Yesterday, I spent an hour with five African-American and Latinx boys from West Harlem. All gamers. Over Zoom, we chatted about the role games played in their lives, how it helps them to be who they want to be in the world, and how my client (a local university) might be able to recruit youth like them by speaking to interests generated through games.
My final question was “Who likes to go to Musuems, or art galleries?”
Sometimes, timing is everything.
The hour BEFORE the focus group I had been co-leading a conversation on ClubHouse about what many of us had been learning at the recent MuseWeb conference. I was invited by Jacques Haba to run this with him, and it was super fun. In fact, this was our third of three in the series.
Jacques, for example, spoke about one session which caused quite a stir. It was about the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit, which go to cities and transforms warehouse spaces with high resolution video projects of the works of Van Gogh. These sort of “Instagram museums” drive museum professionals nuts. They are seen as pandering to people’s desire to take selfies, denigrating the power of museums, and shouldn’t even be considered museums.
In our ClubHouse chat, many hands were raised. Participants shared their perspective, complicating the issue. One artist spoke about the power during the pandemic of projecting her own art for others onto her studio walls. Someone else spoke about how, where she lived in the global south, the idea of going to a wax museum to take a photo with Michael Jackson makes no sense; on the other hand she could see how it made the experience more accessible, and could have value if the wax figures were historic figures from her own country.
I then introduced a new topic, sharing highlights from my favorite session that went behind the scenes with Seb Chan and Simon Loffler of the new Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Their new “Lens” is an object all visitors get to use as they move through the Museum, visually modeled after the old ViewMaster Viewers. It lets visitors interact with every object in the museum, often creating their own, and let’s them curate the objects into their own personalized web site. While ACMI has only been open for a few months, and is still suffering from the pandemic, visitors have already used the Lens to collect 1.23M objects.
I am particularly interested in the Lens because Seb created something similar when he worked in NYC at the Cooper-Hewitt (I wrote about it back in 2015). I wanted to learn if it could translate to a different museum. The Pen was the same concept, but rather than use it to make videos, the Pen was used to collect examples of design. I was enthralled by it and wondered why the idea hadn’t been picked up by all museums.
So the ClubHouse chat ended and I went right into the focus group. We spoke about what they learned from playing games, how they deal with racism and sexism when they encounter it online, how they use games to manage their emotions, and more. Then I asked if anyone goes to museums. There were two responses.
The first boy responded, “I’ve been to a wax museum. That’s pretty cool.” I could hear the ClubHouse chatter responding in the back of my head, “No! Don’t do it!”
Then a second boy said, “Depends on what type of museum.”
I replied, “Tell me the type that would interest you.”
He said (and here comes what motivated me to write this entire post): “Like, it has to be interesting like – I don’t know – it could be something with art in it. It could be like this museum I went to downtown. You get like special pen and whatever you like, click it with the pen and you save it and like, it’s so fun to do. I like that. I was like, I’m cool.”
The Cooper-Hewitt, I asked? He said, Yeah.
Two different conversations about museums, in two different contexts, with two different audiences. What to make of the convergence? For me, it let me reflect on how excluded these youth of color felt from museums and how behind we are in welcoming them in. Using sensational “tricks” to get in the visitors (wall projections, wax figures) might walk a fine line between crass commercialism and addressing critical issues pertaining to diversity, equity, access, and inclusion. But that concern must not stop us from exploring how digital tools (the Pen, the Lens) can broaden an exhibit’s accessibility and engagement for the broadest numbers while still serving more noble educational and social goals.
