Lecture
CANCELLED - Museum Talk: Negotiating museums and their digital interfaces
- Vince Dziekan (Monash University)
- Ross Parry (University of Leicester)
- Date
- Thursday 23 November 2023
- Time
- Serie
- Museum Talks at the Leiden Department of Art History
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 003
Negotiating museums and their digital interfaces
Vince Dziekan (Monash University) and Ross Parry (University of Leicester)
With introduction by Karin de Wild
Museums exude an air of confidence. This edifice is more than an image projected via their imposing architecture expression and its enduring physical statement; it’s also represented in the complex system of beliefs that the institution carries with it from a time-honoured past into a far-less certain future.
In this Museum Talk we will speak to the evolving nature of digital confidence in museums; why it has faltered (at times), why it matters (especially in these times), and how it may flourish (now, and as an integral part of the museum’s post-digital future).
We will notice how digital technology has changed the ways that museums manage collections, conduct research, shape exhibitions, and build relationships with their stakeholders and audiences. We will discuss how we see “them” – acknowledging that, after all, it is people that make museums – negotiating their digital interfaces from two angles: internally, by recognising how museums work with digital within the organisation and without through curatorial programming designed to connect the internal operations of the museum with socio-cultural processes that exist outside in the wider world.
In the first case, we will explore the elements that comprise a digitally-mature museum (its vision and leadership; its processes and systems; and its culture and people) before turning our focus to some of the ways that museums are drawing upon digital confidence to reshape their public-facing programmes. By sharing work that is leading to a new publication in the Critical Perspectives on Museums and Digital Technology series, we hope to problematise digital by treating it as something, at once, used (a tool), managed (a process), created (an object) and, perhaps most crucially, understood (a societal context and cultural condition).
About the presenters
Vince Dziekan is a Senior Academic and Practitioner-Researcher at Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA), Monash University, Australia. Together with Ross Parry, he is the Series Editor of a newly-launched book series with Routledge, entitled, Critical Perspectives on Museums and Digital Technology.
Vince’s work engages with the transformation of contemporary curatorial practices at the intersection of emerging design practices, creative technology and museum culture. The scope of this interdisciplinary investigation was outlined previously in his book, Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition: Curatorial Design for the Multimedial Museum (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2012), and, more recently, in The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication (co-edited with Kirsten Drotner, Ross Parry and Kim Schroder, Routledge, 2018).
He has published widely in traditional and scholarly, as well as non-traditional, modes through his independent curatorial practice. He has served as Associate Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal (Wiley), founding curator of MWX – the exhibition initiative of Museums and the Web (United States), and as an International Advisor on ‘One by One’ – a major Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project.
He is currently serving as General Editor of The Encyclopaedia of New Media Art (Bloomsbury; forthcoming).
Ross Parry is Professor of Museum Technology and Director of the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. Together with Vince Dziekan, he is the Series Editor of a newly-launched book series with Routledge, entitled, Critical Perspectives on Museums and Digital Technology.
A former Tate Research Fellow, and the former Chair of the United Kingdom’s National Museums Computer Group, Ross is also one of the founding Trustees of the Jodi Mattes Trust for accessible digital culture. He was also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (currently Advance HE).
A widely-read author, Ross’s books include Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007), Museums in a Digital Age (editor, Routledge, 2009), Museum Thresholds: The Design and Media of Arrival (co-edited with Ruth Page, Routledge, 2018), and, most recently, The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication (co-edited with Kirsten Drotner, Vince Dziekan and Kim Schroder, Routledge, 2018).
Since 2017, he has been leading the ‘One by One’ initiative – a major Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project, involving national governmental and professional bodies in the UK and US, that is focused on developing digitally confident museums.