Anneke Van De Kiefe
of the Amsterdam
Historisch Museum.
Conference attendees, rapt.
Kids at the Gallery
Belvedere with
gallery @ online.
Vienna
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a (digital) view
from vienna
by Janet Rossbach
"I know many of you expected to reach
pension age before having to worry about
the computer." This ironic statement opened
this summer's annual international
conference of museum educators in
Vienna, Austria. Hadwig Krautler, organizer
of the meeting (held by the Committee for
Education and Cultural Action [CECA]
division of the International Council of
Museums [ICOM]), meant the remark for a
laugh. But it also signified that there was
good reason the hosting Austrian CECA
chapter selected "On Site and Worldwide:
New Strategies for Communication in
Museums" as its conference topic; museum
educators need to learn about the computer
as a viable tool for museum education and
outreach not only for tomorrow but today.
Representatives from 40 countries attended
the annual five-day conference, including
people from Eastern Europe and distant non-European
countries such as Botswana, Japan, New
Zealand and Brazil. The United States was
surprisingly underrepresented with only
five attendees (among them were myself,
John Brooks of the Clark Art Institute and
Peter Samis of the San Francisco MOMA).
CECA provided simultaneous translation in
English, French and German for most of the
conference presentations, although English
was the most common language. (Very few
computer programming languages were
spoken.) The conference attendees were not
webmasters but instead were traditional
educators who wanted to discuss the future
of museum educational programming as
affected by new technology.
As the conference unfolded in several of
Vienna's beautiful museums and gallery
spaces, the 100-plus papers presented
reflected attitudes towards new media that
ranged from enthusiasm to ambivalence.
Titus Leber of the private French firm
Iconomics France represented the
technically savvy and was one of few
presenters that decidedly favored new media
as a viable form for curatorial and
intellectual expression. An advocate of the
"museum without walls," Leber described a
three-stage process that would lead to what
he called the creation of the future's
"electronic museum." The first stage,
exemplified by Corbis' attractive A Passion
For Art CD-ROM of the Barnes Collection,
consists of the reproduction of a museum's
collection in a visual and textual database
format. Images of artworks, text
descriptions and some audio clips are set
up along a time line or other
organizational structure to let viewers
browse through a collection and learn a
little about each artwork and artist. The
San Francisco Museum of Art, the Lonnstrom
Art Museum in Rauma, Finland, and the
Livruskammaren, in Stockholm, Sweden, all
displayed other strong examples of this
format.
According to Leber, the second stage
involves the recreation of actual
exhibition spaces in a 3-D virtual museum
space -- a photographically accurate space
through which a viewer could maneuver. As
an example of this stage, Leber presented
the Musee D'Orsay CD-ROM produced by
Montparnasse Multimedia and Reunion des
Musees Nationaux (RMN). This program,
developed with QuickTime VR, lets the
viewer move through a three-dimensional
reproduction of the museum, pan 360 degrees
around a special gallery, and zoom in on
artworks as if he or she were actually
there. Hans Petschar from the Austrian
National Library presented a similar
approach to the virtual museum experience
for his museum that was developed using the
Philips CDi platform, a format that is
popular in Europe though less so in the
U.S. In this program the viewer also
entered a graphically rendered 3-D virtual
environment of the museum and had the
ability to zoom around the library and
learn about its contents and Austrian
history. Both projects were impressive uses
of technology to bring as close a museum
experience possible to the home-user.
The final stage of Leber's theoretical
electronic museum-of-the-future -- and I
agree with his assertion that it is the
most relevant -- is the imaginary museum.
In this case, a curator devises exhibitions
in this imaginary space that would be
impossible in the real world -- for
instance, a recreation of the famous, and
long-past, 1894 Chicago World Exposition.
Leber maintains that the result would be a
particularly rich montage of historical
context, period music, architecture,
costume, art and more, utilizing
Eisenstein's cinematic technique in a new
media expression. In a way never before
possible, a curator could juxtapose images
and explore ideas and visual, textual and
audio relationships in a non-linear, non-
spatial format. Leber has been working on
an imaginary museum project of his own, but
had nothing available at the conference,
unfortunately. Leber's presentation took
place on the first day of the get together,
and was generally construed as the most
forward-looking presentation at the event.
There were, however, other quality projects
presented. Muriel Silberstein-Storfer from
the Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrated
her new CD-ROM, Look What I See. This
CD-ROM takes her famous parent/child
studio-art teaching class and sets it up
for the home user. Colorful and fun, it
cheerfully approaches the young user to
teach about shapes, colors and mood, and
presents examples of these art basics in
historic and contemporary paintings (not
all from the Metropolitan's collection). It
also has a section designed to help the
teacher and parent make the most of a
studio art experience for youngsters when
they are not in front of a computer.
