Opening Remarks:

 

Nancy Proctor (NP) to welcome everyone.

 

Griselda Pollock (GP) is our Keynote speaker.

 

GP explores the ideas and themes of her book, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and Archive (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415413749/).

 

GP: The historian is a medium.

 

GP: Feminism is a network of relationships and ideas.

 

GP: There is nothing passive about looking at works of art. 

 

GP: We have the ability to create technology, but we often lack the judgment to know when not to use it.

 

GP: The museum is important because it is the conserver of our cultural memory.

 

GP: The museum is an important resource that will acquire new functions beyond tourism. 

 

GP: The Virtual Feminist Museum exists so far only in my books and lectures.

 

GP: Securing images for these projects can be bankrupting.

 

GP: How do we indeed create a feminist space in a museum that works towards improving the human condition?

 

Lara Perry (LP) & Margareta Gynning (MG) respond to Griselda Pollock (GP):

 

LP: What are the ethics involved with the process of judgment in relationship to technology?

 

GP: It is a question I am still making sense of for myself. Feminism will make something better through the process of critical thinking about the relationships between contemporary art, technology, innovation and the human condition. I want these ideas to play off each other. 

 

GP: Technology should be focused on emancipatory projects.

 

LP: How does technology provide a transformative encounter in museums?

 

GP: Technology facilitates people learning from others experiences and view points. Technology distributes the sensible.

 

End of the keynote and response.

 

Claudine Brown (CB) now presents "Access and Inclusivity in the Museum.":

 

CB: Began my career in museums through the CETA program, which is akin to the WPA. 

 

CB: Started my career at The Brooklyn Museum (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/).

 

CB: We sometimes make limitations that are not real. A lot of what we do is negotiation. It's about assessing the needs of our audiences and meeting in the middle.

 

CB: The public teaches us what they want. They help museum workers reshape our expectations.

 

CB: The museum is for everyone.

 

CB: How does the public capture their experience if they are not permitted to take pictures in museums?

 

CB: People see themselves as creating and curating their own experiences.

 

CB: We should try to help the public develop better curatorial skills, rather than tell them they are not curators without advanced degrees. This egg has already been scrambled.

 

CB: We have to let our audiences own what they see.

 

CB: The Smithsonian is the nation's museum.

 

CB: As the nation's museum, what is our responsibility to serve the people who will never come to the Smithsonian physically through technology?

 

CB: We want students to learn thinking skills and be problem solvers - not regurgitate facts and figures,

 

CB: Let the young lead us. They want to help us.

 

CB: The public is helping us augment knowledge of our collections through comments and social participation.

 

CB: We need to help people be part of our learning communities through technology.

 

CB: If you have good ideas, if you've seen good models, if you know promising projects - we are looking at learning together, but the education crisis in this country is so great. We know that we can't do it alone.

 

Kate Haley-Goldman (KHG) and Catharine McNally (CM) respond to Claudine Brown (CB):

 

CB: If women are not included in the authoritative voice of the museums, people won't believe they are part of the equation. 

 

CM: People want an independent experience of museums through technology.

 

CM: Technology can be good and participatory in museums.

 

KHG: The barriers to accessibility are internal. It's not about cost or time. It's our world view.

 

End of the second presentation.

 

Start of the afternoon session.

 

Patrik Steorn (PS) presents "Queer in the Museum.":

 

PS: The mandate by institutions to collect art based on "aesthetic quality" has consequences for the social and cultural interpretations of images.

 

PS: There are commonalities between ideals of beauty with respect to our viewing the andrognous in artworks.

 

PS: Heterosexual privileges have biased aesthetic judgments and led to the exclusion of queer perspectives.

 

PS: Identifying works as queer with tagging in databases might lead to greater discovery by the public or exclude works from the public because of premature censorship.

 

PS: Artworks act as archives of feelings.

 

PS: The alternative archive should resist public space and be shared on the terms of the community.

 

PS. The queer eye will always collect visions of itself in the museum and see itself elsewhere.

 

PS. Museums should allow for queer presences to occur on their own terms.

 

PS: Museums should facilitate queer meaning in their collections by displays, ground breaking research and with subversive social events.

 

Sherri Wasserman (SW) and Margareta Gynning (MG) respond to Patrik Steorn (PS):

 

PS: Questions labeling identity through tagging as means to democratize the museum experience.

 

MG: We can reach concensus by grinding through the landscape of questions surrounding gender and queer perspectives.

