Archive for the 'Learning & education' Category
Visual Velcro and Interpretation in the Museum
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
In an article in the November/December 2007 issue of Museum News published by the American Association of Museums (p 57-62, 68-73) entitled “Visual Velcro: Hooking the Visitor”, Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) develops a very interesting metaphor to describe the way visitors to museums engage with art. The article contains an excellent summary of the latest thinking about interpretation, especially the use of electronic devices such as audio guides, PDA’s and mobile phones.
A Velcro patch (originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or velvet’s fuzzy surface) consists of a strip of tiny loops. Samis asks us to imagine that the visual impression an artwork creates is like Velcro. Unless “it has a hook that can fit into one of the loops on your specific Long Term Memory (LTM) “patch,” it will glide right by and be forever forgotten. If there is something in the artwork, however, that strikes you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation resulting from the artwork’s massive or minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied narrative connection—then we can say that artwork has “Visual Velcro.” It has hooked into your cognitive structure and stands a chance of remaining in your memory.”
Samis goes on to summarize how technologies can help the hooks of artworks engage with the loops of our LTM. It is well understood that interpretive plans have to acknowledge not just who the visitors are – their identity – in terms of background and entrance narratives. In using the increasingly common analog and digital devices it is essential to understand what each kind of device delivers and what the visitor expects. (As he says in his concluding comments, this does not mean that text on the wall is not useful.)
Samis sets out to answer the questions about state-of –the-art interpretation, to what end various devices would be used, how visitors respond and how the visiting experience can be augmented most meaningfully and at the same time least intrusively. Very interesting examples are given from many different art museums. According to Samis, the watchword in planning would be “Design for Experience, Not for Hardware”.
Continue to article.
New publications
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
Two new publications have appeared in the last few months.
2007: With Janette Griffin, Lynn Baum, Jane Blankman-Hetrick, Julie I Johnson, Christine A. Reich and Shawn Roe, Optimizing Learning Opportunities in Museums: The Role of Organizational Culture. Pp 153-165 In John H. Falk, Lyn D. Dierking and Susan Foutz (editors) In Principle, In Practice. Lanham MD: Altamira Press. (Go to Publisher’s site.)
This chapter, in a volume which comes from a conference organised by the Institute for Learning Innovation in Annapolis MD, explores the relationship between successful exhibitions and the culture of the museum, the proposition that a cohesive organisation is significantly more likely to produce better exhibitions. The proposition is almost naïve yet not frequently explored and not an approach to which much attention seems to be paid in museums themselves.
There has been great attention recently to exhibitions however. One of the more interesting is the volume “Are we there yet? Conversations about Best Practices in Science Exhibition Development” (K. McLean and C. EcEver (eds). San Francisco, CA: The Exploratorium). When the Exploratorium brought people together to discuss “best practice” in science exhibition development, Kathleen McLean made the point that while various items could be identified which characterised good exhibition development, ones which promoted good outcomes for the visitor, these could not be considered a checklist for success or a panacea for exhibition development. Jay Rounds (University of Missouri, St Louis) pointed out, “a rigid standardisation of practice is a recipe for disaster. What worked yesterday probably will not work tomorrow and we have no reliable way of predicting what will. Such times call for experiments and innovations that might work well in the new environment we need strategies that can counter these initial tendencies and foster innovation, exploration and discovery of new possibilities”.
2007: with M. Abraham, The Effective Management of Museums: Cohesive Leadership and Visitor Focused Public Programming Chapter 7 in Richard Sandell & Robert R. Janes (editors), Museum Management and Marketing. Leicester: Routledge. (Reprinted from Museum Management and Curatorship 18 (4), 335-368 (2000): go to Publisher’s site.)
This paper was the final paper in the series dealing with the study of some 30 museums around the world which aimed to find what characterised the “most effective museums”. The study is summarised elsewhere on this site.
More on “Quality”
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
In the previous post on “Quality” I mentioned a number of orchestras and museums which I thought represented an exceptional level of excellence and suggested that this had a lot to do with the way people worked with each other and the attention given to recruitment. There is another issue and that is the assertion one hears from time to time that involvement of young people in various branches of the arts such as learning music has spin-off effects in improving other abilities such as math and analytical skills. The jury is still out on this particular issue as I understand it. But the points which emerge are of general signficance.
Here are three items which are about young people and the arts. And there is a fourth item which is not about young people but the Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Philippe de Montebello.
The first item is an interview with British producer/director Michael Waldman and work with disadvantaged, troubled young people aged between 15 and 19, and their involvement in the ballet based on Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet”. Through this they achieved amazing performances and advanced their personal development as well. “A young black woman who was aged 15 who was in a rehearsal session early on, was asked to talk about herself… She said, ‘I’m told that when I was 2 my Dad murdered my Mum’. In rehearsal she showed herself to be focused, energetic, disciplined, with abilities to put her feet in front of each other, musically, and was cast in the character role of Lady Capulet, the mother of Juliet. And when it came to the final performance, the ballet reviewers who came to this said she was as good as the Bolshoi’s Lady Capulet.” (Professors Milbrey W. McLaughlin and Shirley Brice Heath of Stanford University have stories of a similar nature; see the page on museum issues)
The second item concerns the astonishing orchestral project for young people in Caracas, Venezuela, El Sistema - a remarkable project which uses Beethoven and Brahms to “save” the children of the barrios. Earlier this year, the musical directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic - arguably among the best orchestras in America - became vacant. The orchestra chose 26 year old El Sistema trained Gustavo Dudamel after a couple of guest appearances during which the Venezuelan shot what the orchestra’s president Deborah Borda called ‘contagious joy’ through the seasoned musicians. ‘We had combustion,’ she said. ‘We knew something remarkable had happened.’
The third is about partnerships at American art museums which seek to find whether art appreciation has spin-offs in other areas. The US Department of Education offers a grant program to support local education agencies and “organisations with arts expertise in replicating or adapting ways to integrate arts disciplines with a key goal to improve students’ academic performance, including their skills in creating, performing and responding to the arts”. A number of museums involved in the project have shown significant improvements in critical skills.
The last item concens the “Met” in New York. (By the way, fifty percent of all private money for the arts is raised in New York!) There are many rumours, denied, of the impending retirement of Philippe de Montebello, 71 year old director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the last 30 years. In “Twilight of the Sun King” by Charles McGrath (New York Times July 29, 2007) there are some comments about de Montebello and what I think makes museums outstanding. We are enlightened about some of the ways in which the Met distinguishes itself. It has a lot to do with the culture de Montebello promotes.
Continue to essay