Experimental Museology
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EXPERIMENTAL MUSEOLOGY Experimental Museology scrutinizes innovative endeavours to transform museum interactions with the world. Analysing cutting-edge cases from around the globe, the volume demonstrates how museums can design, apply and assess new modes of audience engagement and participation. Written by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and research-led professionals, the book argues that museum transformations must be focussed on conceptualising and documenting the everyday challenges and choices facing museums, especially in relation to wider social, political and economic ramifications. In order to illuminate the complexity of these challenges, the volume is structured into three related key dimensions of museum practice – namely institutions, representations and users. Each chapter is based on a curatorial design proposed and performed in collaboration between university-based academics and a museum. Taken together, the chapters provide insights into a diversity of geographical contexts, fields and museums, thus building a comprehensive and reflexive repository of design practices and formative experiments that can help strengthen future museum research and design. Experimental Museology will be of great value to academics and students in the fieldsof museum, gallery and heritage studies, as well as architecture, design, communication and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to museum professionals and anyone else who is interested in learning more about experimentation and design as resources in museums. Marianne Achiam has a PhD in science education, and is an associate professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Michael Haldrup is a professor (wsr) in visual culture and performance design at Roskilde University, Denmark. Kirsten Drotner is a professor of media studies at the University of Southern Denmark and director of two national R&D programmes DREAM and Our Museum. EXPERIMENTAL MUSEOLOGY Institutions, Representations, Users Edited by Marianne Achiam, Michael Haldrup, and Kirsten Drotner First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Marianne Achiam, Michael Haldrup and Kirsten Drotner; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Marianne Achiam, Michael Haldrup and Kirsten Drotner to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-40676-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-40677-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80843-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun CONTENTS List of figures vii List of table ix List of contributors x Acknowledgements xv Introduction: for an experimental museology 1 Michael Haldrup, Marianne Achiam, and Kirsten Drotner PART I Institutions 13 1 Experimental museology: immersive visualisation and cultural (big) data 15 Sarah Kenderdine 2 Museography and performativity: performance design for impossible objects and immersive displays 35 Rodrigo Tisi Paredes 3 Reflecting on experimental museology at the Museum of Memory of Colombia 50 Jennifer Carter and Cristina Lleras 4 Across the doorway: developing post-critical museology from a closed university museum 67 Erika Grasso and Gianluigi Mangiapane vi Contents PART II Representations 81 5 Colonial heterotropics and global heritage aesthetics in Roundhay’s Tropical World, Leeds 83 Rodanthi Tzanelli 6 Advocacy of shock: how to bring art to life (and its visitors with it) 100 Mieke Bal 7 Museological organisations in Brazil: between doors and grids 117 Wescley Xavier, Diana Castro, and Vanessa Brulon 8 Experimental innovation in museums: encouraging creativity, building confidence and creating social value 133 Haitham Eid PART III Users 147 9 Exhibitions as a collaborative research space for university-museum partnerships 149 Palmyre Pierroux, Birgitte Sauge, and Rolf Steier 10 Transforming astrophysics in a planetarium: ‘we are part of the universe, the universe is part of us’ 167 Line Bruun Nicolaisen, Marianne Achiam, and Tina Ibsen 11 Participatory design as concept and practice in the experimental museum: the case of the Workers Museum 184 Anne Scott Sørensen 12 Implications and perspectives for experimental museology 199 Kirsten Drotner, Michael Haldrup and Marianne Achiam Index 206 FIGURES 1.1 Jazz Luminaries, Infinity Room II, ArtLab 2019 24 1.2 Jazz Luminaries, Infinity Room II, ArtLab 2019 25 1.3 Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive: motion capture and Kung Fu Visualisation 27 2.1 Left: immersive space displaying video-holographic forms of indigenous people of the past interacting with people living in the present. Right: local descendant listening to local stories about her own ancestors illustrated by archaeological drawings. Here, design elements stage an encounter between past and present, provoking questions of a ‘dead’ past versus living heritage 40 2.2 Left: TAIRA’s eave: main triangular panel of the found rock- art. Right: TAIRA’s eave installation, a multimedia immersive wall animated with mapping at the MCHAP in Santiago 41 3.1 First-floor plan of the Voces exhibition in Bogotá. The exhibition was divided into three axes: Land, body and water. The circular space represents the memorial, a ‘house’ occupied the centre square and the forum was located to the far left 59 3.2 Life-sized portraits and life histories of female human right leaders in Medellín comprised exhibits in the case study dedicated to Comuna 13, a territory historically marked by displacement and other forms of violence within the city 63 5.1 The main TW building includes a ground and an upper level that communicate through elevated walkways 88 5.2 Each quarter of the walkways includes signposting that discusses the species of the room/area 90 6.1 Section of room 3, ‘Fantasy’ 103 6.2 The left side of room 4, ‘Loneliness’ 108 viii Figures 6.3 Older Munch (self-portrait in the back) looks concerned about three tragic events (on the right) 112 9.1 Research lenses in university-museum partnership 151 9.2 Exhibition experiment in Fehn gallery 157 9.3 Virtual views of nature (left) and architecture (right) as seen in headset, from same physical orientation 159 10.1 The development of Made in Space took place in a series of workshops and was recorded in a number of documents (shown in italics). Analytically, the development of the exhibition can be divided into a ‘what’-phase and a ‘how’-phase 171 10.2 The restructuring of the content for Made in Space from the scientist workshop (left) to the core team workshop (right) 176 TABLE 10.1 The main actors involved in the development of Made in Space. The astrophysicists are all members of faculty at Danish universities, while the communicator and planetarium staff members have graduate degrees in astrophysics and work professionally with science communication. The Researcher is a PhD fellow in science education, and the designers are employed at a professional exhibition design firm 171 CONTRIBUTORS Marianne Achiam has a PhD in science education, and is an associate professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research is concerned with how the science of scientists becomes embodied in science education and communication contexts (e.g., museums) to eventually become the science of the public. She is especially interested in how this process of transformation is conditioned and constrained by disciplines, institutions and societies. She has published research in international, peer-reviewed journals in the fields of museology, science education and science communication, and has authored several chapters for peer-reviewed anthologies published by Springer and Routledge. Kirsten Drotner is a professor of media studies at the University of Southern Denmark and director of two national R&D programmes DREAM and Our Museum. Her research interests include children’s media and information literacies, digital co-creation and creative learning, and digital museum communication. She is (co-)author and (co)editor of more than 30 books and over 200 scholarly articles and book-chapters, most recently The Routledge handbook of museums, media and communication (co-edited, 2018). An elected fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Academia Europaea, the International Communication Association and recipient of the Association’s Applied Research Award, she is passionate about bringing research evidence to bear on policies and practices. Michael Haldrup is a professor (wsr) in visual culture and performance design at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has written extensively about the performance turn in cultural/social theory, especially with regard to heritage and leisure/ tourism