museums, technologies and social change: keynote for gems conference august 2013

8/10/2019 Museums, technologies and social change: Keynote for GEMS conference August 2013

1/11

NB DRAFT PRESENTATION USED AS A BASIS FOR SPOKEN TALKPLEASE DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION

Contact me on [email protected]

1

World Changing: Museums, new technologies and praxis

My rather generous brief, when I was invited to speak with you today, was to discuss changes in

digital technologies and their implication for education in the round. Im going to try to focus this

down (thats quite a large area) to the question of museums in particular and to the role of digital

technologies in supporting museums to play their role in the urgent challenge of creating powerfulpublic learning environments.

Im going to be basing this on three areas Ive been working in over the last decade:

First, as Research Director of Futurelab, where we brought together children, computer

scientists, artists, researchers, educators to create prototypes of radically new approaches to

education;

Second, in my current role as Professor of Educational and Social Futures at Bristol University

Im working on a number of projects looking at (and trying to create) future educational

institutions in a time of significant technological, social and environmental change; include

80by18;

And finally, Im currentlyLeadership Fellow for the AHRC Connected Communities Research

programme, where Im working alongside George MacKay from Salford. This is a multi-

million research programme with over 250 projects across the UK. These projects are

bringing together researchers with communities (local, virtual, of interest) to create new

insights into issues as diverse as dementia, creative economy, food and local heritage. HLF

links too.

On this basislooking at emerging technologies, possible futures and the changing relationship

between communities and the processes of knowledge production Im going to explore the

following main issues:

What are museums fortoday?

Quick sidetrackwhy is this urgent nowwhats happening to formal education and why

the digital is implicated in this

Engaging publicsdigital resources for world-changing

From possibilities into practicewhat might the museum do?

Basically, want I want to argue today is that there is an urgent need for society to harness museums

as powerful public resources for debating, learning about and inventing new approaches to

contemporary issues. This will mean, however, unsettling traditional divides between curators,

educators, volunteers and visitors; it will mean harnessing digital technologies; and it will mean

rethinking assumptions about how we produce powerful knowledge together.

What are museums for?

So, Id better start, I think by making my case for what I think museums are forafter all, we cant

begin to judge the potential implications of digital technologies unless we have begun a more

substantial discussion about core purposes.

My views on this have been shaped by James Bradburne, of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, who

remains such a powerful advocate for museums as sites of learning; by Robert Janes, the author of

the brilliant book Museums in a Troubled World; and by Sally Duensingand Richard Gregory, whose

work at the Exploratorium (in San Francisco and Bristol) and elsewhere was premised upon the idea

of the engaged participant.


2/11



2

To an audience of museum educators, I hope that this pretty clearly signals where my argument is

likely to be coming from. Namely, that I see museum visitors as active participants in the co-creation

of knowledge, who bring their own distinctive insights and experiences to bear on the interpretation

and sense making of the museum, rather than acting simply as passive and grateful recipients of

curatorial decisions.

This perspective is premised upon the assumption that the museum is a public space that brings

together and puts into dialogue the past and the future, elite and public knowledges. In so doing, it

remains in keeping with the earliest traditions of museums whose origins are both actively

revolutionary, in that they were often set up to make the private public (taking elite collections and

putting them into the hands of the people); and potentially democraticin that, whether through

exposure to science, industry, art or culture, they were intended to equip people with the insights

and experiences to make good judgements in contexts of rapid change.

This perspective operates from the assumption that museums were always intended to be

worldchanging, in that they have always been deeply connected with democratic and educational

projects concerned with the wider goal of creating a better world. In 19th

Century France, this better

world can be understood as being about the creation of democracy itself. In Britain, more

problematically, the project was arguably concerned with Imperialism, Taste, Scientific Competitionand Trade.

So we might want to ask ourselves, in the second decade of the twentieth century - what are the

global projects that need to be tackled if we are to create a better world today? And how might they

be realised?

There are many challenges that a world-changing museum might want to address. But lets take three

as examples of the type and nature of problem that we could reasonably say museums should be

addressing today:

the creation of sustainable economic practices;

learning to live together in diverse and aging populations; balancing the relationship between technology and nature.

