week 7

Tasks

Research current themes, trends and moods relevant to your project requirements and goals. Post your findings on the Ideas Wall and evaluate your research in your blog.

Distill your research, write a positioning statement for your project strategy and post it in your blog.

Imagine three mood boards to contextualise your positioning statement. Post your mood board development on the Ideas Wall and outline the rationale behind your final outcome in your blog.

This is my first experience of a positioning statement, and I’m glad that we had a peer discussion to help learn how to construct one.

Research current themes, trends and moods relevant to your project requirements and goals. Post your findings on the Ideas Wall and evaluate your research in your blog.

Working with the Community and Peer Knowledge

Arts and cultural organisations have had their budgets consistently lowered (74% of arts organisations have been affected by public funding cuts) and so have been looking to extending their partnerships with their community to continue their mission. By bringing in enthusiasts, volunteers and local groups, institutions have the chance to save on staffing cost (sorry, cynicism creeping out here) whilst learning from an untapped collective knowledge.

Rijksmuseum Birdwatching

Projects such as one held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where bird enthusiasts were brought in to identify and tag bird species in paintings in their vast collection in 2015.

Ex-Warner Project

Closer to home for me, artists Lucy Harrison and Katherine Green started an archiving project centring around “Warner” properties built in the Waltham Forest area of East London from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Warner properties are a longstanding project of terraced, self-contained flats that allowed people in social housing to live in safe, clean and dignified settings. Many are preserved and are sought after properties in the area.

The project started in collaboration with the Walthamstow Historical Society and sought to capture the previously unrecorded social history and aimed to “document the current residents of ex Warner properties, including long-term renters, new renters, those who recently purchased or who had purchased directly from the Warners.” With further sponsorship from the Arts Council England and local companies, they called out for further contributions and built an app through which participants can explore oral histories and guided walks around the area.

Annotate

The Tate launched AnnoTate, where Zooniverse at the University of Oxford developed a crowdsourced transcription where volunteers can transcribe handwritten letters, notebooks and sketches that “reveal artists’ everyday lives, creative practices and the processes by which renowned works of arty were made”. This is a great project because the Tate gains the digitisation of the collection and the volunteers can learn directly.

The community is still, however, an under-used resource. People go to libraries, museums or archives to learn, but rarely are the stories and knowledge uncovered captured by the institutions themselves. It, therefore, seems like a trend onto which I could jump and fill out the metadata surrounding the Science Museum’s collection.

However, how can I get the target audience of young adults, families with children 8+ and school groups to engage and participate? This type of project seems like the precursor to the one I have been briefed on, where the information is gathered, and the brief I have to engage people with the information collected. Or, is there a way to run the phases co-currently?

Creating Interactive and Interpretive Experiences

The Museum of Photographic Arts’ 7 Billion Others exhibition

There’s a greater recognition of the visitor as an active participant in the art or in the storytelling.

In this project by the National Archives, they built a virtual village to showcase their collection and to engage students with typical life in World War One. Whilst we may here a lot about the trench warfare (and rightly so), history was being lived outside of this, and by briging technology to this project allowed students to connect to a much greater degree. : https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/building-virtual-first-world-war-village/#more-27243

Voice command

The Museums of Modern Art in New York is aiming to improve engagement and navigation around the museum collection for users, by integrating the Amazon Echo with their collections database. This will be particularly useful to those with visual impairment

If people want to interact online, you must be online. If people walk around the gallery staring more at their phone than at the exhibits, you must reach them there. If people are housebound and can’t go to the museum, take the museum to them.

Distill your research, write a positioning statement for your project strategy and post it in your blog.

Positioning statement

Objects are only physical matter until they are imbued with context, stories and meanings from history. For families who wish to explore their social history, this exploration tool for the Science Museum online collection will foster the sharing of personal and family history through the medium of the Science Museum online collections.

Imagine three mood boards to contextualise your positioning statement. Post your mood board development on the Ideas Wall and outline the rationale behind your final outcome in your blog.