I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel’s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong.

We were talking about Twitter again in a recent class, more specifically what we consider to be a successful museum tweet, and why. It’s very hard to nail down, and even harder to do. The main reason is because it’s so hard to avoid becoming a marketing ploy, something which happens without rapt attention. A museums use of twitter now stands as an analogy for the way the actual museum interacts with its visitors and the traditional barrier between the inner workings of an institution and the public at large. So many museums need to release their stranglehold on twitter feeds to actually let interesting information get out.

I was at the Indianapolis Greek Festival this past weekend, and I couldn’t help to think that they were doing something right.

There were throngs of people, tons of Greek food, everyone jostling and yelling and having a great time, but here’s the part that baffled me- you had to pay to get in, and the food was delicious, but quite pricey. What is the Holy Trinity parish doing that connects so much with their audience that museums cannot seem to do? I think we can be the Agora marketplace discussed by Dr. Steven Zucker (@drszucker) and Dr. Nancy Proctor (@nancyproctor) a vibrant place for community and discussion, in the same way that the Greek festival is. I think the problem is balance- how do we sell ourselves as experts in our field while maintaining that we want everyone else’s opinion, too?

Some people are getting it right, figuring out how to sift through all the noise and clutter to connect with their audience while maintaining their voice. One such person is the British musician Imogen Heap, who felt a divide between herself and her fans before she started to utilize blogs and Twitter, not dissimilar to the separation between and institution and it’s community. In a recent interview with Melissa Block on NPR, she describes the divide quite succinctly. She then discusses what it’s like to have that direct connection throughout the process of making her music.

It’s been so amazing. I’ve always struggled with this barrier that I felt like I’d had up until blogging came along. Just one comment from somebody really sparks something in me. It doesn’t need to be this huge wall between me and the listeners anymore. I really thrive on that.”

@ImogenHeap gets it- the audience has become part of the process, and there’s no going back.

In Tan’s composition “Ghost Opera”, part of the first concert presented in the IMA’s newly renovated Tobias Theater this Friday, gongs talk to splashing water (yes, water); stones talk to cymbals, and the breath of a monk talks to a Chinese lute (a pipa).  It’s going to be a visually stunning, dramatically lit piece in which the musicians won’t be sitting still.

Photo courtesy of Nana Watanabe

This event is the result of a collaboration between the IMA and the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis — an excellent partnership.  IVCI is selling the tickets for the November 21 performance, entitled Virtuosos & Visions—click here to get yours.

I’m hopeful we will not need a professional crying team here in the week before The Toby opens.  In the past month has been filled with the installation of an awesome sound system, 35mm projectors, and yesterday, a movie screen.  Last week we unpacked the Comfy Sacks, massive red bags filled with recycled packing material, that will probably be the most coveted seats in The Toby when we show a film.  Ushers will likely have to break up fights over who gets to sit in the Sacks.  Ushers also get to experience Toby events for free.  [Interested?  Go here].

If you come to the concert, feel free to reply to this post with comments.

Here’s to an auspicious beginning for the IMA’s Tobias Theater…

Sottsass and the members of the collective, including young architect Michele De Lucchi, broke through the “tyranny” of modernist taste by making furniture made from leopard print plastic laminate, celluloids, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals, jazzed up with spangles, glitter, and crazy color combos. Memphis got its power from the ubiquitous cheese of consumer culture.  The old guard modernists turned their noses at the flamboyant movement; the mass media ate it up.

Then, in 1985, at the height of Memphis’ popularity and influence, Sottsass walked away, like a Super Bowl-winning quarterback who turns in his cleets when you’d least expect.  Memphis left the design world in an identity crisis.  Was modernism dead forever?  How long can one subsist on glitter, and can it feed the soul?  What to do when the avant-garde is no longer so?

Thursday, October 30, come to the IMA to hear the rest of this story, as told by Penny Sparke, professor of design history at Kingston University in London.  Sparke will spin the tale of what happened after Memphis and how European designers, no matter how fragmented, marched onward with the reinvention of industrial and product design.

Sparke’s talk is an appetizer for an exhibition opening next March to the IMA: European Design since 1985: Shaping the New Century.  Visit the IMA next spring and you will enter a fun house of chairs, lamps, teakettles and knifeblocks you never thought possible.  Stay tuned to the IMA blog over the next few months for more design chatter.

