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GALLERIES HERITAGE ARCHIVES CULTURE

Issue 19 • -id.com MuseumiD Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the Future of Museums, Past and Present. Museums ID 19: 31-37. Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks Creating incredible Multimedia experiences for the Cultural and Heritage Sector For those who expect MORE...

Whilst strong storytelling skills continue to be a must, todays visitors require more sophisticated entertainment and an innovative approach to education and interpretation; which is where ATS really comes into its own. Focused on stretching the boundaries in terms of communication, we create high quality tours and visitor experiences which will engage, enhance and deliver multilingual and access friendly content to your visitors. Our solutions include our unique iTouch Multimedia Guide handsets, Mobile apps, and more traditional audio-guides. Our standards are very high. Our teams are led by creative producers with valuable expertise, and we have studios with an experienced production and editing team. We’d like you to think of us as creative collaborators. We’ll not only design absolutely what you need in terms of access and interpretation - we’ll take it to the next level. Please make contact and share your requirements; you may be surprised by what ATS can achieve for you and your visitors. A Future - as imagined by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1967 © University of Pitt Rivers AD 2065: The Future of Museums, Past and Present by Dan Hicks, Associate Professor of ,

hat will the Pitt Rivers a kind of artificially endless present simply puts this capsule into reverse, Museum in Oxford look tense. Each glass-fronted case is a focusing only on the detritus of the Contact ATS today to enhance like in fifty years time? I’m stopped watch. Everyone (even the human past. So let’s get the old W Curator-Archaeologist) quickens their archaeological joke out of the way probably the wrong person to ask. I’m your visitors’ experience an archaeologist, so my academic pace as they pass the fossils and at the outset: The Future’s Not My discipline is usually concerned with the dodo, skip down the steps, and Period. thinking about the past not the walk back out into the fresh air and This is not to say that future. And I’m a museum curator, so the sunlight to resume the normal Archaeologist-Curators never think my institution is normally concerned passage of time. A museum like about the future. In the history with keeping things stable, the Pitt Rivers is more time capsule of the Pitt Rivers one example of T 023 9259 5000 E [email protected] preventing decay, loss or change. than time machine, built to bring such thinking springs immediately objects to a standstill. Archaeology to mind, and it is one that came www.ats-heritage.co.uk Museum vitrines are designed create 30 31 Full Page Adverts.pdf 1 29/06/2016 15:52

Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the Future of Museums, Past and Present. Museums ID 19: 31-37. Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks

Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Dan is a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, a Trustee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and directs the AHRC-funded Oxford University Museums Collaborative Doctoral Partnership programme. He has published widely on C Archaeology, Anthropology and M Museums, and his books include Y See Objects in an Entirely New Light The Oxford Handbook of Material CM Culture Studies (2010) and World Drawing for proposed new site for Pitt Rivers Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1967 © University of Oxford MY Museum (2013). Twitter: CY

@ProfDanHicks CMY

K about just over half a century ago. Nervi’s proposed concrete studio and print library; a suite In October 1964, the Pitt Rivers and glass rotunda was 92 metres in of workrooms for post-excavation Museum appointed a new Curator diameter, providing 28,400 square research; and a coffee bar and a (its third since 1891). Bernard Fagg, metres of interior space across restaurant. a distinguished archaeologist and four stories (two of which were An enormous glass dome curator, had been the Director of the underground). It brought together enclosed a special tropical and National Museum in Nigeria, where the full range of Archaeological subtropical ‘Climatron’, inspired by Objects and stories share the same With ColliderCase you can: "Stories surround and interact with he had rebuilt the museum. From and Anthropological activities the iconic domed planthouse built at stage. Requiring no smartphones, no objects in enchanting and the moment of his appointment Fagg of the University at one site: the the Missouri Botanical Garden in St special glasses, and no learning curve. • See inside objects enlightening ways." began work on a plan for a new Pitt collections of the Pitt Rivers and Louis in 1960. The circular galleries Visitor focus is firmly on the object: with • See how they work Rivers Museum. Patrons including the Balfour Library, the Institute of allowed for the anthropological and enjoyment, insight and appreciation. • See their history unfold ColliderCase creates a truly engaging the French anthropologist Claude Archaeology, the Institute of Social archaeological collections to be • See their internal workings learning experience. Objects are Lévi-Strauss and the premiers of Anthropology, the Laboratories for arranged both geographically (by Absolute clarity. • See them come to life, or back to life animated, their stories unfolding in a Ethiopia, Senegal and Malaysia Physical Anthropology, Environmental circumference), and typologically or • See fine detail that is easily missed magical way. were gathered. A decree authorizing Archaeology, and the Research temporally (radially). The proposed The technology is invisible, only the • See hidden aspects and meanings the purchase of a new site in North Laboratory for Archaeology and museum would have looked quite storytelling and object can be seen. • See missing parts Please visit collidercase.com or Oxford from St John’s College was the History of . There would be in character among the buildings • See them reunited with other objects virtualcase.com for more information. adopted by Congregation. And in three lecture rooms; a Centre for of Tracy Island – the secret South • See greater meaning in objects 1966, a design for the new museum Musicology with a recording studio; Pacific base of the International was commissioned from Italian a range of museum laboratories Rescue organisation in the children’s architect Pier Luigi Nervi and London and workshops; a Photographic television programme Thunderbirds architects Powell and Moya. Department with darkroom, (first broadcast 1965).[i] @collidercase 32 www.collidercase.com #collidercase33 Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the Future of Museums, Past and Present. Museums ID 19: 31-37. Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks

