by Terry Makewell, National Museums Online Learning Project (Victoria & Albert Museum)

You would find it hard to locate a museum in the world which doesn’t say that it is interested in engaging with its audience in new ways. A logical way of doing this is through the digital environment. This is especially apt as one of the foundations of Web 2.0 is user generated content.

There are many examples of museums inviting the audience into their digital environment, but there are also examples of museums getting the audience more involved in exhibitions themselves. This is not a new idea and has been implemented by many different museums across the world.

‘Inspired by…’ (an exhibition close to the heart of our project) is the Victoria & Albert’s annual art competition for people on part-time courses. The aim is for participants to create a work of art or craft inspired by the collections. These objects then make up the basis of the exhibition. It is solely for newly created work and doesn’t use anything from the collection itself in the displays. This video shows one of the people who exhibited this year talking about their work. There are many museums which run similar exhibitions where people have created work inspired by that particular museum’s collection.

The next degree in inviting the audience in is to mix the museum objects with those brought in by the public. Visitors to Museums are now being invited to help ‘curate’ exhibitions. The Science Museum undertook such an exhibition in late 2006 with ‘Playing with Science…your favourite toys’. The exhibition included some treasured toys from its medical‚ science‚ engineering and computing collections‚ alongside some of the public’s own toys. The toys aimed to provide an insight into how children and adults engage with science and how technologies have shaped the world today. Visitors were asked to write their own exhibit label, explaining what their toy meant to them and why it should be on display at the Museum.

The Tate have taken this a stage further with the ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’ exhibition. Visitors are invited to contribute content to the exhibition in an online environment. By uploading their photographs to Flickr and joining the ‘How We Are Now’ Flickr group and contributing their photograph they can join the ‘Tate family’. The photographs that are placed in the group are judged by a panel of curators, artists and photographers who will select 40 photographs. These 40 photographs are then used to form the final display in the gallery for the last month of the exhibition. The final 40 images will also be archived on Tate Online as part of the exhibition’s website. Through digital means the public are engaging in the exhibition and ultimately the collection. This participation is the first of its kind in the UK where we have seen a museum utilising a third party website to facilitate visitor participation in the creation of a join exhibition. This is an exciting step into involving the pubic to a greater degree with museums and their collections. It is certainly something I hope that we will see more of.

We have previously seen exhibitions that have been solely created by the public and ones that the public have helped to curate by bringing in their own objects. This leads onto a new breed of exhibition competition where the public’s objects are part of an exhibition permanently remembered in the digital environment. The obvious missing stage is recording the creative process that the public undertake when they are being inspired to create such objects. Perhaps they are creating a wood carving, a painting or a scientific paper after obtaining inspiration from a museum. Wouldn’t that be an interesting journey to follow and understand? This is one of the areas that the National Museums Online Learning Project is currently researching into. Prototyping of these ‘Creative Journeys’ is currently taking place on nine national museum’s websites. It’s a very exciting time.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am and is filed under Culture online, New in the sector, Technology, Guest blogger - Terry Makewell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.