The goats had stepped aside and the rain blustered outside. Eighty diners piled into the hay-filled dining hall for a five-course extravaganza presented by Slow Food Indy. Slow Food in an international movement working to reconnect people with the pleasures of real food, sustainably produced. Money raised from the dinner was used to send several local chefs and cooking students to Terra Madre, the global gastronomic gathering in Turin, Italy.

Participating chefs stood on hay bales to present their courses. Regina Mehallick of R Bistro bestowed the heirloom tomato soup. Former Elements chef Greg Hardesty presented his Tortilla Espagnole—a quiche-like dish made from the sweet eggs of alfalfa-fed chickens and topped with Indiana sweet corn salsa. Goose the Market owner Chris Eley served lamb-stuffed-with-ground-lamb raised on the farm where we ate, along with a sweet potato mash flavored with chestnut honey, parsley, and crunchy duck cracklings—amazing.

For dessert? A rustic cake of apples, ginger and crystallized ginger with crème anglaise and pecans, prepared by Amanda Taylor of Ivy Tech Community College culinary arts program. Just when I thought the blissfest was over, here came a plate of butter cookie twists embellished with pine nuts, made by a local church lady.

It was an auspicious meal, cooked and eaten with full consciousness of the aesthetics, politics, and poetry of food.

If you’re into food at this level, don’t miss nationally-known chef and food educator Alice Waters’ visit to the IMA’s Tobias Theater Tuesday, December 2. Waters is the founder of the Chez Panisse restaurant and foundation in Berkeley, CA. She also created the Edible Schoolyard project to integrate food (and gardening) into every aspect of school curriculum. Alice is also the subject of a juicy new biography (juicy in more ways than one). Alice Waters tickets go on sale today. Watch the IMA blog for Noelle Pulliam’s interview with Alice.

If you knew your next meal were your last, what would you have? Bon appétit.

Talking with Boureima during his short stay, I became conscious of the inherent contradictions that African museums represent. Contemporary African museums inherited their collections from the European colonial governments that established them. Colonial museums in Africa were originally created for the enjoyment of white visitors; black Africans were not admitted.

Their collections consisted primarily of traditional objects – masks, sculptures, and other artifacts – that were often displayed to demonstrate the inferiority of the African cultures represented. In many cases objects were acquired by reprehensible means – deceit, theft and violence. So now we come to the place where the contradiction gets really complicated: The collecting practices were shameful, but some of those objects represent traditions that have almost disappeared. If they had not been “collected” they might have disappeared, along with memories of the understandings they represent. Another complication: according to Boureima, few ordinary Africans today are interested in visiting a museum to view such objects. Whether because they feel disgust at the colonial repression such collections represent, or because they would rather experience traditional material culture within the context of events and practices that have survived in the villages, many Africans consider the museums in their countries to be irrelevant to the lives they live today.

What a conundrum! Collections that represent traditional knowledge and worldviews in danger of being lost, held by museums that have bad karma, are under-funded and run by staffs with little opportunity to develop their professional skills, and are unsupported by the public. Why should Africans or Americans care about the potential loss of these objects and traditions as African museums crumble or are destroyed in the violence of civil war? Aren’t phones and the Internet, banks and commercial development, and, most of all, effective education and health care the most urgent concerns for all of us? Of course all of these are vitally important.

Here’s where I started to think about an analogy that might be found in environmental studies: biodiversity. We know that when species are lost, the healthy diversity of the gene pool and of life forms in the ecosystem is weakened. More homogeneity equals heightened vulnerability to disease, climate change and other threats Diversity is nature’s insurance policy. It allows life forms to adapt and respond to challenges. The earth is itself a complex, healthy system when diversity is maintained. Is it reasonable to think in a similar way about culture? As we lose languages and ways of understanding the world, is human potential somehow diminished? As mass communication and a global economy prevail, is it possible we lose ways of thinking, distinguishing and valuing that could make human life more creative, compassionate and resilient?

I don’t know the answers, but I’m asking – thanks in great part to two days spent with Boureima Diamitani – a man who has dedicated his life to these questions. I hope this is the start of an on-going conversation between the IMA and WAMP.