Finding the Middle Ground

Last week in the New York Times, Michael

Kimmelman proffered “Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks,” a timely article for the pending seminar on the significance of technological innovations for museum operations.  Kimmelman reports that researchers from the Glasgow School of Art intend to visit Mount Rushmore in April 2010 in order to create laser scans and computer models of the site.  The models will be far from ordinary, as they are meticulous, three-dimensional copies that come within a fraction of a millimeter of accurately depicting the original. Far surpassing the precision of photography and film, this technology plays up both nostalgias and forecasts; the design has the ability to recreate images of earlier environments or project developments in urban planning.  In essence, the Scots provide cultural keepers a staggeringly literal, nearly holistic version of entire cities—conserved and reinstated—in virtual realities.  What will technology, such as the kind proposed by the Glasgow team, mean to institutions like the National Building Museum or the Natural History Museum?

In the midst of the article, however, a warning flag appeared.  Kimmelman included a quote from one of the associated architects, Douglas Pritchard, which declared, “Technology doesn’t lie.” In a postmodern world where scholars mull over notions like the hyper-real, the validity of the photographic image, and the ability to capture anything “original,” how did technology manage to escape dissection and dissolution? 

On the opposite end of the discourse is the director of “La Caixa” Foundation Science Museum (Barcelona), Jorge Wagensberg.  Wagensberg champions the “real” objects and cautions against the overuse of technology, which he says potentially jeopardizes a visitor’s trust (a familiar phrase) and problematizes the research of an institution.  He further rationalizes that “there is also the matter of respect for the visitor, who should not have to be constantly asking whether what he is looking at is real or not.”  Essentially, Wagensberg redistributes the question “is it art,” pervasive in the studies of art in- and outside of museums or galleries, to “is that real” for the debates on technology.  Also notable, “La Caixa,” as punctiliously noted by Wagensberg, is a science museum, not a science centre.  He explains the difference between the two institutions: the museum is “a place with static objects,” while the centre is “a museum of phenomena.”  Pause.  Can objects—science or art or anything else creative—found in museums not also be considered phenomena?  Not to mention, his appalling label “static” essentially ousts a great deal of contemporary works like performance art, which seems far from “static.”

Nearly the entirety of the cultural network is responding to the ubiquity of technology: organizations like DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials); artists, such as Tony Oursler (check out his really interesting, borderline disturbing work Moving Images); and scholars, for example Lisa Gjedde and Bruno Ingemann (Researching Experiences: Exploring Processual and Experimental Methods in Cultural Analysis) as well as Phyllis Hecht (The Digital Museum).  Undoubtedly, traditional museums will also take steps to remain relevant in today’s technological environment. What progressive moves will be made, however, remains to be seen, but hopefully these moves will lead the museum to a middle ground, one between the ideas of Pritchard and Wagensberg!