Welcome to the dolls’ hair house

The former London home of Sigmund and Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum, is enveloped in a cats cradle of rope made of dolls’ hair. Standing as it does on a prosperous suburban street of imposing redbrick villas, the bound house looks like a scene from a dream itself, a dream of home denied. Such dreams are typically untangled on a therapeutic descendant of the very couch that sits inside the museum; the fairytale Rapunzel tress-ropes also suggest the kind of psychological decoding of myth and culture that Freud indulged in.

Alice Anderson’s ‘Childhood Rituals’ invades the inside of Freud’s home too. Balls of doll’s hair, looms and figurines invade the rooms of artefacts; in Freud’s study itself the hair is spun into a web through which visitors are forced to regard the domestic interior. Anderson’s work refers to childhood trauma, re-enacting the neurotic pulling of dolls; hair that she would perform as a child when left alone by her mother.

Anderson studied with Christian Boltanski, an artist whose work frequently references the structure and display of museums and archives, who appears in both Kynaston McShine’s Museum as Muse and James Putnam’s Art and Artifact. However, as an intervention in a museum space, Anderson’s work seems to have moved on from the practices of institutional critique where the work’s critical relationship is to the gallery or museum that frames it. Anderson’s work instead relates directly to the subject matter of the museum (that is, the psychoanalytic interpretation of everyday life).

The Freud Museum is modestly sized as a museum, yet has an established track record of artistic exhibitions and intervention that supplement the object displays. This actually isn’t all that atypical for object-based museums these days. While the orthodox view of museum collections continues to be that ‘objects tell stories’ (a curious misascription of agency: it’s rather that we tell stories about objects) many object-based museums (that is, not art galleries) are increasingly looking to contemporary artists to do something for them. What is that something that they are doing?

Google Art Project vs the Delirious Museum

Now you see it, now you don’t. Henri Rousseau and friend on Google Art Project

Google Art Project uses ‘Street View’ technology, but the street ends where the museum begins. Step over the threshold from Millbank into Tate Britain and you leave the world of pedestrians and traffic behind, entering an eerie and deserted gallery space devoid of fellow visitors or even staff, where crude arrows take you from silent room to silent room. You are invited to respond by conducting a series of imaginary art heists to assemble your own fantasy art collection.

It’s a cliché that modernism privileges visuality, but start exploring the MoMA with Art Project and there are some paintings you literally cannot see; works that due to the exploitability of their image rights elsewhere have been rendered fat with pixels like innocent faces in a cop-stop-action show on Channel 5. They exist, and occupy their rightful space in the museum, that you can be sure of; you are merely not allowed to look at them.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that this particular vision of the museum as a visually portable feast of pick’n’mix delights is more than eighty years old. In 1930 Frederick Kiesler imagined it like this:

The Telemuseum. Just as operas are now transmitted over the air, so picture galleries will be. From the Louvre to you, from the Prado to you, from everywhere to you. You will enjoy the prerogative of selecting pictures that are compatible with your mood or that meet the demands of any special occasion. Through the dials of your Teleset you will share in the ownership of the world’s greatest art treasures.

This dream of the Telemuseum is realised perfectly by Google Art Project: a device that negates the distance between the remote user and the museum and removes in the process everything but the flat, visual surface of gallery space. Modern painting, historically obsessed with the visual field, canonically displayed in the Modern museum, is teleported to the viewer to experience it in visual purity.

Kiesler’s fantasy is quoted (p59) in Calum Storrie’s The Delirious Museum, a book with a very different approach to the idea of the museum. Storrie begins with the contention that ‘museums should be a continuation of the street’ and that a museum should not only form an accessible part of the city, but also form a continuation of the city itself. In twelve chapters leading from the Louvre to Las Vegas, Storrie develops a history and theory of the ‘delirious museum’ that takes in theft of the Mona Lisa by an Italian nationalist; Benjamin’s Arcades; Marcel Duchamp’s museum-in-a-suitcase; Shwitters’ adventures in personal mythology and museology; Chris Burden’s Samson (a work in which a museum entrance turnstile ratchets timbers outwards, warping and potentially destroying the fabric of the museum itself); Daniel Libeskind’s totemic, increasingly self-referential architecture; and ends (nearly) with the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a Culver City storefront outfit that is at once both oddball Wunderkammer and critique of the idea of memory. This is an underground history of museums that, if you like, runs parallel to the second half of Karsten Schubert’s The Curator’s Egg.

The Delirious Museum is, in art and architecture, all that attempts to broach the classical facades of institutions of art and antiquity and inject something of lived life back into the museological space. Some of these sallies are nakedly political, like the Situationist assault on the spectacle; others are merely concerned with the artistic; once or twice we cross the dreary river of ‘institutional critique’, the gallery’s attempt to reify theory; and three chapters on museum architecture serve only to convince that the yolk of a museum remains infinitely more interesting than the shell. Impossible to realise, the Delirious Museum (like Malraux’s ‘Museum without walls’) is something that can only exist in a book; but it’s a guidebook that also offers us an idea of what we should be demanding from museums.

