Exploding Borders

​By Jane Szita

In the Netherlands, as everywhere else, the development of digital technology has coincided with a quiet revolution in the role of the museum in society. Heritage institutions have become more aware of their audience than ever before, thanks to the democratisation of the industry, a change in emphasis in collections away from the elite and the extraordinary and towards the everyday commonplaces of community and social history, and — last but certainly not least - the need to prove themselves worthy of funding. The latter factor has added urgency to the modern imperative to ‘find new audiences.’ At the same time, says Virtual Platform Director Cathy Brickwood, technology allows the once-insular heritage sector to address that increasingly important audience as never before. The question now is, how to do it, and what to say? Possible technological tools range from the ubiquitous (the internet, mobiles, and the PDAs which sometimes replace the familiar audio tour), to the up-and-coming (like the RFID tag, although hopefully not used to the extent of the pioneering Japanese museum which embedded no less than 7,000 into the floor of a single exhibition room), and the unique (the Memory Table designed by Mediamatic that was showcased in the VP workshop, the Take Away Museum, and which is now being used by Amsterdam’s Imagine IC in a project to preserve the memories of elderly Indonesian immigrants to the Netherlands). The choice is already extensive, developments are bewildering swift, and heritage professionals rarely know much about the latest technologies — except that they are lagging behind.

Social dynamics

"It’s often as if heritage institutions are almost dreading the next wave of technology," says Cathy Brickwood. “For many of them, they’ve just got a website, and now they’re supposed to be interactive. The role of the VP is to help make it all more manageable, by pointing to examples, setting up workshops to foster practical knowledge, and connecting heritage people with technology people." As part of this role, the VP encourages heritage organisations to see that technology alone is not the solution, but rather part of the problem — which is to define a role for themselves in the contemporary social and media landscape. "Technology was the big driver of the past," says Dick Rijken, a lecturer and consultant whose clients include some the Netherlands’ largest museums. "These days, however, projects have — or should have — much more to do with relationships and social dynamics; technology alone doesn’t cut it." The new prominence of the audience, adds Rijken, means a big change in curatorial roles: "The big thing is presentation in collections now, not conservation," he points out. "And digital archives mean that the responsibility for what is actually seen in a collection has passed from the curators to the users themselves."

"It’s not a question of ‘doing’ something with digital culture," agrees Riemer Knoop, a consultant on e-culture and heritage and a former member of the Raad van Culture (Dutch culture council). "Just putting up a website is a one-way street. Instead, heritage organisations need to organise their audience, creating a network of which they are just one part, to make the communication two-way. It’s a big mistake just to put the responsibility on the desk of one person — and it’s usually the one responsible for external communications — because really applying technology properly means turning around the whole structure." His top tips for heritage organisations trying to digitize are, "Don’t do it yourself — instead, invest in medialabs. And don’t throw money at the problem — it’s more effective to approach it with an open mind instead. The trouble is, it’s hard to say sensible things about the situation, and people are tempted to take refuge in action. They try to solve ‘it’, without knowing what ‘it’ is."

Building bridges

The VP started operating in the heritage sector in order to provide a link between museums and the medialabs in which the Netherlands is so rich, such as the Waag, V2, and Mediamatic. Invitably, it found that along the way it needed to play a key role in opening minds to new possibilities. "Our organisation got involved with the heritage sector two years ago," recalls Cathy Brickwood. "Museums, archives and the like were becoming more and more interested in using new media to reach new audiences, and from a new media perspective they are of course important content providers. The background to this is that the last decade had seen a lot of investment in digitising heritage, on the national and European level, but this rarely seemed to have paid off. So, with this in mind, we started to look at innovative approaches." The VP acts as a much-needed bridge: "the worlds of the heritage sector and new media have traditionally been very far apart," says Brickwood. "They are two different cultures." Accordingly, because the VP initially lacked direct links of its own with heritage institutions, the last two years were spent partnering DEN (Vereniging Digitaal Erfgoed Nederland), the coordinating body for all digital heritage projects: it was "a good partnership," says Brickwood, who nevertheless points out that while the VP’s main focus has always been innovation, DEN’s prime orientation was towards standardisation.

Making new media visible

In this period, the 2004 and 2005 Summer Schools (part of the Amsterdam New Media Institute or ANMI) were two-day intensive courses aimed at showing heritage professionals (curators, educators, or project leaders) what they could do with new technology. The goal was to stimulate practical involvement. Similarly, the conference coorganised by VP with DEN didn’t just feature speakers on the subject of heritage and technology, but involved participants in a workshop about games and museums. "With our workshops and courses, we always carefully tailor content to ensure that no one is alienated," says Brickwood. "After all, it’s difficult sometimes to persuade people that they need to sit down and talk to practitioners in completely different fields, when they think they should be in a group of people all doing exactly the same job." Now the VP has built up a solid reputation in the heritage sector, the cooperation with DEN is ending, as the organisations head off into different territories. The VP’s remit remains "to spread innovative new media through the whole cultural sector," says Brickwood. "The heritage industry is a great source of innovation, and that’s why the two workshops we’ve done so far in 2006 (Valentina Nisi’s workshop on mobile storytelling and the Take Away Museum) were for that target group. Our starting point is basically that new media is not sufficiently visible, and that the new media industry is not linking makers to clients. That’s where we come in."

