Fresh & New(er)

As has been the tradition, welcoming in 2017 began with a playing gig at Kooky’s (almost nearly) annual New Years’ Day party. There’s nothing more bacchanalian or comforting than sweating it out in one of Sydney’s longest running safe spaces. And, sadly, it looks likely that over the coming years those safe spaces are going to be more important for many communities – and not just as places where people like myself have the luxury of visiting as ‘allied tourists’.

For many of my friends, especially those not in Australia, 2016 was a tough year. 2017 is already starting out like it might be similar.

For me, 2016 was a year of reacquainting with Australia, discovering new things in Melbourne, and in the museum world, shifting roles and priorities.

It turns out that my part of Melbourne is pretty great. Good public transport, good public services, and work that is making a difference. When I started at ACMI there were a sense that the organisation was, compared to many other museums, pretty high functioning – and I was a little concerned that building momentum to do ‘different things’ would be considered as being ‘just for the sake of it’. Fortunately it hasn’t felt like that – at least not all the time. The team and concentric circles radiating out from the team have been generous and interested – willing to take a risk. As a result it feels like a lot has been achieved – even if most of that ‘achievement iceberg’ is well below the water line. A bunch of writings sit over at labs.acmi.net.au that discuss some of the ‘above the waterline’ projects whilst some of the VR and game-related things are still undocumented. Hopefully over 2017 I’ll be able to reveal some of the scale of that iceberg and where it is now drifitng . . . the vision is no less bold than that at Cooper Hewitt.

Australia, as I reminded myself in the 2015 wrap up, is very far from the rest of the world. While I didn’t get back to the East Coast to visit my Smithsonian friends, I did catch up with many at Museums and the Web in LA in April. On that trip I realised that as Museums and the Web turned 20, I’d been to 10 of them – and more than a couple of the ‘new’ themes were, in fact, slight variations on the themes that were being tackled a decade earlier. Sometimes this meant new perspectives and new approaches, but more often than not it felt like the next generation repeating the errors of the last. No doubt this happens cyclically. Following MW2016 I spent a week at UCLA as one of the guests for their Cultural Analytics & UX Design and got genuinely excited about some of the new ways mathematicians are thinking about cultural products, and what digital humanists are doing to problematize a purely algorithmic approach.

I was lucky enough to spend even more time in LA doing the Getty Leadership Institute in June – thanks mostly to the recommendation and nudging of Janet Carding, and the generosity of my ACMI colleagues to let me be away from the office for an extended period of introspection. More than anything, the course solidified my commitment to the field. There were plenty of personally challenging moments for everyone on the course – we all were emotionally exhausted afterwars but the new friends made around the world during it have been a truly supportive and diverse bunch. On the one afternoon when we were left to oursleves, I headed back into central LA and finally got to check out the Museum of Broken Relationships. A versioning of the Zagreb original, its a great ‘reading’ experience – with the stories bringing each donated object to life – and one that made be think of Fiona Romeo’s long ago comment on visitors ‘not coming to museums to read 40,000 word books while standing up’. In this case I think I looked at labels for far more time than the objects at Broken Relationships, and didn’t feel bad about it at all. Following the Institute, amongst other things, I’ve decided to start formally mentoring a number of ’emerging professionals’ – and am increasingly committed to building the next generation of culture workers – we’re going to need them.

The latter half of the year had much less travel except for three trips to New Zealand – my first return to NZ for about 6 years. I was once again reminded of the splendid people who work in our sector over there – and felt that there had been a genuine cultural transformation in the years between visits. Bi-culturalism felt deeper and far more embedded in daily life and although deep structural inequalities remain, New Zealand seems to have pulled much further away from Australia and Canada in how the future looks with its first peoples, and its new migrants. The first trip was to speak at Museums Australia/Aotearoa – a joint event held in Auckland. The second trip was spent at Te Papa in their Mahuki museum incubator helping the first cohort interrogate and kick the tyres of their museum startups.

Inbetween Te Papa and Mahuki, I spoke at Web Directions – now just Directions, in Sydney. The day after the US election and alongside many US-based speakers, Directions was considerably more spikey and political than I remember it being. I really enjoyed reconnecting with many of the Australian tech scene – and the splitting of the technical sessions of Web Directions out into their own events has turned the new look Directions into an even better highly curated single track event. I should probably also mention that Directions had the best conference catering of any event this year too! If you watch one talk from it, make it the closer from Maciej Ceglowski – he was in fine form.

