
Griffiths says 'there is something in me that detests a wall. Or a fence, reservation or golf course. That detests the tepid world of net curtains and the dulled televisual torpor of mediated living, screened experience in two senses, both life lived via screens and life itself screened out.'
Screens show us the world. We are grabbing more images of the world, and creating more stories and conceptual systems with them, than ever before. I would hope that screens, i.e. wired multi-platform multi-media, can offer us a way to more fully and sensitively understand the world as it really is. The images and the voices of travellers and residents in the world provide the evidence. I believe in the potential of digital culture to raise awareness. However, we can all identify with that torpor of mediated living, the sense that the media is controlling the dull formulae for our narratives and restricting our agency to connect in the raw and to make real changes in the world.
There is another irony here. 'Wild' is literature. Griffiths is extraordinarily literate, thank goodness. She describes how her lust to travel was fed by the books that she couldn't reach on the high shelves as a child. But she also says 'Literacy is an epistemology of the built world, physically, in libraries in towns, but metaphorically too, the constructed artifice of our written culture, book-bound, which encourages our philosophies and values to move ever farther away from nature.' She is not against books or literacy. She means that we ignore and destroy the intelligence in nature, its wild language.
So, this is our challenge. How can literacy turn towards nature? How can our literature, in becoming more multimodal, immaterial and dialogic because of new technologies, give us more connection to the raw and the wild, in ways that will not further harm or exploit it, but the opposite?
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2 months ago
I went to the if:book group last night, to discuss the future of books and reading in the digital age. Chris Meade, ex director of the Booktrust and the Poetry Society, is now director of if:book London, the UK wing of the Institute for the Future of the Book, founded by Bob Stein in New York.
He opened by wondering if 'this is it?' Has the era of digital books finally arrived? He described how enraged some people are at the prospect, yet he reminds them that they read on a screen all day (don't we all?). Is the e-reader (e.g. the Kindle) really that exciting, more than a paper book? We've become used to mixed media and interactivity on our computers & mobiles, which are allowing new forms of creative reading and writing, so is this going to cut it with our changing expectations?
First the publishers (Random House and Pan Macmillan) talked about the market potential of e-readers. From a commercial perspective, they really need to know if people will pay proper money for e-books. There have been strong sales of e-readers, more than i-pods in their first year, but the potential market is not as great as for music MP3's. As the e-reader is currently fairly limited in interactivity and features, there is great potential to evolve the devices as sales improve, and also to use the web (e.g. where e-books are downloaded) to increase interactivity and creativity, for example with games, blogs or discussions around extracts. I look forward to seeing a wired e-reader, with each page or paragraph having its own URL, mashed-up with Twitter to enable 'social marginalia'. Maybe?
Kate Pullinger spoke from a writer's perspective. She feels disappointed by the e-readers, even though she is annoyed by the media exaggerating that 'this is the end of books'. She embraces the digital, but feels that increasingly commercial book publishing is narrowing the range of literature at the same time that we are seeing a great expansion of possibilities for literature offered by new media. She asked: Where is the exciting multimedia project that is exploring new content for e-readers? What a great challenge!
Naomi Alderman, novelist and ARG designer, enthused about her Phillip's Iliad, an e-reader that you can write marginalia and notes pages on, and also connects to the internet. She wants to see writers be more proactive and play with content for digital media, and also extend commercial practice by being 'The Arctic Monkeys of literature'. Her challenge is also to publishers to take a more dynamic approach.
Before we all got too thirsty for a drink, a few other things were discussed:
Chris Meade mentioned a very exciting project called Songs of Imagination and Digitisation. It asks 'If William Blake was alive today what would he use?'
He also mentioned a report he has delivered for ACE, called Read:Write about digital reading and writing.
I inserted the dimension of cultural collections, in that publishers and writers were not the only people responsible for producing and innovating with digital literature. There is a 3,000 year old heritage of digital texts that are out of copyright, being digitised en masse by Google and until recently by Microsoft. We have only scratched the surface of the creative possibilities of presenting and interpreting those texts. For example, see my idea above for 'digital marginalia', and I was also fascinated to meet Tim Regan from Microsoft who is exploring ways of visualising the structures of books, i.e. the plot, themes and characters.
Update: A great piece in the Independent on this subject: Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age?
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2 months ago
Back in April I wrote a
post about the Ofcom report which criticised museums' web offerings. Its commissioner, Tom Loosemore, later spoke at the
UK Museums and the Web conference saying that museums should follow the lead of Tate and
see themselves much more as media organisations.
(Whenever I write about museums, this is shorthand for museums, galleries, archives and heritage libraries.)
