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Thank Goodness for Museum Blogs!

A couple of weeks ago, I received a forwarded email from a friend that said that an extraordinary event would occur on the 27th of August; Mars would appear to be very close to earth - it would in fact 'look like the Earth has two moons'. Not being very clued up in things astronomical, I thought that this sounded pretty cool. I probably even forwarded the email onto a few friends as well.

Thank goodness then for the Sydney Observatory's new blog , produced by the Powerhouse museum. Reading one of their posts , I discovered, that this email was a hoax! Reading this, I felt a little silly of course, but not as silly as I would have felt all bleary eyed on the 27th of August. As Nick Lomb from the Sydney Observatory notes, you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. Except when you read it on a blog of course ;)

(thanks also to Bila + Design for the link to the Sydney Observatory's new blog)

Getting Dirty in the Museum

I’ve been thinking a lot about getting dirty lately. No, it’s not what you might think! Also, I’m not just talking about dirt alone, but our attitudes to getting dirty, both literally – getting dirt under your fingernails – and figuratively, as in really getting stuck into things, learning by doing.

I work in two different environments. One is a museum where dirt (more specifically dust) and dirtiness is the enemy. Objects are wrapped, boxed and placed in a storage shelf. White gloves are ever at the ready, stuffed into my pockets just in case I need to pick something up. Even better, don’t touch at all. This attitude of look don’t touch permeates throughout museums, applying to visitors as well with the ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ signs. At the museum I become a veritable clean freak where nothing makes me happier than knowing that the objects are being looked after.

Now to the other extreme! My other world is a community garden. Here dirt (more specifically soil) is everything. The garden is nestled amongst old industrial buildings, with much of the garden built on top of Perth’s sandy soil. Building the soil is a daily ritual. Fifteen compost heaps in total with a few large worm farms thrown in for good measure. The compost heaps are made up of shredded newspaper, grass clippings, manure, leaves and food scraps, all layered like a big lasagna, turned and watered regularly to make beautiful, rich humus.

At City Farm, I revert back to my childhood, stomping round in the dirt with no need to worry about keeping up appearances! The best part of my job facilitating workshops at City Farm is encouraging people to get dirty too. It is a hands–on learning approach with activities such as making worm farms and compost heaps. Last week I held a scavenger hunt, where kids scrambled around the garden attempting to solve riddles that led them to an object that had been recycled or reused. For example, an old basketball hoop, now used as a garden trellis for climbing plants.

I like to tell the kids that I just have one rule, and that’s that by the end of the workshop their hands must be completely covered in dirt! You would be surprised how many kids are reluctant at first, but most of them revel in the opportunity to do what they’re often told not to. Just imagine a bunch of kids, delving their hands into a worm farm, squealing with delight as they pick up wriggling worms!

We have become such a visual society, concerned with how we, our websites, exhibitions, homes, amongst other things look, that we all too often forget the simple pleasures of doing or making. As Bridget McKenzie from the blog
Cultural Interpretation and Creative Education writes:

‘What if we said that schools and other learning centres are not about learning but about making, if their purpose is not primarily to impart & test facts & skills but to make makers?’

The way I see it is even if the kids forget everything I’ve told them in their couple of hours at the garden, they may be more likely to plant a tree, recycle their rubbish or build a worm farm because they have had this experience of really getting their hands dirty.

While I might not be able to get the kids to dig up anything at the museum, with a bit of imagination we can look for new ways to ‘make makers’ at the museum as well. What did you DO at the museum today? Not what did you see.

Museum Photo of the Week:
Geometry in Art

Photograph by Chuck Berk (aka Chromazone)

‘MoMA, NYC . 2006 . Angles & Motion
Pictured sculpture ‘Broken Obelisk’ 1963-69 by Barnett Newman’.

Thanks Chuck, it’s a striking image.

Tags: museum, blog, photos, new york

Short and Snappy (No. 16):
Bumper Edition

There are so many links for this bumper edition of Short and Snappy that I’ve had to put the links into categories (you’d think that I work in a museum or something!) Enjoy the videos, sounds, photos, opinions, guides, widgets, collections and objects that follow.