The third time back in NZ, several weeks after my time at Mahuki, was for National Digital Forum – one of my favourite events and something I’d really missed when I was in New York. This year I asked that my keynote be done as a Q&A with one of my favourite kiwi museum people. So, Courtney Johnson and I sat on stage around a pixel fireplace (stoked occasionally by Digital NZ’s Andy Neale) and talked about the differences between museum cultures in various parts of the world and building supportive and reflective work cultures for teams. It seemed to go down well and the casual nature of the chat probably meant we covered topics in a more forthright manner than if it had been a ‘prepared’ deck of slides. You can watch our chat over on Youtube.

The final trip of 2016 was to Singapore. It was the first time I’d stepped outside the airport in Singapore. Emerging into the humidity, I found the place full of contradictions. I got a chance to visit both Cloud Forest and the fantastic Art Science Museum. The Cloud Forest is a microclimate inside a biodome – and despite a heavy handed climate change message at the exit, its a spectacular, if dystopian, glimpse into the future. The nearby Art Science‘s permanent exhibition galleries are made up of 16 interactive experiences by Japanese agency TeamLAB. TeamLAB’s work has been exhibited in many places these days and their model of being a hybrid agency/design/art studio is fascinating. Here at ArtScience, though, the impact of all 16 works put together into ‘zones’ brings a scale and gravitas to the best of their work. It’s very impressive – and very accessible – in a way that some fo their scaled down, individual pieces aren’t.

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This year was one of my most heavy listening years since 2008 – perhaps unexpectedly as I’d noticed that I’ve had a lot less headphone time during office hours this year. I clocked up 20,426 plays of 10,639 different songs from 3,148 different artists – and I went to 21 live gigs.

There were a lot of great new releases this year – and many discoveries of older things. My interest in deep synthesized soundscapes continued with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Suzanne Ciani’s collaboration being one the highlights alongside a fabulous compilation of 70s/80s music put out by Light In The Attic – The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986. Add to that Wolfgang Voigt and Deepchord’s remixes of Peter Michael Hamel’s Colours of Time and I went far down a wormhole I hadn’t visited since the early 90s and the days of running our ambient recovery parties, Cryogenesis, and parties with our friends at Punos. I’ve mentioned in passing that I’d now describe this as ‘music for self care’.

On a similarly ‘home listening’ tip, I did interviews with Ian Hawgood of Home Normal, Dave Howell of 130701 and Dave Wenngrenn of 1631 – all home to different aspects of a very loosely defined ‘modern classical’ sound. 130701 put out Ian William Craig’s Centres – one of my favourite albums of the year full of delicate processed vocals. It was good to get back into a bit of music-writing, and maybe that wil expand over 2017. I’m also starting to draw stronger connections between my recent work and my musical life and this has started to leak out in interviews like this one with Dan Koener of Sandpit.

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Being at ACMI has pushed me much deeper into games again. I don’t think I’ve played (or enjoyed playing) video games this much since I was a teenager, or perhaps when i was moonlighting as a reviewer in the 90s. In between the indie games, I caught up on lost time with Witcher 3, thoroughly and unexpectedly enjoyed the single player mission of Titanfall 2, and spent q lot of hours playing Life Is Strange with my daughter. I could talk about improvements in game narratives, or the immersion of a good VR game, but mostly I’m currently interested in the spatial design of the worlds in which these games take place – virtual architectures – and how they affect gameplay, how their edges are increasingly hard to find.

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Perhaps I’ll get to write more this year. I had to disappoint a few people by pulling out of writing projets in 2016 which I’m still apologetic for. Life is busy.

[Crossposted with bonus pics on Medium]

Each year these roundups seems to get later and later! This one is an amalgamation of various ‘unpublished posts’ and related adventures, so carefully pour yourself a flat white, and nestle comfortably. (Don’t forget to open all the links in a new browser tab . . .)

1. Prologue

Three years ago I wrote an end-of-year post that summed up my first year in New York. Back then I was in the early stages of learning how museums in the USA worked, and how they differed from those in ‘centrally funded’ parts of the globe. Not unsurprisingly, funding and audiences are closely tied together – perhaps more closely than I had first thought.

Digital transformation is really about something else that often isn’t openly talked about – transforming audiences. Sure, we might change work practices along the way, but really digital transformation efforts are really in the service of visitors wherever they might be. In that sense, ‘digital transformation’ follows in the footsteps of the education-led museology of the 1990s. You can sense this in Nicholas Serota’s recently published “commonwealth of ideas” speech about a new Tate.

In the US ‘transforming audiences’ is especially tricky as the culture of private funding means that for most privately funded museums the ‘actual audience’ is a handful of board members and ‘significant donors’ (foundations and corporations), not those who actually attend or use the museum and its collections as visitors. The desired outcomes of different board members of the same institution may vary widely, and at times may even be in conflict with each other – pity the poor Director who is squeezed in the middle!

