Peter SamisAssociate Curator Interpretation

Who has the responsibility for saying what we see?

QuickTime™ and aGIF decompressor

are needed to see this picture.Museums & the Web 2008 • 10 April 2008

Mashing up Museum, Artist, and VisitorVoices on-site and online for the exhibitionTake your time: Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, One-way colour tunnel, 2007

Olafur Eliasson: An art of perception

… and participation.

Work as phenomenon-maker:

perceptual stimulator & change agent

A Radical Stance:

“Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making use of that object.” 

A Radical Stance:

i.e., The Museum’s reality does not trump the visitor’s perspective.

“I of course don’t think my work is about my work. I think my work is about you.”

Enter…

The Challenge: to encourage visitors in their own critical process of self-observation

Inviting visitor voices—& experiences—to complement our own:

The Good News

• They came • They reacted• They wrote

• > 400 comments• > 200,000 page

views• average visitors

viewed 75% of pages

The Not-so-good News

• Comments represented only 2% of total blog visitors

• Greater interest in seeing how others responded than in contributing to the conversation

• All told, comments a bit of a muddle (à boire et à manger)

A sampling:

Visitor data sample: Grist for the Mill.

• understanding visitor motivations (entrance narratives)

• evaluating “Velcro effect” of various artworks

Your mobile expectations got people going…

Sometimes the discussion got hot & heavy:

(of course interspersed with other random comments in true blog style!)

What is the value of comments such as these?

What do YOU think?

What are the criteria of value for the comments?

… and by whose standard?• The Artist’s?• The Curator’s?• The Director’s?• The Marketing Department’s?

Few of these actually read the blog.

If the goal was to get people to write and reflect on their art experience, we may have succeeded.

(Getting them to think critically about their life is a taller order!)

But if the goal is to initiate a meaningful dialogue between visitors and the Museum, then we failed.

We said our piece in our multimedia voice(s). We opened the blog door to invite visitor voices in.…And we left.

They were the only ones in the room.

First generation art museum blog sites in the US were dominated by museum voices.

Next came art exhibition blog sites that started with authority voices and then opened the door to visitor comments.

What will be next?

Will we actually get in the room with our visitors and dialogue?

In fact, part of what we’re trying to do isbridge a cultural chasm.

Where experts & novices have meaningful things to say to each other.

And the lion lies down with the lamb? ;-)

Look at this perfect storm of pent-up comments:

294 comments within a day.Articulate, considered, impassioned.

And two weeks later:

On the other hand, is it enough to host a compilation of Me stories or does something else have to be at stake?

Some greater collective endeavor,some greater win?

The Eliasson project got us part way.

Nina Simon’s Hierarchy of Social Participation

But maybe it’s not just a blog that gets us there.

(cf.SFMOMA’s new Community Producer)

Nina Simon’s “Web 2.0 for Museum Professionals”

A social interaction that feels meaningful, rich and compelling to people inside and outside the museum.

Structured so that even staff want to return to it, learn from it.

And just where is “there,” anyway ?

Ideas?