 

PS: Museums need to show an honest and directed interest in bringing queer audiences into interactive relationships with museums.

 

PS: The museum should come out the closet!

 

Reesa Greenberg (RG) presents "Feminist curation and exhibitions online.":

 

RG: Knowledge is not finite. It is a process.

 

RG: Independent websites for exhibitions are important points of access for connecting and reconnecting to museum content. 

 

RG: It is valuable to have installation images with audio online that give viewers a sense navigating the exhibition onsite.

 

RG: It is very difficulty to asses the impact of exhibitions as they move from different venues based on archival online content. 

 

RG: Art on websites is to often presented as factoids.

 

RG: The absence of installation photographs determines what questions about exhibition practices are raised.

 

RG: The acceptance of user generated content on exhibition websites is essential.

 

RG: I urge training for art historians, curators and students in web design and analysis.

 

Time for another break.

 

Kathrine Ott (KO) and Beth Ziebarth (BZ) respond to Reesa Greenberg (RG):

 

KO: We need to produce what we know in range of ways that people can access it.

 

KO: New media must not become another "old boys" club. New media can be outright exclusionary.

 

KO: The diminishment of the sensual is a result of consumer capitalism.

 

RG: Nothing substitutes the intellectual and sensual pleasure of seeing an exhibition in the gallery. 

 

RG: We need a distributed museum via social media rather than a master to slave dictation of information.

 

BZ: How do you (RG) envision using crowdsourced mobile content from visitors in exhibition histories?

 

RG: This type of content is already out there in the form of Flickr and blog comments. The question is how to bring that material together so that it can be used?

 

Now we have Peter Samis (PSSF) from SFMOMA presenting "New Media as Counter-Narrative and Corrective.":

 

PSSF: Presents examples of SFMOMA interactive media projects (http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactive_features).

 

PSSF: In the old days of oral history, people used recordings to produce a transcript and then the tapes were erased.

 

PSSF: Modern art - like all the objects we exhibit - exists in a framework of meanings.

 

PSSF: The white cube of the gallery removes the framework of meanings.

 

PSSF: There is a continuum between experts and novices. Somewhere along the line, that leaves us to restore context.

 

PSSF: Bring the voice of the museum to the archiving of incidents and actions subversive of the museum's own paradigm.

 

Respondents to Peter Samis (PSSF) are Nancy Proctor (NP) and Nicky Bird (NB):

 

PSSF: The place where experimentation with interface continues is France. American websites are a bit more blog based. There is a trade off with accessibility and longevity. Archival practice is also an issue.

 

PSSF: So many of the early CD-ROMs were artistic expressions unto themselves.

 

PSSF: In the past, websites were considered finished.

 

NB: What is the viewer's relationship with a particular work in a particular space? How do images document that relationship?

 

PSSF: The web works in different space. Artworks are in relation to other works on the web beyond the gallery space.

 

NP: If your museum is not videoing artists interviews, you are making a big mistake.

 

PSSF: In the gallery, video is no longer a preferred medium. You want people to look at the art, not at their screens.

 

NP: It is always the artists who show us how to use new technologies. Art is key to innovation.

 

NP: People tend to be fascinated by biographies of artists. Why are we so drawn to that? That question allows us to pick away at other assumptions. Who do we assume an artist to be? This very question is influenced by the cannon of art history whether we recognize this or not.

 

PSSF: It is not just art that has a limitations of understanding. It is objects in history museums. It is lots of things.

 

PSSF: We are humans. We relate more easily to humans than we do to objects. A human is an easy path into an object.

 

End of discussion. 

 

Now we will create the agenda for tomorrow's workshops.

 

Workshop Ideas:

 

Digitized artifacts as acts of generosity

Being an artist and how to fit into the intellectual cannon or not. (theory and practice: whose?)

Relationships of web design and content

Putting theory into practice using technological design

Politics of knowledge and how it's acquired , eg. the experiences: what is museum's responsibility online and onsite? (knowing, thinking, feeling: avoiding reducing those to "enhancing...")

Pivotal images that "turn the mind"

Feminism's interventions...Queering the museum...Challenging people to shift their centers to recognizing others desires * Not just an alternative view; allowing yourself to be challenged, as a feminist and queer theorist

Redundancy as a positive value - problematic mass-market/ blockbuster economics and thinking

*The Market and utilitarianism: different kinds of economics beyond global profit

Challenging the sacredness of the object

Writing art's histories - also applied to archives and more...(the wiki)

Problematizing tags & metadata