Elsewhere in the world, where museums are publicly funded or rise from grassroots community activation, ‘who funds the museum’ is theoretically closer to ‘who attends the museum’. In the case of central government funding the results may steer towards ‘instrumentalism’ where the institution becomes a delivery mechanism for social policy – Robert Hewison’s Cultural Capital: The Rise & Fall Of Creative Britain is a worthwhile read on instrumentalism as it played out in the 00s.

Either way, though, who is legitimated as belonging to, and who is able to come to the museum is as hotly contested as it ever was – although more ‘coded‘ than ever before. You can see this in all the debates about ‘how people behave’ inside museums, as much as in the socio-economic and racial disparities between different ‘levels’ of museum worker.

2. Departure lounge

Just before I finished at Cooper Hewitt I went to Orlando, Florida, to speak at the Tessitura conference.

Being down in Orlando gave me the opportunity to peek inside Disneyworld thanks to Micah’s unofficial connections. Although museum folks tend to look skeptically, if not disdainfully, at Disney’s theme parks, I think that there’s a lot to learn and understand from theme park design and the ways in which visitors use and create meaning in these places. That said, my theme park experience is somewhat limited. I’ve been to LegoLand in San Diego (2012)- somewhat disappointing for Lego fans – but I had a surprisingly wonderful time at Tokyo Disney (2011). My time at Tokyo Disney was unexpectedly enjoyable because of the way in which the Japanese visitors got deeply involved in the experience with even grandparents cosplayed as characters, and the lack of ‘queue aggression’. Both of those, I expect, are culturally specific responses.

A photo posted by Micah Walter (@micahwalter) on Aug 19, 2015 at 3:41pm PDT

Disneyworld in Orlando Florida was not the same. Micah and I hadn’t gone to go on the rides – but to get a first-hand sense of how the fabled Magic Band was working. Waiting for our informal guide, we sat outside the ticket area and watched the stream of families – tired, stressed, bickering – moving in and out of the ‘no turnstiles’ (the turnstiles having been replaced by touch sensors for the Magic Band).

Before you think that the Magic Band and the removal of turnstiles might mean fewer helper staff at the entrance, let me reassure that there was still one staffer for each entry path. Our guide advised us that some visitors had Magic Bands that didn’t quite work as expected and they were there to scan their tickets and help them align their bands with the ‘Mickey-shaped’ readers properly. Sound familiar?

Instead the Magic Band allows Disney to – the idea goes – get better analytics on the use of its parks. It doesn’t yet operate as a revenue generator in its own right, but in theory it reduces queueing and makes ‘guests’ happier (at least as far as their ‘park experience’ goes, probably not their lives as a whole). ‘Better analytics’ is the promise but as we discovered, there’s a fair few hardware issues still being worked on as those longer range RFIDs aren’t 100% accurate, and as always there are bugs. There’s also still a lot of guests who don’t have Magic Bands – those on day passes especially.

What was fascinating to hear, though, was that behind the scenes, Disney has joined up a lot of their backend systems. Those user accounts are now beginning to be ‘integrated’ – and I think that this is probably the bigger and more important achievement here. Effectively if you have an online account for any Disney service (which includes ESPN and ABC GO – and maybe also Club Penguin etc too), then those are increasingly going to be viewable by Disney as a single entity. For the customer this means ‘Single Sign On’, and for Disney it means vast seas of data. (Cue privacy and security challenges)

It was also good to hear about the surprises. Now that visitors can pre-plan their days at Disneyworld right down to the timing and order of the rides they want to go on they have begun to behave in unexpected ways. For a set of parks that had been designed on queueing systems and enticements to spend in particular ways, the Magic Band has suddenly upended some of the assumption that have been quite literally ‘built in to’ the parks and their business models for decades. Some visitors now optimise their visit to reduce the time spent between rides – that very time that the original park designs relied on for visitors to spend money shopping and dining.

Not unlike museums, though, the challenge will be sticking with the systems and their ongoing maintenance and upgrades until this data and the analytics starts to really bear fruit.

What a learning experience that was.

3. Now boarding

So at the beginning of September I farewelled New York, and with it, the USA.

The Cooper Hewitt work was as ‘done’ as much as it could be – and in the aftermath of the ‘big opening’, the museum proved that it was possible to retain momentum and keep pressing on towards the launch of the Pen in March. Not only that, but the staff also doubled down on a cycle of iterations (that happily continues even today).

I’ve long argued that museums need to get better at doing ‘exhibitions as continuous productions’ [the work on The 80s Are Back at Powerhouse is a useful historical example] – not ‘launch and move on to the next thing’ – but it is hard to make that a reality.