Lets take these in turn. First the creation of sustainable economic practices:

The publicity for this conference talked about the challenges of austerityfor museums and the

potential role of volunteers in this context. Arguably, this question should be reversed. It is not a

question of what volunteers can do for museums in a period of austerity, but what museums can do

for their publics who are struggling day to day with the experience of increasing economic divides in

the resounding absence of new approaches capable of building economic resilience for all. We are in

a situation in which the divide between rich and poor is increasing daily, youth unemployment in the

UK is at 20%, and the poorest are being increasingly presented as responsible for their own poverty.

At the same time, there is deepening positional competition within the middle classes for diminishingwork and services. This is not a recipe for a better world.

A second projectis the project of helping us work out how to live well in dynamic and aging

populations. Economic, technological, social and environmental factors are combining to create

highly diverse, older and mobile populations living in ever-larger cities. Significant levels of within and

between country migration are being driven by employment patterns and agricultural impacts of

climate change; better public health (for some) and declining fertility for most mean populations are

aging. These changes potentially bring real problems what happens to intergenerational solidarity

when over 50% of the population is aged over 50 by 2035; or when the grandparents of younger

workers are based in other countries? When a huge bulk of the population lives in cities, but is

completely dependent on very different rural communities for food and sustenance. These changing

populations also bring huge potential resources they offer rich access to a huge range of diverseexperiences of different age groups and different cultures that can enrich all of our experiences. They

offer the potential for new relationships of intergenerational learning that enhance all age groups.


3/11



3

A third project might be to address the dysfunctional human relationship with both technology and

nature. At a time when we are living through the early effects of extreme weather and its already

evident impact on crops and populations, when debates are raging about technological responses as

cause or solution to these problems, the dysfunctional but core relationship between humans, our

technologies and the ecosystems we are part of threatens the livelihoods and lives of billions around

the world. Understanding and reshaping that relationship is at the heart of the project for the 21 st

century.

All three of these challenges are complex, interconnected, messy problems. They are wicked

problems to which there is no single or simple solution. They are problems of practice and politics as

well as science and evidence. They require dialogue and the creation of common spaces in which to

work out and try out new ways of living involving multiple forms of expertise and points of view. They

require, in Aristotelian terms, Praxisin pursuit of theory: the grounded, dialogic, working out of new

ways of living through ongoing experimentation. And if this is essential then spaces for phronesis

the deliberative dialogue where we work out together what new standards we want to set for these

ways of livingare urgently required.

In the remainder of this talk I want to argue that, while the origins of museums were concerned withdemocratising the knowledge and culture of the powerful, the contemporary challenge of a world-

changing museum is to find ways to make powerful, the knowledge and cultures of the public

through phronesisby creating public spaces for debate, negotiation and the experimental

working out of new rules for living.

I want to argue in particular that the appropriation of digital technologies into the wider institutions

of education and politics, and the new developments that are emerging, make this challenge both

increasingly urgent AND increasingly achievable.

Digital technologies and public institutions of education

To explain the urgency of the challenge, I want to talk, first, about how digital technologies have beenappropriated within the other public education institutions with whom museums might, in the past,

have found some common ground in addressing these wider complex projects: the schools,

universities and institutions of politics.

Lets start with whats happening to schooling in the era of digital technologies.

In schools, despite over three decades of hype about the impact of digital technologies for

transforming learning (Selwyn, 2010; Laurillard, 2010), arguably the most transformative technology

has been the spreadsheet. Not the actual spreadsheet that the child encounters when puzzling over

how to learn mathematicsbut the symbolic spreadsheet that drives every teacher, every

headteacher and every Ministers annual appraisal (Facer, 2013). This is the spreadsheet that tracks

childrens educational progress in blocks of red and green, that compares children against their peersin the class, their school, their region, against children in China and Finland. This symbolic

spreadsheet seeks to make equivalences and comparisons between childrens learning around the

globe, and it becomes a hugely important measure of what counts as education for schools, for

parents, for children (Grek & Ozga, 2009; Ball, 2010; Lawn, 2013).