Ross Dawson, an Australian commentator, said in
a piece on the future of museums that "it struck me that museums are basically media organizations, providing and editing (i.e. curating) content". Someone from a media background may not be very affected by being struck this way, but the 'striking' does affect museums and archives because they have so resolutely defined themselves as organisations for collecting, caring about and understanding objects. Public programming revolves around and emerges from the collections and research about them, and themes are often chosen in order to raise profile and further funds for that work. So, it's a semi-shift and therefore there is tension. (Incidentally, I've noted a change in the use of the term 'curating' along with this semi-shift: From meaning 'caring for collections' to 'programming interpretation'. Notice Dawson's use of the term.) Even if we need to rethink the entire politics of collecting in such a way that we are almost 'uncollecting' (unlocking our stores, randomising or changing taxonomies, returning collections to original ownership etc) we still have duties of care for these objects and our traditional tasks and practices remain the most practical.
In response to Dawson, Angelina Russo says the notion of museum as media organisation has been with us a long time but that she despairs of museums considering the role of technology as central to museum communication. I agree with her that: "The museum sector would do well to move away from a sense of its own importance to demonstrating the
true value it can bring to lives. As cultural networks proliferate, the museum is ideally placed to lead discussion and debate, to create participatory media and develop the role of the active cultural participant."
Seb Chan (who I am kicking myself not to be meeting today as he is leading a seminar in London) also deals with the museum as media organisation
here. He implies that this does not mean museums learning the ways of the old media, rather that because of blurring definitions between types of media and types of cultural collection, both media and cultural collections organisations need to develop new skills. In particular, he points to skills in facilitating interpretation not just within your own channels or sites but out there where people are congregating.
Looked at one way, it is easy to agree with all this. Yes, we should be engaging and communicating as widely and innovatively as possible. But there is something too that rankles about being told to become a media organisation (apart from the 'being told' bit).
Partly, it's about resources. Mal Booth's
long comment in response to Seb on Museum 3.0 makes this pretty clear. He says "we can never really hope to compete with the huge media empires, it simply isn't feasible. We are not Newscorp, Disneyland, Nickelodeon or Fairfax. They might be useful models for us to mimic on a much smaller scale, but we don't have a stack of journalists sitting around waiting to engage in online conversations. Nor do we have the media expertise and savvy of the BBC or the ABC. In reality, most museums are pretty stretched just developing and caring for their collections, researching and describing them adequately, providing access to them and curating exhibitions that might interest the public."
Partly, it's about our perceptions of what 'media' means. Museum discourses revolve around the twin poles of 'collections' and 'education'. The two have become more connected in many organisations but even they remain twins. Museum education has expanded its range to include outreach, audience development, participation, exhibition interpretation, access and creative projects, more often defined as 'learning'. The distinction of museum learning is that it involves conversations and engagement between real people in real places, not lecturing or pushing out knowledge. Our experience of the media, traditionally, is that it involves lecturing or pushing out knowledge. Of course, this is changing with the internet but on the whole, 'media' still connotes to us a certain distance between content provider and audience. Perhaps museum learning professionals have a great deal to teach 'the media' about dialogic engagement, as we become the media or become more like the media.
Partly, it's about the cultures in which we operate. We could form vast consortia of cultural collections in order to pool resources and collaborate to create media channels. But, cultural organisations have been primarily intent on establishing their unique brands, engaging with their specific localities and specialist communities and developing their buildings to improve the visit experience. Modernisation has meant learning how to be competitive.
However, there are signs that this is changing in the UK. The National Collections Online Feasibility Study that we have just undertaken for national museums and Culture 24, and the forthcoming digital strategy for the MLA sector, are both asking: What will happen if we collaborate? How can we reach more audiences more efficiently by sharing and repurposing our infrastructure? How can under-resourced organisations become curators of media, and increase resources for their collections work too, by co-creating and sharing those media channels? The digital strategy is aiming to support these developments through guidance and working alongside collaborative initiatives.
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2 months ago
The Guardian (and perhaps other press?) has been jumping up and down about the 'banning' of Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Education for Leisure' from the GCSE English syllabus. It has run at least 6
articles on the topic. Why such a fuss? It is symptomatic of a culture of prohibition, which does seem to be coming upon us, perhaps creeping across from the US where in some states so many books are being banned from schools that it wouldn't be a surprise if they decided to shut those darned dangerous libraries altogether. For evidence of this mindset look at the
list of books, including Shakespeare, that Sarah Palin wanted to ban and forced a librarian to resign over it.
It also raises important questions about the role of art in education. Should art be made or used with the purpose of enabling exploration of sensitive issues? Is it true that if the poem is taught there would be less knife crime? Does this reduce, or on the other hand elevate, the role of literature?