Fagg’s plans to leave the Victorian building behind were unsuccessful for a number of reasons. There were protests from the residents of Bradmore Road, and Portfolio works with your Collection Management System problems in reaching the fundraising targets. But the project also suffered from a flawed vision of the future. It was, to borrow a term coined by the composer Leonard B. Meyer, a ‘chronocentric’ plan.[ii] Anthropological museums have often been charged with ethnocentrism, but Fagg’s archaeological chronocentrism was driven by his own immediate modern intellectual concerns. In Fagg’s vision of the future, temporal, geographical and typological arrangements were resolved in a single display regime, and the full range of archaeological and anthropological endeavour was brought together at a single location for the study of world culture, past and present. This finality of vision moved away from the spirit of Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ own more open-ended vision of the future of typological museums which, writing in 1891, he imagined ‘would require constant rearrangement’, to the extent that ‘the cases might, perhaps, be put on wheels to A Future Pitt Rivers Museum - as imagined by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1967 facilitate their readjustment’[iii]. © University of Oxford How else might we think about the future of the Pitt Rivers Museum in fifty years time – a full of museum visitors alone tell us grown to more than 3,500 by 2013. century after Fagg’s unsuccessful much. To take some examples from In the universities, interdisciplinary scheme? We might start with thinking the UK, during 2013-14 there were interest in museum collections and about the present day in a different 6.7 million visitors to the British material culture is burgeoning. The way. Today we are living through Museum and 6.4 million to the economic and social impacts of a period of rapid technological . Oxford University’s museums are now widely recognised, changes comparable with those four museums – the Ashmolean, Pitt from tourism to the quality of life and of Victorian Britain. The Victorian Rivers, Oxford University Museum of wellbeing that people gain from living Museum Age, and the evolutionary Natural History and Museum of the alongside culture. Perhaps even the thinking that accompanied it, was History of Science – received more longstanding decline in individual • Quickly find digital representations of collection objects to a large extent a response to the than 2.1 million visitors. As visitor giving to museums – the tradition of technological and social changes – numbers have grown, construction philanthropy to which the Pitt Rivers • Track CMS related information such as accession number, changes in transportation, empire, and expansion has transformed owes its beginning – may be starting artist name, title, or other custom fields the measurement of time and space, museums around the world. In very slowly to abate. urban form, and material culture. 2013, reporting on the re-opening But signs of a new Museum • Convert assets on demand instead of creating and The digital transformation of the Rijkesmuseum, the Van Gogh Age are clearest in digital culture storing unnecessary duplicates of knowledge and culture is just Museum and the Stedelijk Museum itself. The hundreds of millions of getting underway, but there are in Amsterdam, the New York Times online visitors to museum websites For more information and to try already strong indications that announced ‘a golden age of museum and open access resources are it will bring in its wake a second renovation’.[iv] In China, the 25 one small part of this. Many more Portfolio for free go to: Tel: +44 1604 654 270 Museum Age. The sheer numbers museums that existed in 1949 had billions of everyday curatorial acts www.extensis.com/heritage Email: [email protected] 34 35

