Collections, Technology and Context
NEMA Keynote Speech to 650 NE Museum Directors
October 27, 2004
I am not a technology guru. I love art and artifacts. I use technology, sometimes in the same context, but I must start with essentials for this all to make any sense.
At the outset, however, I would ask that you take my comments with a grain of salt, as I have not walked in your shoes. I am an observer and a loving visitor to your museums. Like us all, I have biases about which I will be forthright so you can consider my comments in context.
To start, there are objects and there are people. You create and manage the places where they come together in our communities- both real and vicarious.
My first bias is that fine art objects require very careful management of the environment in which they are displayed to preserve the emotional quality that defines them as art. Their historical and cultural context is the intellectual experience that is of critical import, but the viewer / listener must have control over how and when they choose to absorb this context. Artifacts, on the other hand, are utilitarian objects of cultural, historic and aesthetic value, so they require this context as they are viewed. For them, the aesthetic appreciation and the intellectual learning are integral and can be simultaneous… my bias.
Another bias, Web-based technology holds tremendous promise for the development of new audiences, for research, for survey, for education and for ease of access and navigation. But it holds little or no current promise for the sensual appreciation of your collections.
Imagine, if you will, sitting in a pew St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria, hearing Mozart’s “Great” Mass in C surrounded by people either worshipping God, or Mozart…or both. Now imagine listening to the mass on your iPod.
Or, imagine making love to the most important person in your life. Now imagine watching that on an Internet porn site.
Gurus make promises that technology can’t keep. There is a lot of “gee whiz” technology beloved by early adopters whose thrill is innovation rather than enduring utility. Remember sitting in a conference room with your notebook and pen waiting for the meeting to get underway while your colleagues booted up a variety of PDA’s on which they had learned to scribble arcane hieroglyphs. The PDA’s are gone. They did little to make their owners more efficient.
Technology does, however, have great power to build new audience, educate, promote, organize and navigate complexity but, at this stage, offers us a severely compromised approximation of aesthetic or sensual experience.
Let’s look at that intersection of technology and art in the community treasures of which you all are stewards. Not all the objects in your collections were created as art. Many were created as utilitarian objects and became art because their fabrication and utility were beautiful to behold. In them, beauty and utility were as one. Throughout their history they accrued and retained their experience. This intrinsic cultural value imbues them with emotional import and you bring that alive in how you display them.
A late 19th century wooden hayfork at Billings Farm may have had its genesis in utility and was therefore technology, but its graceful lines and power to elicit a recall of the time in which it was used makes it beautiful to behold. It might look bereft hanging from a stark gallery wall with a light shining on it. So you might choose to position it casually in a hay barn surrounded by its collegial period artifacts.
In 1942, Marsden Hartley painted Mount Katahdin as an object of beauty. It had no utility per se. It was created as fine art. It belongs on the gallery wall, not hanging in the 1950’s house at Shelburne.
The range of your collections from objects, whose beauty lies in their utility, patina and design to fine art objects, is important, as the nature of the object invites a different contextual presentation technology.
To be thorough, I would like to briefly survey six domains in which technology plays a part in your world: conservation, information and collection management, object presentation, context presentation or education, Web technology and transformative technology.
First is conservation technology, I will fast forward here, pausing only to clarify. This is the technology of paint chemistry, medium physics. It is the domain of your conservators. {They must understand both the technology of the period in which the artists in your collections worked, but they must apply the technologies of today in their own conservation work; X-ray, chemical analysis and cleaning say, or carbon dating in order to restore, preserve and secure works under your stewardship. Under modern conservation technologies I include environmental controls that protect the work such as humidity and temperature controls and the myriad motion sensing security technologies.}
Second is enterprise management software or EMS. This is generally mature and reliable technology that manages your collections, your membership and donor lists, your finances and visitor transactions.
Third is object presentation technology, those technologies, along with their aesthetic choices, that allow an object to be shown in its best light, maximizing the viewer’s emotional experience, not necessarily their knowledge. The minimalism that may enrich the presentation of fine art and supports that “moment of immersion” by the viewer differs greatly from a more contextual presentation of utilitarian folk objects that may be clustered in a métier or diorama environment. Technology may play less here than the aesthetic decisions of the exhibition team. Wall color, pedestal height, stage placement, sound re-enforcement, placement, angle of incidence, type of glass, focal and ambient lighting are all aesthetic criteria that involve some degree of presentation technology. This technology is all focused on maximizing the viewer/listener experience, not adding contextual knowledge. It supports an emotional bond, to be enriched by intellection.
