deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives
DESCRIPTION
What is the public value of an online collection? Why should museums and archives invite digital artists to deconstruct and rebuild their online collections experience? This paper argues that the traditional online collection- a database of object records- is fundamentally designed for research audiences, and presents very few opportunities for serendipitously engaging the casual browser. It will propose that in order to reach new audiences online, museums and archives should be less concerned with technical innovation and more interested in enabling and publishing creative reuse of collections; they should promote their collection as a resource bank to creative practitioners who design compelling digital experiences; and that designing digital heritage experiences to inspire curiosity and wonder is more important than facilitating learning. This paper will refer to the innovative Half Memory project as a case study. The project, developed by TWAM with Tusk Music and Pixel Palace, invited musicians, sound artists and film makers to use TWAM’s collections as a resource for creating engaging (digital) heritage outputs; outputs that recontextualised historical material in order to inspire new audiences.TRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Deconstructing the online collection:
the value in creatively repurposing museums and archives
John Coburn
@j0hncoburn
![Page 2: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
9 museums and galleries1 archives
1.1 million objects450,000+ records online
![Page 3: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
The role and public value of the museum online collection…
![Page 4: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
![Page 5: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
![Page 6: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Functions as an educational resource for people who know (roughly) what they’re looking for
![Page 7: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Audiences who are satisfied with meaning extrapolated by museums
Objective historical context
Dates and chronologies
Representative thumbnail images
Object production data
![Page 8: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Overstating the value of the online collection…
![Page 9: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Online= new, diverse audience with incentives to explore
![Page 10: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Online= new, diverse audience with incentives to explore
Enormousdatabase= rich, navigable content
![Page 11: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
Online= new, diverse audience with incentives to explore
Enormousdatabase= rich, navigable content
Object record= engaging museum experience
![Page 12: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
Online= new, diverse audience with incentives to explore
Enormousdatabase= rich, navigable content
Object record= engaging museum experience
Innovation= technologies that duplicate the “object record experience” as social media/ apps/augmented reality etc
![Page 13: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
“(the value of) digital in the museum is not about endless collections web development it’s about developing new forms of curatorial practice”. Seb Chan, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum
![Page 14: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
How do we enable the development of richer, more compelling collections experiences online?
![Page 15: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
Pilot project with Tusk Music and Pixel Palace arts programme.
Inviting film makers, musicians, sound artists to identify resonant collections areas and create new work we can publish online.
Published work intended to inspire new audiences with collections.
![Page 16: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
Promote the collections as a starting point/connection point for ideas and creativity.
Audiences who-
• Have the motivation and passion to create.
• Ruthlessly apply new critical perspectives to collections.
• Deconstruct collections and objects, connect their meaning with ideas and concepts.
• Create experimental, ambitious work with a captive audience in mind.
![Page 17: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
Public engagement aims-
• Not teaching history but inspiring wonder, stirring imagination, sparking empathy for the past.
• Compel a new public exploration of collections.
• Inspiring new proposals for creative reuse of collections.
![Page 18: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
“An album of songs concerned with the functions and consequences of violence. Family. Opposing forces of creation and destruction, memory and time, birth and death, body and soul”.
Richard Dawson
![Page 19: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
![Page 20: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
“We’ve created a film and a suite of new songs, which is not about the Metro’s construction as such, but takes and holds on to some of the spirits conjured by these pictures. It’s an experiment in the pairing of sound and music, using rhythm and repetition to evoke and entrance, and think about the position of hope in civic life, forty years and a lifetime on from the origins of the photographs”.Warm Digits
![Page 21: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
![Page 22: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
![Page 23: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
Open call for sound and music responding to a broad North East historical theme; work that disrupts an understanding of the past.
“35 hour broadcast hoping to rearrange and create new meaning from the past”.
Imagined soundtrack to the construction of the Tyne Bridge, montage of oral histories and electronic music, field recordings, performance, found sound.
![Page 24: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
Creative processes for identifying resonant collections
![Page 25: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
The remarkable, beautiful, buried story
![Page 26: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)
Harmonious aesthetics
(post-war technological modernism and European urbanism)
![Page 27: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/27.jpg)
Illuminating the one compelling detail
![Page 28: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/28.jpg)
Playing with poetic gaps in an object’s narrative
![Page 29: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/29.jpg)
Thematic, visual search(and museums are usually terrible at this)
![Page 30: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/30.jpg)
The voice of the museum is silenced;objective historic interpretation is erased.
Animated concepts, ideas, stories, questions create impact, not objects.
![Page 31: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/31.jpg)
Impact
![Page 32: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/32.jpg)
10,000+ people accessed the produced work via online platforms and live stream
High depth of public engagement- dwell time and interaction
40,000+ subsequent visits to (raw) collections material online
Disseminated by diverse audiences, evidence of non-museum audiences
(affinities to music/museums/sound/transport/local history)
![Page 33: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/33.jpg)
Provide the right collections access and people will dedicate themselves to reusing it:
491 hours
(daily rate of £250= £17,535)
![Page 34: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/34.jpg)
Museum as ideas enabler,not experience designer?
![Page 35: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/35.jpg)
11 subsequent proposals submitted independently
Museum exploring role as “ideas enabler”
Museums as a home for good ideas, a space to develop creative practice and seed innovative outputs.
![Page 36: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/36.jpg)
Recreating “aura” from objects: drawing machines continually sketching the collection.
![Page 37: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/37.jpg)
Documentary film exploring social activism of the Spence Watson family
![Page 38: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/38.jpg)
An examination of 3D printed objects and the effects of various stages of fidelity
![Page 39: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/39.jpg)
The Man Who Thought The Moon Would Fall Out of the Sky
(already developed, performed and touring independently of TWAM)
![Page 40: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/40.jpg)
Success is not the quality of what’s produced but audiences understanding they have permission to create with collections.
Creative space and freedom has high value and exists more often outside the museum!
Emphasis is on meaningful experimentation not technology; original format could be digital or physical.
Not a commissioning process. No declared funding.
The kernel of each proposal is our collection and what’s created gives it new meaning.
![Page 41: Deconstructing the online collection: creatively repurposing museums and archives](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022081518/554d5e86b4c905003b8b4e54/html5/thumbnails/41.jpg)
John Coburn
@j0hncoburn