The Duffy story developed such a profile it ended up with a front page
article with a poem by Duffy in response to the saga. The article just sneaked in the fact that AQA has said that schools were not being urged to pulp the anthology: "This is not about destroying books. They are allowed to continue teaching the poem, if they wish, but they are not going to be examined on it," it said.
So, it's not a ban but a removal from the official syllabus. It's quite hard to know what this means in reality. On the one hand, given what we know about the pressures on teachers, it's clear that pupils during the exam years are not going to explore texts in any depth which aren't on the syllabus. On the other hand, the changes in the National Curriculum would seem to be overtly encouraging teachers to make their own choices about curriculum content, to mix non-canonical material with requisite material, and to enable students to follow their own enquiries too. Ofsted really do want teachers to be less wedded to delivering curriculum content and more engaged with finding the best methods to support students to follow their own enquiries.
I'm not sure how much freedom there will be in English GCSE (let's assume not very much) but it does seem that there will be a very great change at A Level.
This article about the changes in the National Curriculum and 14-19 assessment says "Teachers of English Literature A-level will be free to choose any texts they like for pupils, which could include those recommended by breakfast TV couple Richard and Judy, the exam board OCR said."
This looks positive but it does raise two concerns: One is that many teachers must be worried about how their choices will relate to their exam results. Will they blamed if they made the wrong text choices and their students don't do so well? Teachers already feel too much responsibility for their students' results.
The other is that we can't assume that these freedoms issued from the QCA and exam boards will necessarily mean a wider range of texts, topics and viewpoints being taught. I'm thinking specifically of the increase of faith schools and the freedoms accorded to the sponsors of new Academies to influence the ethos of their schools.
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2 months ago
I went to Cardiff last week to visit the
Ffotogallery to meet their Education team because Flow is helping them expand their service into a pan-Wales agency. I was dead impressed. Their work reaches out to so many different audiences with such innovative and thoughtful practice. They showed me some great
projects they have delivered. They go way beyond the craft of photography to draw in and connect with other media and artforms, to help people look again and think more deeply about the world around them. For example,
ffoto:story did pilot projects in 3 primary schools to develop a free online resource for teachers in digital storytelling, connecting sound and image. They are about to advertise an opportunity to work with them in an exciting role that is developing new media work with communities and learners, so look out for it.
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2 months ago
I had a really interesting meeting today with an Ofsted inspector, Patricia Metham, who is conducting a study into creative learning in science. It involves going into 47 schools and talking to lots of experts, and the report will be published next November. Our discussion ranged around questions like:
Are the current modes of assessment stopping teachers from using creative approaches or is it just that they lack confidence and tools in using them?
What impact has Creative Partnerships had on creative learning in science, and what other initiatives are having an impact?
If the agenda of STEM and the National Science Learning Centres is basically to encourage young people to become scientists, how is that supported by creative approaches, or is that agenda at odds with one that seeks to develop creative and critical skills in general?
If students are allowed to follow their own paths of enquiry, how can teachers structure projects to ensure that curriculum content is still delivered?
Is it a false and unhelpful dichotomy to oppose a creative approach with a hard science approach? Are we conflating many kinds of practice under the heading of 'creative' which can include imagination, enquiry-based learning, cross-curricularity, working with artists, systematic thinking, using cultural stimuli, producing creative outcomes, which can include very rigorous work?
This article provides some context to this issue. I look forward to reading the report.
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2 months ago
On Saturday 6th September the charity
Novas Scarman will present its proposal to the Friends of the Livesey Museum for Children, and anybody interested, on how they intend to rescue and run the Museum. We're excited about this proposal and believe it is the most viable solution to maintaining the Museum in the building whilst keeping true to the legal requirements laid down by George Livesey in 1890 and also to the philosophy of creative learning that the Livesey has pioneered. Southwark Council are using the Community Council meetings across the borough in September to carry out their consultation on what we want for the future of the Livesey. We hope that lots of people will come to the meeting at the Ledbury Estate Tenants Hall, next to the Livesey, at 12 noon on Saturday to hear the proposals and have their say, so that they can be informed for the consultation process. Southwark still have to be convinced that Novas Scarman can sustain the Museum and manage the building so we still need as much support as possible, including new members. See http://liveseyfriends.wordpress.com for joining information.
Update: Following the meeting, it's really clear that the joint Novas Scarman/Friends proposal is the only viable option for saving the Livesey. The Friends alone just could not raise the funds and take the risk, but Novas Scarman have the capacity and track record to do it with us. If the Council's consultation results in their view that there is no support for the Novas Scarman/Friends proposal, they will probably manage to persuade the Charity Commission that they should sell off the Museum. Supporters need to attend the Peckham, Camberwell and Rotherhithe Community Council meetings over the next days and weeks and make their views heard.