Storrie goes nowhere near the digital: his delirium remains grounded in the spatial and personal experience of the museum environment. But these tendencies to critique, and more importantly to the expansion of the museum into everyday life are not without their online manifestations. It’s true that net.art remains the great unrealised promise of the internet setting art free, a promise that over-sponsored pixel-pretty shows like Decode fail to redeem. But when with even modest technological means at their disposal museums are capable of opening up photographic archives to the public, teaching science through games, making curatorial processes transparent through blogs and asking the public to contribute to exhibitions years before they open, it seems odd that Google Art Project should feel so like a CD-ROM, the kind of representation of a gallery that those of us who work with museums online for a living had abandoned before the first dotcom bubble even burst. Why has the world’s leading technology company delivered us a ‘virtual museum’ that belongs to the 1930s?

What it means to look at a dead body in a medical museum

Mummified male body, Chimu people, Peru, c1200-1400CE. Wellcome Collection

You might not be searching for it. You could come across it in a corner or behind a panel, displayed in a cabinet or a vitrine. It’s unfamiliar but also unmistakable: the body of what was once a human being, preserved and now presented in the context of a museum of life.

A museum is of course just another sort of mausoleum: you’d hardly expect to find a living human being (other than yourself) in a museum of life. But what does it remind you of? Well, it reminds you that all human beings, you among them, are going to die. The face: its skin stretched taut, its features distorted, tells you that this was once a person as you are, but is no longer.

There are other objects in this museum that sing the same song. Behind you, in the shadows, in other rooms of the museum are things called memento mori, or vanitas. They contain the shapes of skulls and skeletons, combine images of rich life and stark reminders of death. With more finesse, they too remind you that you will die.

All these reminders, to what end? The artefacts are largely Christian, and in fact they don’t remind you that you will end, they remind you that you will continue. They tell you flesh is dust that you might clean your soul; they tell you that this life will end the better to prepare you for the next one.

And because you are who you are and live when you do, you may not be able to separate the idea of your ‘soul’ from the idea of your ‘consciousness’. What else could suffer in hell but ‘you’; what else could continue to exist, bereft of body, but your mind? This corpse too might only be evidence that corporeal existence will end, another memento mori.

But if you look closely, the dead body of your fellow human being will tell you something different. Look at his hands, and then look at your own. What would your world consist of if you had no hands with which to pick things up and look at them? The eyes, and with them sight,  are gone, and the ears may be there, but there is no hearing.

As a human being with a body, you can imagine consciousness without a body, but that consciousness itself is not possible, could not exist without a body with which to apprehend the world. And it is the persistence of a body without consciousness (a body forcibly separated from its consciousness) that reminds you how essential a body is to ‘you’.

What is still there demonstrates adequately what has departed. And this, in a roundabout way, could be what the medical museum is really trying to tell you.

Games kit

Game type cards from the workshop

My colleague Martha Henson and I ran a mini-workshop at this year’s Museums and the Web conference in Philadelphia. The workshop consisted partly of a summary presentation of some of our experimentation and evaluation with games at Wellcome Collection, but mostly of a workshop in which we asked people to brainstorm ideas for new museum games.

The aim was to share ideas, experience and knowledge with the (very knowledgeable and experienced) people in the room, and also to validate one of the principles on which we’ve been working: that bringing a museum theme directly together with an established method of gameplay, rather than working backwards from educational or narrative objectives, generates good ideas for engaging games.

The workshop seemed to be a success to us: A room of 60-70 people spent an hour taking and thinking, and came up with some great ideas for games. So we thought it might be worth publishing the format and materials, in case anyone else finds them useful.

The format of the brainstorming session was this:

• We asked people to cluster into groups of three to six (smaller is generally better; there were a lot of people in the room)
• We assigned them two or three ‘game type’ cards, with the name and image of a type of game (First Person Shooter, Beat ‘em up, etc) one side and a brief Wikipedia definition of the game on the other.
• We asked each group to think of a collection, aspect of mission of their cultural heritage institution, and then to bring that together as the basis for a game, then to spend 15 minutes brainstorming and fleshing out that game.
• Each group then briefly presented that idea, and the rest of the workshop joined in with questions on their idea (we particularly wanted to hear from anyone who had built a game something like this themselves)

The cards we used can be downloaded here as a PDF. They’re A6, printed on A4, so each sheet contains four cards and need to be chopped. They’re two-sided, so if you print the PDF back-to-back, the image and description will come out on opposite sides of the same card.