What does this mean for schools? The most generous interpretation is that this provides a much

greater degree of focus on individual childrens attainment than was previously possible. At worst,

this symbolic spreadsheet means a whole generation of children who have been taught to the test,

who know exactly where they fit in the ranking of successes and failures in education (Reay, 2009)

and who see learning simply as the route to gaining a certificate and (with luck and some helpful

networks) a job rather than a way of changing your life and reshaping your world. The democratic

imperative in education has been transformed from seeing a school as a prefigurative place (Fielding

& Moss, 2011) where you can learn about, think about and explore the possibility of a better world;

to school simply as a site for acquisition of personal benefit.


4/11



4

In universities, nervous eyes are presently trained on the growth of the MOOCs (massively open

online courses), which are freely available for anyone to participate. There are millions enrolled in

programmes ranging from computer programming, to creative arts to sociology, all around the world.

In its first 13 months, one provider, Coursera, had 2.8m sign-ups1. These courses are being massively

subsidised by universities at present, but they are offering a new conception of the university

experience. University education in many of (not all) these spaces is not about collegiate

development, but about highly targeted learning experiences oriented towards particular goals. In

some instances this is massively liberatingit opens up learning to a much wider range of people and

offers powerful new pedagogic approachesin others, this is a stripping down of the educational

experience to a consumer offer in which low quality experiences are rewarded with low quality

certificates. In either manifestation, however, this virtualisation of the university experience is

radically separating higher education experiences from a sense of place and a sense of participation in

a shared existence.

At the same time, a new industry of onlineand folk education has emerged. Some of it very exciting,

some of it of dubious quality (consider the online learning offerings, for example, from Kelloggs or

Disney). From the now regularly cited Kahn Academywhich is basically a massive collection of

online learning resources for science and maths with an online community and support network - tothe wonders of YouTube, where you can type in any sort of problem and will find that some

kind/strange person has created a video for you. How did we ever work out how to bleed radiators,

lay lawns, knit socks without some guy in the wildest reaches of Alaska having taken the time to make

us a helpful video?

Looking at trends in schooling, in universities and in informal learning, we could argue that the broad

direction of travel in public education practices is towards individualised, massified, often

instrumental, learning experiences. It is no longer clear that these spaces are continuing to create

opportunities to experience the messy difficulties of collective, convivial, shared learning that is

necessary to address complex problems that extend beyond the individual.

Of course, such trends can be reversedand the current evidence of student demand for more civicengagement in universities might suggest this will be the case. However, it does suggest that the

current landscape of public education in which museums might traditionally be understood to be

playing a role, is changing as schools and universities increasingly configure their students not as

citizens but as consumers2.

Digital Technologies and Deliberative Democracy

The other institutions where we might learn together to address collective shared, messy problems

such as those Ive talked about, are the political institutions that have underpinned the modern

nation state.

At the moment, however, there is a significant decline of confidence and participation in thestructures and institutions of traditional representative democracy in the West. In the UK voter

turnout at the last general election was 65%, for European Elections it was 34%3. Political party

membership is at just over 1%. To give a flavour of the declinein 1951, Conservative Party

membership was 2.9m, today it is 155,000. In the US, patterns are even lower, with only 54% turnout

in the 2012 presidential elections. At the same time, there has been a huge decline in local media,

even national media. The legitimacy of representative politics as a space for debating, negotiating and

addressing the question of how to make a good society, is being called into question by these trends.

Mitchell, M (March 13, 2013); "Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science".Scientific American. Retrieved August 30 2013.2Schools in the UK cannot currently be run for a profit, although this is expected after the next election. Private schooling, however, is inthe ascendancy internationally where state support is failing. See S.L Robertsons research, for example, on India and South Africa.3http://www.ukpolitical.info/Partystate.htm, retrieved 29 August 13
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-sciencehttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-sciencehttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-sciencehttp://www.ukpolitical.info/Partystate.htmhttp://www.ukpolitical.info/Partystate.htmhttp://www.ukpolitical.info/Partystate.htmhttp://www.ukpolitical.info/Partystate.htmhttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=massive-open-online-courses-transform-higher-education-and-science


5/11


6/11



6

The second powerful asset that museums can draw upon is that they are physical and public spaces.