It also helps to define your museum or historical society for the community it serves. It is here where the museum becomes greater than the sum of its objects. Museum are social environments, they defined less by their objects, but by the collision of those objects with sentient people.
The fourth is context presentation technology, the technology choices that an exhibition team chooses to enrich intellectual context, to educate if you will. Context is both historical and cultural. Supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera and audioguides at the Metropolitan Museum are both good examples of this technology. The challenge with contextual technology is to ensure, to the extent possible, that it does not interfere with the visitor’s emotional enjoyment of the object. How are you at multi-tasking? Have you ever tried to write a particularly descriptive introduction for an upcoming exhibition opening while listening to All Things Considered? Don’t force your visitors to multi-task their way through your collection if it compromises their ability to enjoy it. Be sure that they have choice, whether they use it or not. The supertitles at the Met were moved from above the proscenium arch where they were a constant visual distraction from the stage to subtle digital implants in the seat ahead with the ability to black them out if you choose not to use them. Audioguides, used properly, are a great tool for providing context. Have you ever watched a child, however, totally absorbed in the exploration of their control panel options missing the objects described therein, or their parent, paying rapt attention to Philippe de Montebello’s scholarly commentary about El Greco’s early tribulations as an iconographer and compromising that private moment of immersion one wants to experience in front of a work like The Opening of the Fifth Seal… Does the lovely 16th century French galliard played on a 20th century lute that provides background from the narrator’s contextual audioguide commentary distract the viewer emotionally from their deep malaise at first seeing de La Tour’s Education of the Virgin at the Frick? Context is intellectual. Objects can be sensuous, often evoking rich emotional reactions. In certain spaces museums need to be quiet and contemplative and in other spaces they need to be bustling and evocative. Most of your visitors will seek historical and cultural context, but the media you select to provide that context must gives them choice, choice to appreciate and choice to learn. Choice may be as simple as giving the viewer the ability to select an object location on their audioguide and hearing about it when they choose rather than marching through the exhibition to follow an uninterruptible audio stream.
Remember my bias that artifacts demand context at the point of viewing, whereas fine art collections invite context at the viewer’s discretion. The application of contextual technology must be defined by the collections themselves. Contextual technology in the Whitney will be markedly different from contextual technology at Rokeby, the American Precision Museum, or the Noyes House in my home town of Morrisville, Vermont.
Penultimate is Web technology. Promotionally, it opens the door to unlimited visitors, researchers and educational markets. It does so by creating dynamic, navigable, context-enriched access to your collections. It does not create a line at the virtual gate however. It only opens the gate. You need to drive traffic to your gates. You can create links among yourselves. Think virtual maps, museum itineraries or heritage tours online. You must ensure that the descriptive words on your website trigger search engines such as Google to display your Web address when someone is searching or researching. This is called “key word optimization analysis.” (I will amplify in Q&A if you wish.) You must promote your site just as you would your brochure by hiring a pamphleteer to distribute it at visitor and tourism centers.
The Web does indeed open your collection to the world. {The process is straightforward, and as many of you will know, time-consuming and expensive. Your works and their contextual elements are loaded or scanned into servers and made available on the worldwide web to individuals at home and in class rooms sitting in front of computer terminal screens.} The opportunity now is immense. If you are a “Doubting Thomas” on the subject of the Web and like to dredge up the collapse of the dot.com boom, get over it quickly. The bubble burst because everyone: investors, entrepreneurs, gurus, all got ahead of the curve and were inevitably disappointed. Throughout the boom and attendant collapse, the growth trajectory of the Web and e-commerce has been linear and accelerating. You need to either be there with an open mind or move aside and make room for a leader who can be there.
I know from having lived in Vermont all but 3 of my 59 years that this room is filled with directors from community gems like The Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Rokeby in North Ferrisburg, The Fairbanks Museum in St Johnsbury, and The Noyes House in Morrisville. Pardon my provincial recall. I know also that the cost and complexity of this technology is beyond the reach of many now. That will change. I urge only that you remain vigilant and open, find common purpose among yourselves collaborate. Together you provide the scale of a major museum. Remember also that your visitor who is interested in 19th century rural life and artifact will also go to your library, your bureau of records. Find common cause both among other institutions in your community and among yourselves to create scale and afford a common resource. The challenge for grant making organizations, foundations and philanthropists will be to not just fund the digitization of bellwether collections like the LOC and the National Gallery, but to fund technical assistance opportunities for all of you who together comprise our nation’s cultural and aesthetic heritage.
In the grand scheme of things the Web is relatively new and still has problems. It is, however, relentlessly improving and your audience is now measured in the 100’s of millions.