We’d be very interested in feedback if anyone uses them for a similar exercise.

(You might also find this useful: Lift your (museum) game, a museum games wiki set up as a result of another games session at the Museums and the web conference)

The museum of pieces of people

Artwork by Todt at Mütter Museum, Philadelphia

The distinction between two different types of space couldn’t be clearer. You pass from a dark, wood-lined space where objects sit safely behind glass, into a brightly-lit gallery with china-white walls and three-dimensional artworks that could easily (if unforgivably) be touched. One space is redolent of age and obscurity; the other is of the moment. It’s hard to understand how the two spaces can exist in the same institution, let alone be directly adjacent.

What’s on the walls, however, is much more intimately related. The dark space is the object galleries of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, a display originally attached to a surgical college, rather like London’s Hunterian, where anatomical knowledge is channelled through the by-products of the surgeon’s knife, dried and bottled, and where the monstrous is illustrative. The skeleton of a giant, a colon that held forty pounds; a plaster cast of conjoined twins; swallowed objects retrieved and typologically arranged.

The white space plays host to an exhibition of the ‘whimsical artwork of local artists collective TODT‘. Their whimsical subject is the monster aesthetic of the Mütter itself. A row of plush toys spill their complicated wax guts, the face of one teddy half-transformed by rictus into a vanitas. Featureless plastic heads levitate, tongues penetrating each other. Transparent men harbour brightly-coloured intestinal organs. A sea of flesh is clamped and stabbed by needles. Microscopes are mounted with pistol butts.

So we pass from the dark into the light and we understand what we’re seeing. From the monstrous to the ironic: TODT rework the imagery of medicine, emphasise the eeriness, mock the simplicity of anatomical understanding, highlight the violence inherent in the anatomical eye. They’re artists. This is what they’re here to do.

Then we are supposed to step into the gift shop (where they sell ‘fetus soap’ and multiple cartoon images of conjoined twins) but what if we retraced our steps to the dark place and looked at the monsters again? Having witnessed the artists’ irony in action, are we forced to see irony everywhere, even in the merely tragic? Do we understand bottled babies differently once we’ve seen dolls playing their parts? Has something here been overwhelmed by aesthetic interplay, by the relation of art to object?

This is the subject of investigation.

Making the case for museum games

High Tea, from Welcome Collection

This is an opinion piece co-written by me and Martha Henson published today in Wellcome News (a publication whose audience is based in scientific research rather than museums). It’s a little bit provocative….

Opinion: “Museums need more compelling games”

Martha Henson and Danny Birchall

Do you play games? We might dismiss them as childish, but in his 1938 work Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argued that play is an essential component of all human culture. The chances are that you enjoy playing something – whether it’s Angry Birds or a round of charades at Christmas.

Globally, gaming is big business, with a market worth an estimated $50 billion (£30bn) in 2011 and a demographically diverse audience with an even gender split. But it’s not just about numbers: the dedication of gamers to the pleasure of play means time spent at the console can exceed that spent with a feature film or novel.

The educational potential seems obvious. So why have museums and educationalists, with all the information and resources at their disposal, failed to make more than a handful of really compelling educational games? The work of game designers and researchers such as Jane McGonigal (author of Reality is Broken) and Channel 4 Education (including the Wellcome Trust-funded Routes) has amply demonstrated the power of games to bring both children and adults cultural and scientific ideas in new forms.

But many have assumed that any game-like feature is enough to engage people, and tacking minimal interactivity onto a barely disguised didactic lesson plan has unfortunately been the dismal standard in this field. However, others, such as the Science Museum, have begun to harness the potential of games for learning. The physics-based Launchball game was hugely popular and they have just released Rizk (about climate change).

We’ve had our own success recently with High Tea, a strategy game centred on the dubious actions of the British Empire in the run-up to the Opium Wars of 1839. From over 1.5m plays in its first fortnight after release, plus comments, reviews and survey responses, we can see that we have achieved both a wide reach and our educational aims.

Why are these particular games successful? Because they put gameplay at the centre of the experience and use experienced digital agencies to deliver this. These examples are a great start, but surely more could be done in this area.

Games might seem a trivial way of approaching the public with new ideas, but the playful and exploratory impulses that draw gamers to great games are still largely untapped as a means of engagement. By pushing boundaries ourselves, we hope to show others what can be achieved.

Museum of codes

snake! by Joe Dunckley, on Flickr (2009)

Once I got the opening hours straight, I was straight over to what must be the very closest museum (as the crow flies) to my workplace. After a year in storage and transport, UCL’s Grant Museum has reopened in a new location, on University Street.

I never visited the Grant before it moved, but it seems the fundamental organisation of objects in glass cases and their labelling hasn’t changed (there’s a nice A-Z of pigeonholes by the entrance that are curatable, with aesthetic echoes of Keith Wilson’s Things and Mark Dion’s Welt Wissen installation).