They are places where, in principle, people can bump into each other, can make serendipitous

friendships, can simply encounter other people in all their riotous difference. The V&A was described

as a great caf with quite a good museum attached. This is often said disparagingly, but arguably, it is

precisely in the cafes that the real power of the museum lies for effecting social change. It is in the

points of encounter with other people, the convivial exchanges and conversations that can emerge,

that resources for exploring and negotiating new ways of living are developed.

Im thinking here, as an example, of institutions like Bristols Watershed, Manchesters Corner-House,

Glasgows GFT,whose caf-bars are important places for working, for bumping into people, for more

formal moments of socialisation around curated discussions. These are places where projects are

developed in the context of and between parents with baby buggies, pensioners enjoying coffees,

young casual workers hunched over laptops. These cafs are the descendants of the coffee houses

and the reading rooms of the 18th

and 19th

centuriesplaces where plans are hatched and ideas

shared.

Moreover, as physical institutions museums are implicated within and part of local ecologies of

government, of transport, of green spaces, of energy and resources. They cannot inhabit a separate

detached global space separated from the lived realities of local areas. If the local area is destroyed,so too is the museum. In the language of Asset Based community Development, they are anchor

institutions for employment, for culture, for consumption. As such, they are both implicated in and

able to speak and support a wider agenda of local politics and concerns.

Finally, museumswhether concerned with science or dressmaking, local heritage or designare

powerful repositories of our past futuresand of the human capacity to respond to change . They

remind us that not all of our futuresfeared or aspired forcame to pass; that interventions were

possible; that trajectories were changed, disrupted, transformed. They are powerful spaces for

thinking forwards through the past.

So, just to pull this all together -

1.

Museums have an urgent role to play in acting as public democratic spaces for mutuallearning to understand and address the wicked problems of our age - be this around

creating new forms of economic resilience, addressing population change, or living with

nature and our technologies

2.

Museums have powerful strengths that can be harnessed in pursuit of these roles they are

place based institutions that can bring people together in local areas; they are institutions

that have resources capable of promoting wonder, joy, delight and passion; they are

institutions that allow us all to learn from our past to think about the future

2. Hyper-local journalism, new materialisms & the data revolution 25 mins (read

fast)

I want to spend the second half of this talk exploring how three contemporary digital trends arepotentially powerful resources for museums who want to take on this project. These trends are:

participatory culture and hyper-local journalism; the merging of physical and digital; and what is being

called the data revolution.

What all of these allow museums to do is to rethink their relationship with publics as they make

visible the extent to which the lines between curators and publics, between volunteers and educators

is being blurred.

The first significant development is the growth in social media. Im not going to talk about this in

detail as I know this is being covered in workshops elsewhere throughout the day. However, I think

there are both some general principles that it is worth flagging up and some specific developments

that are of real interest.


7/11



7

In terms of general principles, what social media now begins to allow anyone with access to a

facebook account and an Internet connection to do is to become their own news source; to make

their own experiences, ideas and views available for public consumption. This has become normalised

over the last five years, but its worth simply reflecting on the fact that prior to the mid 2000s, the

process of getting your views online was significantly harder than simply posting a 140-character

comment via your mobile phone. We still havent, of course, fully understood what this will mean for

processes of public education practices is this the flourishing of a new age of collegiate learning? In

many ways, these tools make possible what Ivan Illich called peer learning or convivial learning in

the 1970s. Is this the emergence of a new cacophony that drowns out quality and insight?

For our purposes, the development that I think is particularly interesting is the growth of hyperlocal

journalism; in other words, journalism about very local areas. This is often citizen and volunteer led,

and is driven by a desire to keep people up to speed with the issues that matter in their local area.

These are not, however, small scale endeavours that can be dismissed as amateur consider, for

example, the Edinburgh Reporter, set up only 3 years ago, now with 60,000 unique subscribers and 10

million page views for their last edition. Run by local activists, student journalists and campaigners

for local democracyit involves live blogging of local politics as well as contributions from citizens of

images, comment and text on issues that matter to them. Then theres the SouthBlessed network in

Bristolthis acts as a platform for anyone to upload videos made in the South West. The organisationalso has a studio and space for people to learn how to create their own digital media.

