Iceland in December
Mariana Salgado, from Media Lab, University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland, gives her impressions of the recent international conference on digital technology in museums (NODEM) held in Reykjavik.
Dulwich OnView was asked to participate in the section - ‘Social Media and Museums and Cultural Heritage’
What I like about a conference about museums and new technology is the variety of vocabularies and voices. NODEM (Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums) was not an exception. There were archaeologists, designers, engineers, art historians, architects, producers, researchers, and computer scientists among others.
What I liked even more was the size of the conference. There seemed to be around 100 participants. This allowed for constant bumping into the same people, and having continuity in the dialogue. It was easy to find common interests and people who I wanted to talk to.
Among the various themes of the conference there were explorations in handheld devices, embedded technology, games, three-dimensional modelling or visualizations, and social media. (Dulwich OnView fell into this last category).
Some projects highlighted the intention for accessibility. Some concentrated on demonstrating solutions, such as the tilting table for map navigation in the case of Pingeyskur Sögugrunnur. Some focused on the development process and others in their future intentions. Yep, there was a good mix.
Two projects were really surprising: “IXP Engaging Exhibition Spaces” and “The Mediated Window”.
IXP was a project by the Center of Interactive Spaces in the Kattegat Marine Center. Visitors can make a fish by joining fish parts, and learning about their resulting functions in the process. But the fun part is that they can release these creations in to virtual water and then use virtual hydroscopes for looking at this virtual ocean in which their fish were swimming. It was participatory, creative and it motivated the inclusion of groups and children.
The other project, The Mediated Window, won the first price of the competition. It was a window that looked like a normal window and enabled remote presence. The researchers involved were from The Royal Institute of Technology & The Museum of National Antiquities, in Sweden. In the museum there was a window to an excavation site and in the excavation site there was a window to the museum. I loved the example that they showed in the video, where someone in the excavation found a piece of a cup and the museum guide on the other side showed the person in the excavation what the complete cup would look like. It was an extremely simple idea, well implemented, and with a lot of future potential for development.
Kevin Walker, (from London Knowledge Lab at the Institute of Education at the University of London) gave a key note which was great, especially in the way he mixed smoothly the concrete projects in the exhibitions with his theoretical framework. It was easy to understand it, although it was quite of a complex work. He showed various examples of his work. One was applying immersive technology in a participatory installation. Another was a project using mobile devices for adding visitors’ content in the form of audio and photographs in a website.
Icelandic delecacies - smoked lamb on something and coffee
Some of the questions that were posed during the conference still resonate in my mind: When implementing social media in the museums, what are the strategies for the sustainability of the projects? What happens when the project finishes with the user generated content gathered? What are the pros and cons of tailoring platforms for visitors’ content instead of using existing ones, such as Facebook or MySpace? How to balance curatorial authority with visitors’ ones? [Dulwich OnView was asked these questions]
An inspiring place, Reykjavik was perfect for this cosy meeting in which the Icelandic hospitality, even in times of crisis, was shown in its best.
Kevin Walker has also written a round up of the conference ‘Nordic Digital Excellence’
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One Comment
I agree on the whole and I could add the keynote by Joakim Sauter from ART + COM which set a fokus on the design part of the discussion. This aspect has been discussed widely in Denmark in the recent decade, and Joakims perspective for the future was interesting. If only he had had a little more time..