The major change is the addition of technology. Primarily: the use of QR codes to identify and share information about objects; the use of iPads as interactive displays; and a framework which links in-gallery and online comments together into a ‘conversation’ about the objects. It looks like a relatively small technology budget has been used very imaginatively.

QR codes themselves I can take or leave. There seems to be some springtime of love in London for these curious 1990s Japanese throwbacks: everyone has them on their printed ephemera and posters. In the ‘looking cool’ stakes, they’ll soon be so over-used that by summer they’ll either look tacky or be invisible. Functionally: I recall Mia Ridge saying something about simple, quick paths to information, and if you have a smartphone (and a signal – no in-house wifi at the Grant) they do work as a simple trigger to open a webpage or application.

The iPads sit on a ledge at the bottom of the cases. In a custom-built app you can flick between a question, an opportunity to comment on that question, a QR code to identify the question that links it to others’ responses in the museum and online, and a live twitterstream (common to all iPads) of comments related to the Grant Museum as a whole.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the use of iPads is their function as a chameleon device: they’re small touchscreens that can do almost anything that you want them to. The first time I saw an iPad in gallery it was simply stuck to a wall displaying a short film on a loop, which had paused because the battery was running low. At the Grant, they’re properly mounted and power-tethered, and fulfilling a function most museum people probably think of as ‘kiosk’ (As in a small self-contained interactive. I had some discussion about whether my definition of a ‘kiosk’ or even ‘mini-kiosk’ was correct – the most persuasive argument against being that kiosks stand separately from the objects, where these iPads are intimately connected to the displays.)  Like PCs were twenty years ago, iPads might be powerful precisely because they ‘re mass-production objects that can easily emulate existing, known functions. But there’s absolutely nothing special about them being an iPad as such (that is: there’s obviously potential for generic tablet computers in galleries).

The questions asked on iPads I feel less enthusiastic about. Any visit to a museum sparks dozens of questions in my own mind that I’d rather discuss; though obviously germane to the displays, whether pets are preferable to wild animals isn’t really something I have an opinion about. I almost certainly fall into the category of over-involved as far as museums are concerned, though; and a good question can definitely be a spur to an interesting conversation.

However, the one question that provokes a (rather spiky) response from me via an iPad (I have to half-crouch down to use it) is this one:

Should science shy away from studying biological differences between races?

Studying the differences between people from different parts of the world was common in the past. Now, in more enlightened times, such science has become somewhat taboo, possibly due to the fear that conclusions would be drawn that could be considered racist. Should some topics be off-limits to science, when the potential outcomes are unknown? Is it racist to say that different races are biologically different?

Now there are genuinely interesting questions about race and science, that are particularly pertinent to the collection of Robert Grant, a thinker who influenced Darwin, whose own theories were influential on European attitudes to race.  But this is not one of those questions. It sets up an entirely false opposition between scientific ‘knowledge’ about race and subjective interpretations of racism, and precludes people (including me, with my spiky answer) from saying anything more interesting about anatomy, science and race.

The linking framework uses Tales of Things, a website/smartphone app that keys on QR codes to link personal stories to objects. Something like Bruce Sterling’s idea of a ‘spime‘, adding surplus aura to everyday objects is an interesting approach. It seems harder to join the dots once you’re outside the museum – you can contribute to the ‘race’ debate above directly on the Tales of Things website, but you have to know what you’re looking for. In addition there’s a Twitter hashtag (#GrantQR) which can get a bit meta-, as some of the conversations I was having about the technology after I visited have apparently been showing up on the iPads….

In fact, the most interesting conversation I had about interconnectedness came when I asked an invigilator whether it was OK to take photographs. Yes, for personal use only, I was told. The idea that ‘personal’ photography exists in opposition to ‘publishing’ photographs is, I think, a completely unsustainable proposition. Sharing is fundamental to the personal use of photographs now (and hurrah for that). Photography still causes anxiety in some museums – to take a photo is to take something away and potentially create your own node, your own focus for comment and discussion. At the Grant (very sensibly), the only concern seems to be commercial exploitation, and so after some consultation, I think we agreed that it would be OK to post the photos on Flickr under the appropriate noncommercial licence. And I’ll be back with my camera, because having been distracted by the technology, I didn’t even get as far as the Jar of Moles.

What’s going on here is very interesting – and testament to the benefits of being a university museum close to a Digital Humanities department on hand to help (rather than having to grow the expertise organically yourself, a huge challenge for small museums). Naturally, there are lots of places online to find out more:

QRator website
UCL Digital Humantities blog on the QRator project
Andrew Hudson-Smith’s blog on the project
Claire Ross’s blog on the project