P1-Ad-MuseumHeritage-MuseumID-20141117.indd 1 11/25/14 8:18 AM Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks (2016) Pitt Rivers AD 2065: the FutureMarket of Museums, leading Past and Present. visitor Museums ID attraction 19: 31-37. management software Further details: https://oxford.academia.edu/DanHicks Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfDanHicks

far beyond the museum, will be Online - Offline integrated // EPOS // Online Ticketing // ignited and reignited. DMA will require us to build not new galleries, but new research centres where objects are freed from cardboard boxes and ziplock bags. DMA will serve to re-humanize museum objects. Historic collections will no longer gather dust, and undoubtedly new forms of contemporary collecting will emerge. DMA will not diminish the museum as an institution, but will strengthen it by unlocking the cabinets. The first step in the process will be to recognise that museums are places not just for the display of information, but for the co-production of knowledge. Museums, in other words, are not just collections of objects, but always collections of ideas

Dan Hicks, Associate Professor of Archaeology, University of Oxford, The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum © University of Oxford [i] See discussions in Mike O’Hanlon’s recent book The Pitt constantly going on around us. Walk Duke of Gloucester, was followed Rivers Museum: a world within through the centre of any historic in 1683 by the benefaction of Elias (2014, London: Scala) and Chiara city, or pause to observe museum Ashmole that formed the basis of Bleckenwegner’s 2014 essay visitors in the galleries, and you see the ; and in ‘The Unbuilt Pitt Rivers Museum’ people documenting, cataloguing 1884 by the donation of the Pitt (typescript on file at the Pitt Rivers and sharing what they see, where Rivers collection. Each of these Museum). they are, who they are with, what moments - 1480s, 1680, 1880s – [ii] Leonard B. Meyer 1967. Music, Online Ticketing // EPOS // Online - Offline integration // they are thinking or feeling, through was intimately related to new kinds of the , and Ideas: patterns and an ever-widening array of apps and knowledge: Rennaissance, Empiricist, predictions in twentieth-century Powerful, fully-hosted online Utilise complete EPOS functionality A feature-rich online portal allows the devices. Some lament the second- Evolutionary. culture. Chicago: University of ticketing solutions designed for the sale of merchandise, tickets, handedness of visitor experience Next, Digital. The Museum creation of events, tickets, products Chicago Press, Chapter 7. to match your existing website memberships, Gift Aid items and refracted through screens, but Age of the 19th century was focused [iii] Augustus Pitt-Rivers 1891. memberships and online entry redemption, engagements with museum objects on exhibitionary practices, where a Typological Museums, as exemplified branding. Tickets are emailed more. Supported by a versatile all supported by thorough reporting have always been mediated and curatorial vision presicely shaped by the Pitt Rivers Museum at directly to customers allowing back-office package, the easy-to- facilities with 24/7 access. Offline mimetic. The screens of their what was selected and presented Oxford, and his provincial museum them to be printed or scanned use front-of-house system ensures integration provides even more devices simply develop new kinds of – an approach that continued into at Farnham, Dorset. Journal of the directly from smartphones. that the first interaction your functionality – allowing all the above with engagement with collections from Fagg’s grand 1960s scheme. By AD Society of Arts 40: 115-122. visitors have is a positive one. the added safety of not being dependent older technologies – the glass case, 2065 a Digital Museum Age (DMA) [iv] New York Times 1 May 2013. the cast, the photograph. will have unfolded those practices. upon internet connectivity. In long-term perspective, Museums will remain public This essay was first published in Oxford University’s collections institutions, but digitalism will have the 2015 issue of Crossword - the have developed over six centuries, transformed the public realm. Open magazine of St Cross College punctuated roughly once every methods will replace exhibitionary - and was written as part of 200 years by new benefactions practices. DMA will happen not just the celebrations of the 50 year and institutions. The opening in in the galleries, but mainly in the anniversary of St Cross College, 1488 of Duke Humfrey’s Library, storerooms. Connections between Oxford. It can also be found on Dan housing the manuscripts donated objects in different repositories, and Hicks’ blog: http://profdanhicks. Merlinsoft// by Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st with people, places and communities blogspot.co.uk/ www.merlinsoft.co.uk Market leaders in design and innovation. 36 01226 294413 Empowering customers by providing37 [email protected] tailored solutions to meet individual needs