Some issues to watch:
- Let’s start with cost and ease of use. The cost of entry is still high. There are, however, opportunities to share costs between institutions. Costs and complexity will steadily decline and utility and ease of use will steadily improve, so timing is everything. Helping you all enter this world appropriately is and should be a technical assistance grant making focus at IMLS, NEH and NEA. It goes straight to the heart of their outreach mission. Use this organization to build scale. Web technology is a network. It does not care who travels on it. Once you have built the network, you can all use it. Beware of trying to fund initiatives in technology with a capital campaign. It isn’t about capital. It is about expense, relentless ongoing expense. Cost of acquisition is peanuts compared to the overhead expense of staff, maintenance, upgrades, scanning and network management. Your costs will persist year in year out. Computers themselves are no longer capital investments. They are expensed, over three years.
- Scalability and platform issues: The people who make these technologies are
competing fiercely for hegemony and that does not serve you well as they offer different platforms and protocols that do not always mesh. Whatever you choose must be scalable without reinvestment beyond the addition of memory. That is you must be able to continuously add to your network offerings, only having to add server space, not having to throw everything out and starting over each time you need additional capacity. Seek help to ensure that you start on a durable platform, not one that may become an orphan. We seem to be migrating towards open architecture and interoperability, which will better serve us all. We are still early in this game.
- Forget quality of experience. There is none yet. The emotional or sensual experience is nil. Even the ability to rotate sculptural objects in 3D or the ability to zoom into detail in a painting is of merely cognitive interest and offers no aesthetic or emotional interest. The reason is essentially a human one. Technology cannot create community. There are virtual communities and chat rooms, but they are lonely places inhabited by text and still images. A real community is comprised of sentient people in a sensuous environment. It is constantly impinged upon by nature, time and humanity. Your museum is a community of living breathing people and objects.
- Rights issues are confounding deployment of these technologies to some degree. Do you own the stretcher, canvas and frame along with the image or just the medium and the in situ image, having no rights beyond the medium? Do you have the right to display the image on a network, to license the image to National Geographic for a cover or to Ford for an ad, or to Nine Inch Nails for a CD album cover? This too will resolve itself over time, but will consume millions in legal fees before we reach consensus through legal precedent.
I believe that the current value of such technology is akin to adding a very sophisticated index to a book. It allows for search, navigation, exploratory digression, research, linking, in short cultural and historical context exploration and delivery. It enriches contextual knowledge. It can enhance, but not convey emotional experience. It will open your collection to the world. It will raise and answer questions. It will stir debate. It will enhance admissions in time if you take it seriously. You must promote your site as you would any hard media promotion.
Also, partner with, and use, other people’s technology. The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum this weekend had a spectacular piece on All Things Considered. It was long, sensuous and visceral and made me want to go right over there. NPR has 29 million listeners. If 1% of the listening audience felt the same way, they would have a visitor wave equal to half the population of Vermont. The piece focused on their archeological work at the bottom of Lake Champlain on Benedict Arnold’s ship, found by them several years ago in near perfect shape and scuttled in the late 18th century, a natural for radio.
I often think in terms of assets, channel and markets. You have assets that are priceless and enduring to our communities. Public radio and, to a lesser degree, television have channel strength, but few durable assets. They both deliver market. The assets of public radio are short-lived and need constantly to be replaced with compelling and informative programming. You must help them imagine how a project or new exhibition can be produced into an interesting segment or program for their listeners. Jane Beck at the VT Folklife Center has a long history of partnership with VT Public Radio, producing terrific programming derived from her oral histories of Vermonters on various topics.
How can you bring an exhibition to radio? How would you hear your institution on Weekend Edition with Lianne Hansen? This is not PR. It is highest and best use of technology others have paid for.
Last is transformative technology, the most controversial of all. It has disturbing implications, allowing the viewer / listener in their home to alter the original art form, to convert the Mona Lisa smile to a pout, to add a tango rhythm to a Bach partita, for better or for worse, to create a derivative work with or without your permission as steward, or that of the artist or artisan. I won’t go here unless you want to in Q&A.
Those among you who are skeptical of this technology are right to be so only if you understand it. Uninformed skepticism will serve you, your collections and your audience badly. Those among you who are students and embracers of this technology need to learn from your skeptical colleagues, remaining open to technological advances, but always questioning and measuring its human utility, not letting it get out ahead of you, your objects or the visitor experience. It will serve you well if you remain its master and apply it well.
Thank you
Bill Schubart
4:55:54 AM 
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