Slides for talk as part of New Media and Museums at CUNY, new York, April 22 2014. "How are cultural institutions using innovations in design to capture and retain public attention? This discussion explores ways in which museums are using digital media to connect audiences with places and one another. Guests include Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art; Sebastian Chan, director of digital and emerging media at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; and Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moderated by the Graduate Center’s Lev Manovich"

1. @sebchan
director of digital & emerging media
cooper-hewitt national design museum
labs.cooperhewitt.org | freshandnew.org

2. formerly powerhouse museum, sydney

4. this is not:
!
your new twitter account
your new online video series
your new website
your new gallery kiosk
your new app

5. we have retreated
from the promise of
the web

6. we have retreated
from scale

7. “digital” should be:
!
enabling new forms of scholarship
enabling new forms of public engagement
enabling new forms of exhibition
enabling you to collect the present
enabling a new type of institution

8. “A period of protracted
superdensity. Dystopia
and chaos all at once.
The New Normal.”
Anab Jain

9. ‘families’ or ‘scholars’
‘curriculum focus’ or ‘free-choice learning’
‘experience’ or ‘information and fact’
‘exhibitions’ or ‘collections’
tensions
‘buildings & galleries’ or ‘platforms & media’

10. changing publics

11. virtual tours by google

12. robot guides & gallery telepresence

13. “enchanted objects” in the world

14. asian art museum 3d scanning
3d printing from collections

15. Museum of Old & New Art, Hobart, Tasmania

16. no wall labels

17. personal visit reports

19. 1 of the 19
smithsonian
museums

20. location

21. “just a minor
renovation”

22. science museum
explain
art museum
inspire

23. “a ‘design museum’ sits between
the art museum and the science
museum. it can draw attention to
the processes, choices, human
decisions in the making, not just
the finished object”

24. cooper hewitt collection has always
been a ‘working collection’

26. THE MAKING
OF
A MODERN MUSEUM
BY
ELEANOR G. HEWITT
WRITTEN FOR
THE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON CLUB
1919
“Naturally constant use will
have a tendency to damage,
even destroy certain objects ...
but ... if in that time an artistic
tradition passed on ... the
existence or non-existence of
these objects will not seriously
matter, and during all that
time the Museum will have been
fulfilling its destiny”
!
Eleanor Hewitt 1919

27. Poster, "El Dominio del Fuego (The Domain of Fire)", Luis Vega .1972 Poster, "Otis Rush", 1967. Wes Wilson

28. Birdcage In The Form Of A Church, mid-19th century

29. Planter, ""Hyvalysti" Garden Tool Set", 1988. Kai International Co., Ltd. Radio, "Tykho", 1997

31. Button Showing West Indian Scene, late 18th century.

32. Cricket Cage, late 19th century.

33. Figure, "Cat and kitten", late 19th–early 20th century.

34. revel in our
history and the
quirks of
collecting

35. 0.3% fit in galleries
~10% photographed
212,000 objects

36. “digitisation of
objects is only the
first step”

37. how is it made?
why was it made?
how does it work?
why is it important?

38. people, places,
context, stories

39. narrative & context
metadata
2d/3d images
knowledge?

40. data release on github.
metadata as ‘cultural source code’.

41. museums as a
‘global seed bank’ of
culture and ideas

42. visualising the ‘shape’ of the collection

43. Jim Davenport’s relative dimensions
of 70k objects from Tate’s collection

44. “the porous
collection”

45. beta collection explorer nov 2012

46. easy public API for the collection

47. “institutional
wabi sabi”
see http://bit.ly/14MTYrK

48. interfaces that privilege browsing

49. interfaces that draw attention to details

50. building a house in
the middle of a
flowing river
source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30674396@N00/68903700/

51. supple architectures
source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30674396@N00/68903700/

52. “capacity building
for the present”

53. “new forms of
curatorial
practice”

54. Chair, "Solid C2", Patrick Jouin , 2009. Digital Media Player, "iPod Nano", Apple, 2009 Mobile Telephone, "iPhone", Apple, 2007

55. Software and Source Code, "Planetary", Bloom Studio, 2011.
first iOS app in Smithsonian

56. planetary as code on github

57. not a single object but versioned

58. open source as a preservation experiment

59. also sits on a shelf
just to be safe

60. born digital
objects are a
trojan horse

61. source code as EPS, INDD & PSD files?

62. Thermostat, "T86 Round", Henry Dreyfuss, Honeywell Inc, 1953 "Nest Learning Thermostat", Nest Labs, 2012

63. do we need a Nest
user/s dataset to
make sense of this
in the future?

64. a world of cheap tiny sensors

65. eric fisher’s locals vs tourists: new york

66. “the future of the computational
humanities is itself going to be
turning to the increasingly
heterogeneous digital fonds, data
sets, data dumps, corpora of
software and images and logs of
transactional data.”
!
Trevor Owens, 2014, Library of Congress

67. we remain constrained
by organisational
structures built
around 20th C
publishing

68. these experiments
are necessary to
shift our attention
to the present

69. @sebchan
director of digital & emerging media
cooper-hewitt national design museum, nyc
labs.cooperhewitt.org | freshandnew.org
thanks