The Creative Citizens project (part of connected communities) is making a significant contribution to

understanding these new media practices.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-

vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKw- show this one, first 2 mins

At a time when national and international media organisations are retreating from coverage of local

issues, this hyperlocal publishing practice is beginning to fill the gaps around local accountability,

debate and information.

The second developmentthat I want to talk about is the shift to a new materialismin technological

developmet, in other words, the increasing merging of physical and digital. This clearly has significantimplications for museums as the collecting, preserving and curating of objects is so central to their

practice. What we are starting to see is the increased augmentation of the physical object, so that

objects can carry and become a focus for multiple (and conflicting) narratives. The debate, discussion

and conversation that surrounds the artefact or the physical location, can begin to be held and

captured within that artefact to help prompt discussion and reflection. This is done in a number of

different ways:

First, there is the overlaying of digital information onto physical spaces in ways that are accessible via

mobile devicesconsider google maps etc. But also, hyperlocal journalism combined with augmented

reality, brings blogs and information to the precise places where there is a debate. Soyou are

walking down the street and are presented with information about the debate on how to develop this

particular historic building or local green space.

Second, there is the adding of digital information to physical objectsso that you can simply add to

and find out more about objects. One project we are working on at the moment is a digital resource

that allows older adults entering care homes to tell the stories of their lives through their artefacts,

that will be digitally enhanced.

Third, there is the physical representation of the digital as an overlay onto the physical environment

so this means that somehow, the digital information gets visualised in situ. Consider the Arnos Vale

Cemetary. The Future Cemetary Project -http://www.react-

hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/

Third, there is the re-materialisation of the digital into artefacts. This relates to the desire for the

tangible object as an object of curiosity and engagement to talk around, rather than the virtual.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKwhttp://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/http://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/http://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/http://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/http://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/http://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vdFVJz_E&list=UUH1uYt6uKXZtq4M0mWOFGKw


8/11



8

Recent projects in Connected Communities programme and the REACT heritage hub provide

delightful examples

Sound of the clockcapturing time in robots that can then play out experiences

The Digital Totem Pole & Digital Sentinel

Locating voices and ideas in artefactsthe Georgian ghosts and mirrors

Chronotapemerging physical and digitalPete Bennett

Finally, I want to talk about the massive growth in data.

We have always kept records of our lives through different media. Consider, for example, a retired

architect in one of our recent projects whose 100 strong snowglobe collection served as a stunning

visual display of his travels. Increasingly, however, we have massive personal datasets thousands

and thousands of photographs, emails, blogs, tweets, travel movements, that simple stream out from

behind us At the same time, others are collecting information about us our movements in cities,

our purchases in supermarkets, our online activities. This data is seen as a new natural resource, to be

mined and extracted to give new insights into behaviour and connections we werent aware were

possible. The NHS may soon become a hugely profitable system as it sells our personal data, for

example, to the highest pharmaceutical bidders one small loss of total anonymity to each person,one (in theory) massive benefit to human kind in terms of understanding the origins and prognosis of

disease.

The significant challenge this data landscape presents is the challenge of making this data legible in

ways that allow us to understand how it is being produced, to explore how we might make sense of it

for our own concerns and inquiries, and to work out how to make it public And here we need the

creative and expressive arts as much as the arts of statistics. People are starting to work on doing this

- Famous examples include Hans Roslings work on the Worldmapping project. More recent beautiful

examples include: Wifi Oslo (http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/) ; Whale

Hunt.

At some point soon, we can imagine citizens being able to play their way through the latest statisticson crime, transportor swimming their way through the historical archives by theme and period.

Bringing these three trends together, then, we are looking at very shortly operating in a context in

which publics are able to create and examine massive amounts of data that can be deeply connected

with local areas and with the objects that are held in museums. The citizens/volunteers/publics that

museums are engaging with are, equipped in this way, better understood as potentially powerful

collaborators with museum educators and curators in exploring and addressing the challenges of

contemporary living.