Videos
The Power of Ten, the classic educational film by Ray and Charles Eames is available to view online. If you’re lucky enough to be in Melbourne, you can also visit the Eames exhibition and associated series of events until the 17 of July as part of the Melbourne Design Festival. There's a film night but it’s already booked out.
(Via Kottke)

The TED Conference (technology, education and design), is making a selection of their past lectures available online. So far, I’ve only watched Hans Rosling's talk, but it’s a beauty! Watch it to see the power of information design. The graphs aren’t all that pretty but they are very compelling.
(Via Information Aesthetics)

More to watch at Moving History, with more than 100 films from a selection of moving image collections in the United Kingdom.
(Via The Ten Thousand Year Blog)

Photos
Retro design - a compilation of scooter-related ephemera on Flickr.

Sounds
Take One Museum is a collection of six tours of museums in the United Kingdom with Paul Rose from the BBC as guide.
(Via Lena Maculan's article on podcasting at the 24hr museum)

Historical Sounds from the Free Information Society in MP3 Format

Articles
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has reworked the way it displays artworks in its European Galleries, and according to this article in Journal Star, ‘it’s a rethinking that is immediately apparent to an infrequent museum visitor’ where ‘paintings share wall space with clocks. Silverwork and sculptures are on pedestals strategically placed in the same room with the paintings’ and ‘All of the works in each room were made in approximately the same place at approximately the same time’. A timely article exploring the shift museums have/are making towards becoming more focused on the audience.
(Via Design Observer)

Guides
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) has brought out a guide on video games for parents available in PDF format. It provides a good summary of different genres of games, as well as looking briefly at the areas of concern for parents, such as violence. Now if only they’d bring out a game where you can run a museum!
(Via The Age blog Screenplay)

Widgets
Download the Rijksmusuem’s widget and get art delivered to your desktop on a daily basis.
(Via Musematic)

Competitions
The Ghost Nets Competition is clearly a design competition that aims to make a difference. The brief is to design a product which resuses ‘ghost nets’ that are ‘lost’, ‘deliberately discarded’ or ‘abandoned’ fishing nets. An added twist to the brief is that it should also be ‘easily manufactured by community groups for sale’. This appears to be a very worthwhile project, even if you're not a designer, the informative, well-designed site is still worth a visit.
(Via ABC's Catapult)

Designboom has recently announced its winner for its design competition with an altruistic bent, Shelter in a Cart. I think the most significant aspect of these competitions is that they bring important issues to attention.

Collections

Experience design, from decades ago, with this archive of the journal
Design. The issues range from the year 1965 to 1974, and conveniently it includes both the scanned pages as well as searchable text. Pictured
above is an image from the article Company Showcase on the BMW Museum.
(Via Core 77)

This online exhibition of Czech book covers, explores the avante-garde period of design between World War I and II. The online collection of book covers is comprehensive and allows you to browse by either design type, author, designer or year. Curated by Stephen Van Dyke, from the Cooper Hewitt Design National Design Museum.
(Via Design Observer)

A collection of links to movies and TV series featuring archives, art galleries and museums.

Objects
A little creepy, but oddly cute as well, Genpets, life-like sculptures of bioengineered pets, are currently on display at V-Gallery, Basel Switzerland. Not surprisingly, they've caused quite a reaction wherever they’ve been displayed so far!
(Via Sydney Morning Herald Blog Mash Up)

Email Mode your museum and design links for the next Short and Snappy.

Museum Photo of the Week:
Independence Seaport Museum

Photograph by ‘Squared’ (aka eismcsquare)

‘Squared’ has posted another beautiful photo of the Independence Seaport Museum, to the Museum Photos for Mode group. I am particularly fond of the description:

‘Another light and shadow moment. As if these ships are resting in harbor at the end of a long, difficult journey.

In a way, its true. They are now retired, and parked in a museum.

Taken at Independent Seaport Museum, Philadelphia. The one on the right is Olypia - Spanish-American War flagship. Its the oldest steel warship afloat in the world. She was launched in San Francisco, California in 1892. Decommissioned in 1922’.

Tags: museum, blog, photos, philadelphia

Getting the most out of Wikipedia

‘…The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous’
Cory Doctorow(Via Fresh + New* )

Chances are that unless you have been living under a rock (or *gasp* living offline) you will have heard, by now, of Wikipedia . For those of you who haven’t, let me fill you in. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia notable for allowing its visitors to edit and create its content.

Like many, I have been in two minds about Wikipedia. On the one hand, the wealth of information is extraordinary, but on the other, there is always the question, which Mike Barnes, from the Guardian, asked last year, ‘Can you trust Wikipedia?’

The answer to this question will differ depending on what you are using Wikipedia for. It is likely that Wikipedia’s content will always have a question mark over it due to its open source nature. However, this does not mean that it is not useful. Within the museum industry, Wikipedia can be a great research tool, proving particularly useful as a starting point, providing excellent leads to other sources. For example, last week, I stumbled upon the online version of the Cyclopaedia Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences , first published in 1728, whilst looking at Wikipedia’s entry for Colocynth .