New programme

The VP is now embarking on a three-year programme that will feature workshops, expert meetings, and a conference, Culture 2.0, at the start of 2007. The activities are, as always, designed to unite different kinds of people, from policymakers to academics. "This makes the VP unique," says Cathy Brickwood. In addition, VP will be involved in documenting best practises and in applying the best international ideas to the Dutch context. Ideally, says Cathy Brickwood, the dialogue between museums and medialabs should be two-way. "There is a tendency for the new media people to come along and say, ‘Look at all this great technology!’" she says. "But then there’s not much input coming from the other direction." She identifies failures of communication as the main obstacle in heritage new media projects: "There’s sometimes a lack of respect for different backgrounds, and a lack of awareness of the expertise involved in other fields." Brickwood sees a major current trend in archiving content in dynamic ways; the VP was recently able to link ISEA, with its project to archive its whole collection, with De Balie, which is developing its own Open Source Living Archive software — an obvious partnership, but one that might never have happened without the good offices of the VP. "Also, there’s a trend now in thinking that new media isn’t really new anymore," she says, "which means that it can just be lumped into ‘arts’ funding. So a consequence is that specific aspects of projects, for example, technological infrastructures, are just not covered. So I see it as role for the VP to lobby for awareness of what is specific to new media. Not all ICT money should go to big universities and research departments — it should also go to the independent media labs. Holland has plenty of these, and the Dutch heritage sector is therefore in a strong position, as it has them to work with. They can offer both a longterm relationship and a quick turnaround — important, as most projects now tend to be one-offs."

Amateur involvement

Brickwood notes positive feedback from the VP events, which have resulted in some very promising concrete developments. For example, following her VP workshop, interactive storyteller Valentina Nisi is now working on a project with Imagine IC, the Amsterdam Zuid-Oost-based organisation devoted to the heritage of migrant populations. ‘Tracks and Trails’ will combine real and virtual, exploring the geographical space of the area with a number of themed walks. "The way we use new media is to collect stories from first generation immigrants, and pass these on to a larger public," says Imagine IC’s Bibi Panhuysen. "New media has many advantages: it is non-static, it allows multi-layered stories, it crosses all cultural and generational barriers, and it presents few difficulties for amateurs — ordinary people can easily get involved." She notes to the democratic tendency of ICT: "Chatting is a great way to involve experts in discussions — in a way that they can take part, but not dominate completely," she says.

Panhuysen initially contacted the VP when she was seeking some examples for a storytelling project. "They came up with some great ones," she says, and she continues to find inspiration in VP events: "the workshops really widened our horizons regarding technical possibilities," she adds. Nevertheless, Imagine IC’s approach is resolutely content-led, and Panhuysen readily attributes its success to determined networking: "We always consult our target group in developing our projects," she says. "This gives them a personal stake. It’s their stories we want, after all. And we are careful to have a reciprocal relationship with our medialab developers. If the Waag was just leading the way all the time, it simply wouldn’t work."

Time capsule

That Imagine IC is a relatively small organisation is undoubtedly one of its advantages, according to Riemer Knoop: "The best innovations and most provocative solutions come from small companies, because they are intrinsically more flexible," he says. But another key to success is the ability to cooperate and share resources with others, and he argues that the future will be increasingly dominated by a kind of convergence. "I think we’ll see more heritage institutions sharing the background of digitisation, which in turn will mean redefining relationships with other players," he says. He cites examples that have succeeded in creating what he calls an ‘exploded borders’ approach — in which the museum is seen to successfully transcend the limits of its physical building and material collection. "The Tylers Museum Game Zone, the result of a collaboration with the Waag, plays with the time lag between the foundation of the museum 250 years ago, and the present, and projects the same amount of time into the future," he says. "It conveys the idea of the museum as a time capsule, through a game. Then with the Identiteitsfabriek ZO Brabant, identity is seen to consist of landscape plus memory plus heritage objects. The project isn’t about museums as such, but about virtual space connected with real space where you can construct identity."

"Collaborative projects make a lot of sense from the audience’s perspective," agrees Dick Rijken, pointing to successful hybrid exhibitions like the recent Rembrandt-Caravaggio blockbuster. He also cites the Zicht op Maastricht project, which combines input from various heritage institutions to tell the story of Maastricht through different physical locations — with the possible goal of turning it into a tourist guide. "They aren’t worrying about form yet," he says. "They are finding the stories first, and the form will come." On an abstract level, he adds, digitising heritage has much to do with "designing context for content. Museums often cling to the oldfashioned idea of their raison d’etre — to preserve objects. But really they have to redefine that. Many people are asking questions that the museum can’t answer; it’s quite possible that the audience might know more about certain objects. Museums could address the role of gathering all the knowledge out there - but this takes a very different mentality. It also raises lots of new issues about quality control and so on."

Plural realities

In the past, the museum presented a single version of events, one usually based on the underlying linear premise of ‘progress.’ In the future, this certainty itself seems likely to be consigned to the dustbin of history. "The future of the museum will no doubt be more complex and more chaotic than its past," says Dick Rijken. "There will be less certainty as to what is true, more room for error, but ultimately more room for pluralism. Museums will be able to reflect many truths and many realities. But they first have to start exploring different roles." Cathy Brickwood, who with the VP will be discussing such philosophical ramifications with the Hague-based Nederlandse Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, agrees. "Technology isn’t being fully taken advantage of right now," she says. "People are still failing to appreciate how it can be used to reach different people in different ways, whether in making collections accessible to bigger numbers, or allowing ordinary people to add their comments to a collection. The VP is trying to ensure that heritage organisations don’t waste this golden opportunity."