What does this mean for the museums?

Lets return now to the sorts of challenges of living that we are facing today and that museums needto address to avoid, in Robert Janes terms, slipping into irrelevance. The challenges we discussed at

the outset are complex, interconnected, messy problems. They are wicked problems to which there

is no single or simple solution. They are problems of practice and politics as well as science and

evidence. They require dialogue and the creation of common spaces in which to work out new

responses to the problems of living. They require, in Aristotelian terms, Praxisthe grounded,

dialogic, working out of new ways of living through ongoing experimentation and reflection. And if

this is essentialthen spaces for phronesisthe deliberative dialogue where we work out together

what new standards we want to set for these ways of living are urgently required.

The challenge for museums therefore, is to work out how to harness these new technologies and

socio-technical practices, to enable deliberative dialogue around problems of living.


9/11



9

There are many examples of museums who are already doing just that. I want to step back from the

specific example now, though, to take an overview of how we might bring all these different assets

Ive discussed together to address this challenge.

Museum purpose Challenges Museum Assets Socio-technical

practices

The creation of spaces

for phrnsis

(deliberative

dialogue/ virtuous

reasoning) to address

problems of living

Economic

Demographic

Techno-natural

Democratic

+

+

+

Public Space and

Place

encounters

between

difference

Objects as

sources of

wonder & insight

Powerful

narratives linking

pasts and futures

Participatory

cultures

The digitisation of

the material, the

materialisation of

the digital

Data proliferation

When we lay out these purposes, challenges assets and practices like this I think it is possible to

suggest that we are entering a new golden age for the museum as a site for public practical reasoning;

the digital helps to overcome some of the sustained difficulties that museum educators have been

facing for years, while the museums themselves powerfully counterbalance the limitations of digital

cultures. Together, they create the possibility for the museum to act as a resource by which the

different types of expertise and knowledge, of the powerful and the powerless, might be brought

together to address contemporary challenges.

In the past, for example, it wasnt possible for museumsbased on permanent collections to respond

particularly adroitly to contemporary challenges. The creation of a new major national gallery would

have to imagine it would serve the public and research for 30-50 years. It was too risky to seek to

respond to the now and the new. Today, however, as the physical and the digital increasinglymerge, longstanding exhibitions and historic objects can be virtually annotated and enhanced, placing

objects into dialogue with urgently contemporary concerns. And such resonances can be articulated

not only by curators, but by visitors and community researchers bringing multiple voices into dialogue

around the anchor of the object.

Reciprocally, the virtual polis which risks dying from ephemerality, can be hosted and grounded in the

material objects of history and in the public spaces of the museum. Here they will encounter the

longer time scale of millennia and centuries that is the business of museums, and the multiple other

people, perspectives and publics who inhabit the museums public spaces.

At the same time, exhibitions that have been constrained within the four walls, open only to those

already willing to enter the doors of the museum building, can be extended out and located virtuallywithin city streets. Their escape into the city can engage those who would never have entered the

building, and can elicit ideas and data from those who would before never have been allowed to

enter the world of the curator. The exhibitions can learn from the practical experiments of living

being conducted everyday by the citizens who surround the museum, can begin to surface the ideas

and examples that offer new standards and rules of operating that people are developing as part of

their day to day lives, and put them into dialogue with the disciplinary traditions and historic insights

of the curators and exhibitions within the four walls.

What might this look like practically? I want to conclude by working through one example that we

might imagine taking place that sought to combine the digital and the physical around a

contemporary challenge of living.


10/11


11/11



11

foster not just a debate within the museum, but an urgent public debate about the futures that we

are building together.

If thought about together, the museum and the emergence of participatory, data enabled networks,

have the potential to create powerful praxis knowledge, able to seriously intervene in the logic of

contemporary debate. The museum can once again be revolutionary, and its democratic impulse this

time will be not only to make the knowledge of the powerful accessible to all, but to make the

knowledge of all, powerful.

museums, technologies and social change: keynote for gems conference august 2013

Documents