The Amsterdam Historisch Museum displayed
another quality project for a museum kiosk.
Many museum educators are wary of the
physical impact kiosks can have within the
museum, impinging upon the museum visit or,
even worse, allowing people to only play
with the program and not look at the "real"
art. With this in mind, this kiosk program
focuses on only one single painting of a
lively Dutch city street scene from the
17th century. Presented in English and
Dutch, the program provides a menu of
options to learn more about the specific
painting and the history of the city and
its people. Interestingly, the kiosk was
programmed to run the CD-ROM for only eight
minutes in the museum (the full program is
said to take over an hour to view in its
entirety), so that users would step away
from the kiosk and actually look at the
painting hung right behind the kiosk.
Anneke Van De Kieft remarked that the
program was in use 75 percent of the time
the museum was open.
However, there were many worries and
misgivings about how new media would affect
museums and the museum experience. The
presentation by Michael Bockemuhl from the
Universitat Witten, Herdecke, Germany,
epitomized the fears and reservations of
the more conventionally minded museum
community. Bockemuhl titled his
presentation, "Can the museum dispense with
the original?" and instead of using a
traditional painting or sculpture to defend
his position, he set up a 15-inch black
square affixed to an easel. He asked the
audience to stare at the black square for
20 seconds -- to look at it intently,
without moving one's eyes. The conference
room became quiet as the audience eagerly
participated in this experiment. After
looking at the square for the allotted
time, Bockemuhl asked us to look at the
large white screen hanging behind the
stage. We all experienced the post-picture
reaction of seeing the negative image of
the black square on the white surface, and
audible reactions flew through the
audience. Bockemuhl exultantly exclaimed
"Art requires Time!" He continued that one
cannot replace an authentic art viewing
experience by passively staring at an
artwork on a computer screen. He explained
that the price of the immediacy of new
technology is the loss of the intimate
world of perception, and the removal of the
opportunity to develop a relationship with
an original work of art.
I do not think anyone disagreed with
Bockemuhl, and many attendees felt
comforted by his defense of the original
work of art. The perception that new media
will ruin the museum experience was one of
the strongest themes of a conference.
People questioned: Will people lose their
ability to look at a work of art? Will
people no longer visit museums if their
collections are available on CD-ROMs or
online? Will tomorrow's children (if not
already today's) learn to gather
information rather than hunt for meaning in
art? Will art educators be replaced by
cyberguides and CD-ROMs?
According to the reactions of the children
involved in the Austrian museum@online program
there is no reason to hold these fears. The
Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and
Cultural Affairs, the Austrian Culture
Service, and the Osterreichische Galerie
Belvedere jointly established this
significant program with six local Austrian
schools. The students, aged 12 to 19,
visited the Belvedere museum exhibition,
"Art at the Turn of the Century," with
their teachers and learned about several
masterpieces of Austrian art from its
collection (for example, Gustav Klimt's The
Kiss). The children returned to their
classrooms with a photo-CD of the
exhibition produced for the project and
during special afterschool classes created
original Web projects that reflected their
impressions of the artworks. What was so
significant about this project was that it
not only taught the kids about art history
and artistic techniques, it also taught
them to design a Web page, a new creative
process that is already becoming a valuable
artistic skill. The kids enjoyed the
project and were eager to demonstrate what
they learned. Technology was used to
explore art away from the original, but not
by any means to replace the original. It
was carefully positioned as an educational
tool, as a way to open up museums and their
collections, rather than serve as an
alternative to visiting museums and
substitute experiencing works of art in
person.
Despite the fact that many of the
conference attendees were not very familiar
with new media, as predicted by the opening
statement, most left the conference more
educated about the possible uses of new
media in the museum arena. Many were still
wary about the benefits of introducing
technology into their museums, not to
mention the financial burdens to accomplish
such ends. Nevertheless, most accepted the
fact that the computer is not going away,
children are already using the technology,
and that well-conceived programs can be
very stimulating. It was agreed that new
media programs cannot replace school visits
to museums, nor parents and museum
educators teaching children to take the
time to look, to analyze, to experience art
in its many forms. Yet the conference
accomplished its goal to challenge its
attendees to think about the new
communication strategies available for
museums, and the value of developing
relevant, thought-provoking projects, much
like Mr. Leber's imaginary museum, to serve
the audience they so much want to attract.
JANET ROSSBACH is a new media consultant
for the arts (e-mail: janetr1@mail.idt.net)
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