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3 months ago
I've been thinking about the landscape today. I grew up in the Norfolk countryside, one of those children of the safer olden days who was let out from a young age, unaccompanied by adults, us riding bikes many miles from home. A few years later, my mum was desperately upset when a boy in her class (she was a teacher) was murdered by a man while he was out playing on his bike. If that had happened before our pre-teens her attitude to our freedom may have been different. This incident was one of several that reminded us, although we always knew it, that the rural idyll was not inviolable. Another incident was the death from cancer of a local farmworker caused by long hours spraying pesticides. Despite the fact that I grew up in the English county that is probably the most industrialised in its agriculture, with its vast fields and machines and its many souring incidents, I still have a deep nostalgia for the English landscape and a slight sense that it can possibly be recovered, as it was. I think this may be influenced by the fact that my family is very aware of artistic representations of the landscape as it was. As it was, meaning, before the Second War when farmers were encouraged and forced to double productivity.
I've just enjoyed watching
Andrew Marr's Britain from Above programme, which uses archive film, aerial images, contemporary data mapping and historic maps to present an overview of Britain as a system - past, present, future; economic, social, environmental. It's fascinating, if rather Reithian in its style (Marr's voice merges seamlessly with the clipped tones of the BBC Ancients in the archive clips). Tonight's programme was about East Anglia, especially West Norfolk, where the fields are bigger and flatter than anywhere else. I felt rather dismayed at the neutral Reithian quality in Marr's voice when he said that more new towns would cover the fields, and more industry, and with yet more industry would come more yet more new towns.
These nostalgic and perhaps romantic thoughts about landscape have been intensified by walking round Shoreham today, in search of the idyllic pastoral visions of
Samuel Palmer. I wanted to know if those close, safe and mystical orchards and woods really existed as in his prints and paintings. Well, I don't know if you can see any traces of it in my
photos. Who knows, of course, if his paintings of Shoreham were in any sense realistic - of course, they probably weren't. He never showed the hard work of the rural life. But, considering how close Shoreham is to London, it does represent an idyll of sorts. And when you add the layer of nostalgia that Palmer's association brings, which alerts you to the gnarlier trees and the toytown cottages, it does seem to be patch of England as it was.
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3 months ago
I was intending to post just about the Skeletons: London's Buried Bones
exhibition, at the Wellcome Collection gallery. I was simply going to comment in depth on its curation, which seems at first disappointingly simplistic, compared to previous Wellcome extravaganzas. It is elegaic, very like a graveyard, in that it consists of almost nothing more than a host of skeletons in glass cases, lined up in rows, toes all pointing the same way. Like visiting a graveyard, the exhibition rewards you by a monotonous reading of each epitaph in turn - name, date of death, cause of death...but unlike normal gravestones the cause of death is provided in full medical detail. This detail is not as dry as the bones, as it seems at first, but becomes fascinating as you delve into the exhibition. Also unlike a graveyard, you can actually see the bones, see the evidence with your eyes. You can almost draw lines from the label to the fissures and pitted scars on these bones. You see that medical knowledge is not so very arcane but is a system for describing what can be very traumatic damage to the body. You may imagine that disease and the pressures of life affect the flesh but not the bones as much as all that. However, many of these bones are ravaged.
So, I was going to write about the curation of this exhibition, how it is a collaboration between the Museum of London and the Wellcome Trust, combining medical and archaeological knowledge almost seamlessly, how it includes the trademark curatorial feature of Wellcome exhibitions of contemporary art in with historic medical items. In this case, the art is large photographs of the sites today where these bones were found, many no longer visibly burial grounds but lumbered over by blocks of flats and offices. They make visible the fact that our city is built on skeletons, or on top of the lives and deaths of millions of Londoners.
I was going to write only about that, but then I skipped through the Guardian today and saw
this piece about Jamie Livingston who decided in 1979 to take one polaroid every day of his life. The photos continued without fail until he died of a brain tumour on his 41st birthday in 1997. This gave me pause because today is my 41st birthday. My 40th passed almost unnoticed but my 41st has really made me think about age, achievement and urgency, about the remaining days and what remains of our days past. The newspapers have been fuller than ever before of stories about ice melting, bees dying and needing to prepare for extinction, making us wonder what the future will hold and what we have to do now as it comes upon us. How much should I just carry on as normal? How much do the details of my life matter? How much will taking photographs and making art achieve in the face of all this? Will my life begin at 41, just as Jamie Livingston's ended? Do you achieve more if you know life is threatened, or not?