In a paper presented at the Museums and the Web conference 2006, Jonathan Bowen and Jim Angus suggested that museums should think about creating their own entries on Wikipedia. They reason that this can enhance a museum’s online presence. Thankfully, for the less web-savvy among us, their paper helpfully provides a step-by-step guide on how to set up your museum’s Wikipedia entry, which they state ‘As a minimum…should include location information, a brief overview, correct categorization within Wikipedia and a link to the museum’s Web site’ (Bowen and Angus 2006).

Bowen and Angus also noted that as many museum professionals are specialists in an area, Wikipedia is a great way to share that knowledge with others. If the entry for ‘Museums’ is anything to go by, there are still gaps in Wikipedia, with the sections on museum ‘History’ and ‘Architecture’ very limited, as is another page on ‘Museology’.

So, give it a go!

*Seb Chan, at Fresh + New has posted a link to an interesting discussion about Wikipedia.

Museum Photo of the Week:
National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC

Photograph by Raymond Fudge(aka smata2)

Thankyou Raymond for your photo of this week, taken at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, labelled ‘Specimen 12’.

Tags: museum, blog, photos, washington dc

Short and Snappy (No. 14):
Where Fact meets Fiction Edition

In this edition of Short and Snappy, I invite you to follow the links to sites where fact meets fiction.

Special effects creator Ray Harryhausen is regarded by many as a legend to his field. The exhibition Myths and Visions explores his work, as well as his influences, which ranged from Willis O’Brien, known as the creator of King Kong, to the work of Charles R Knight, known for his depictions of prehistoric animals. A gallery of the detailed concept drawings are accessible online, if you can’t visit the exhibition.
(Via 24 Hour Museum )

The Cornell University Library has created a wonderful online gallery titled the The Fantastic in Art and Fiction . Easy to navigate and with a suitably dark feel, the gallery is divided into categories such as ‘Angels and Demons’, ‘The Marvellous’ and ‘The Grotesque’.
(Via Boing Boing )

Described by Boing Boing as ‘a bit of a jumble’, the Victorian Visual Dictionary is made up of excerpts from articles and images curated by writer of historical thrillers, Lee Jackson. Messy but fun, the site is a great place to get a feel for Victorian London.
(Via Boing Boing )

Just when you thought that you wouldn’t have to hear about Harry Potter again until the next book or movie launch, Palaeontologists go and name a dinosaur after Hogwarts, the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. As Matt Celeskey, from the Hairy Museum of Natural History reports,‘Dracorex hogwartsia, ‘The Dragon King of Hogwarts,’ is a new species of pachycephalosaur whose skull was covered in a fantastic array of spikes, tubercles, and hornlets’. A press release from the The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science tells the story.

If you have an interest in visual culture and history, BibliOdyssey is a wonderful place to browse. The latest post, contains images from Rosarium Philosophorum , a text on spiritual alchemy. It’s a great place to lose track of time.

What’s Happened to Mode?

Mode is getting a makeover, but despite a wonderful new design, we are hitting some snags to get it up and running. So please bear with us for the next few days and we hope you will enjoy a new, improved Mode soon!

Lisa

Museum Photo of the Week:
Independence Seaport Museum

Photograph by Squared(aka eismcsquare)

The best thing about Museum Photo of the Week is that I get to hear about museums that were previously unknown to me! So, thanks to Squared for this week’s photo, the Independence Seaport Museum, at Penn’s landing, Philadelphia.

Tags: museum, blog, photos, philadelphia

mode

Thank Goodness for Museum Blogs!

Getting Dirty in the Museum

Museum Photo of the Week: Geometry in Art

Short and Snappy (No. 16): Bumper Edition

Museum Photo of the Week: Independence Seaport Museum

Getting the most out of Wikipedia

Museum Photo of the Week: National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC

Short and Snappy (No. 14): Where Fact meets Fiction Edition

What’s Happened to Mode?

Museum Photo of the Week: Independence Seaport Museum

Museum Photo of the Week:
Geometry in Art

Short and Snappy (No. 16):
Bumper Edition

Museum Photo of the Week:
Independence Seaport Museum

Museum Photo of the Week:
National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC

Short and Snappy (No. 14):
Where Fact meets Fiction Edition

Museum Photo of the Week:
Independence Seaport Museum