He didn't know he was going to die, not until his last year perhaps. There is one photo that shows a massive operation scar across his head, visible evidence in his skeleton of the fact of either impending death or a great effort to survive, whichever fact you take it to be. But many photos follow that show him living at home, getting married, being with friends, carrying on, that is until they don't carry on any more. The photographs could almost be seen as going back in time from that point, once you know about his death, a daily record of each day lived until it ended. There is a close connection between photography and therapy, or it could be said that photography is a kind of mania to hold on to life as it passes, for example, as seen in the work of W Eugene Smith who obsessively recorded New York as he gradually lost his sanity. Even though I was wondering about the validity of photography (does it help or change anything?), seeing these daily polaroids made me even more want to record what I love and discover more unloved things that could become loved through being photographed. So, I went out with my camera and took some
photos...
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3 months ago
While I take an unearned but muggy-August-Friday-ish break from writing a short film about a Concrete artist whose paintings visualise mathematical ideas, here are a few thoughts about interpreting the meanings intended by artists. This
article by Tom Lubbock got me thinking about how much and whether artists can be said to investigate an idea. He criticises the Tate's interpretive text for Martin Creed's Work No. 850, which is a concrete and systematic artwork of a kind, but a pretty surprising kind as it involves runners sprinting up and down the gallery. He picks up on the assertion that the work 'investigates' the body, the ebb and flow of nature etc, saying that the work does have runners and so on, but it doesn't have themes or metaphors, and we shouldn't try to look for them within the work. He says we are held in a double bind, that we are told art's meanings are arbitrary, yet the interpretation provided always insists that there must be some meaning because without meaning it can't be commended or valued.
Then I was sent this
article responding, referring specifically to Lubbock's sniffy comments on the
Telectroscope. The experience was spoilt for Lubbock because the telectroscope was devised by an artist, Paul St George, whose website said that the work was about themes and ideas. This is an overreaction. There are some valid points to be made about the quality of museum & gallery interpretation but I'm not sure Lubbock's are subtle enough. Just as the 4IP article author (Tim Wright?) says, we've all experienced lazy and irritating labels, which make use of that tedious curator-speak which generalises far too much and assumes meanings that aren't intended. A better article would have analysed those types of writing and explored better alternative interpretations. Gallery and museum education work emphasises a more hermeneutic, active and social process of exploring meanings with audiences. Unfortunately there is still too much separation between curatorial label-writing and this kind of work. But still, that gap is an opportunity.
Blogs do provide some chance for people to discuss meanings of artworks seen in exhibitions. For example, Jonathon Jones
writes more positively about Work No. 850, provoking many comments from readers on its associations for them.
Oh, and if you can face reading even more on this theme of art and explanation, there are 50 responses to this
blog post by Jones!
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3 months ago
I've been so involved in projects to do with the web and digital culture lately, that the topic I consider to be the most important has been pushed to the background. It was seeing these two things recently that made me hear the ticking of the clock again: This
simple site counting down from 100 months - which is how long we have to solve the problem and
this warning from the DEFRA chief advisor that we need to plan for the devastating effects of a temperature increase by 4C. Then, I got all niggled at
the news that Boris Johnson had cancelled some green projects. Last year I published an article called Cultural Education for a Changed Planet in the Art and Climate Change edition of the
engage journal , which I recommend you get hold of as all the articles together make for an inspiring and important read. Here is my
article on its own.
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4 months ago
I have a new obsession. Thanks to
Fiona Romeo, Head of Digital Media at the National Maritime Museum and
Mike Ellis, of Eduserve, I have been shown new vistas of possibility with culture, learning and the web. This obsession is museum data combining or mash-ups and, in particular, use of visualisation tools.
For a quick intro to what this is all about in museums, see Mike's
video on Museum mash-ups.
My favourite outcome from Mike's workshop was Fiona's
visualisation of words from maritime memorials, using IBM's Many Eyes application.
Since then I've been digging around and learning for myself, for example on the
infosthetics blog, including playing quite a bit with http://wordle.net/
And I'm really interested to see how the Fidgt Visualiser is going to grow http://www.fidgt.com/visualize.
Now there's a chance for the cultural collections & heritage sectors to think about how their datasets could be put to creative public use using these tools. The Public Office Information have issued a competition called
Show Us a Better Way . There is a £20,000 prize fund for the best idea plus a willingness to help negotiate to release more data and support more innovations with public data. I'm thinking about ideas for using cultural collections and heritage venue data and have put out a call on the Museums Computer Group list to share ideas.