Cooper Hewitt definitely had a pretty good go at attempting that shift. And the awards kept coming – more importantly, though, so did families.

4. Safety briefing

Leaving any city is hard and the ‘leaving New York‘ story is already so overused in popular culture [spoiler – it’s usually a ‘rags to riches’ or the ‘voyage and return’ plot] that I won’t bore you with the full details.

Instead in the tradition of data dumping, here’s some pointless data collected from my time in NYC –

Months living in Manhattan – 46
Rent – far too much
Music listened to – 66,099 songs
Concerts and club nights attended – 61
Number of museums visited [excepting Cooper Hewitt]- 206
Out of city flights – 36 domestic USA, 26 international

And to prove that New York is indeed a walking-city, here’s a map of my Manhattan travels on foot for the last 12 months. You can probably figure out that I lived close to the office “in the 90s”.

It definitely wasn’t all ‘work’ – there was plenty of ‘play’ too. New York was a great base from which to explore the North Hemisphere, and endlessly full of interesting music and cultural things to do.

There’s many friends that I miss – from lovely work colleagues, ‘museum friends’, my late night music co-conspirators, right down to the local donut ateliers and our building superintendent.

However, deep winter is something I’m glad to be rid of.

5. In-flight entertainment

2015 was a good year for music – whose relevance to my museum work is explored a bit in an interview that Thomas Padilla did with me for DH+Lib.

It was notable for some particularly wonderful live shows. FKA Twigs absolutely killed it in Brooklyn during Red Bull Music Academy, and the same goes for Kamasi Washington at Blue Note which happened to be my last night out in NYC. Sao Paolo/Chicago cornettist Rob Mazurek, too, was in fine form at Shapeshifter and I was so happy to have caught ska legend Derrick Morgan at the final Dig Deeper at Littlefield. Bunker provided some great long nights too with Moritz von Oswald and Atom TM and my lucky kids got a chance to see Bjork and Arca at Carnegie Hall and dance to Caribou in the East River Park. Being back in Australia now, though, it has been a lot of fun to wind up the sound system again and get out and back playing some shows of my own.

Release-wise, there were plenty of great records that are worth checking out from Jerusalem in my Heart & Esmerine, both on Montreal’s Constellation label; a new album of introspective NZ pop from SJD; the reissue of Turkish producer Baris K’s splendid live recording of Kime Ne by his band Insanlar reworking a 17th century Sufi poem; my go-to “lucid dreaming in long haul cattle class” music, Max Richter’s 8 hour Sleep epic; Holly Herndon’s Platform; Joanna Newsom’s Divers; Roger Robinson & Disrupt’s Dis Side Ah Town; and great EPs from Luke Abbott & Jack Wyllie, Tropic of Cancer, Nidia Minaj; Pilooski; and a bunch of faceless techno bollocks and the entire Super Rhythm Trax label.

6. Slow descent & holding pattern

So we left New York at the start of September and as our container load of belongings departed on the Ever Legend (to Kaoshing) then the Ital Mattina (from Kaoshing to Melbourne) we spent a month travelling.

I spent a fascinating week in Buenos Aires listening to South and Central American museums discuss their collective futures – it was probably exactly what I needed after New York, a ‘cultural palette cleanser’. The contrast between challenges of New York museums and those talking in Argentina couldn’t have been sharper. The manifesto produced at the event is a must read.

Then it was off to Paris to visit some of the smaller, stranger museums including the fantastic Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature, complete wth super cute instructional videos and type-written ‘accession cards’.

Great 'no flash photography' animated signage

A video posted by Seb Chan (@sebsnarl) on Sep 11, 2015 at 7:18am PDT

Publicly browsable collection and provenance records.

A photo posted by Seb Chan (@sebsnarl) on Sep 11, 2015 at 6:39am PDT

Also great was the Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, which has been kept pretty much as it was when it was built for the 1900 World Fair. No technology, just endless skeletons – and considerable more interesting for the kids than the newly refurbished Grande galerie de l’evolution which is more sparse, screen-oriented, and with ‘tasteful taxidermy’.

Now that's how you display a natural history collection!

A photo posted by Seb Chan (@sebsnarl) on Sep 10, 2015 at 7:06am PDT

Following Paris it was over to Glasgow, then London, Brighton for Culture 24’s Lets Get Real 2015 conference, then on to Bristol for the Watershed’s No Boundaries complete with a side trip to Banksy’s Dismaland.

Despite visiting the UK several times a year whilst I was in New York, this last trip – with its extended drive down from Scotland – felt different, darker. Austerity bites hard, and the cultural sector is in tough times. There will be more closures, and hopefully a new wave of artists and cultural workers. Certainly at Lets Get Real and No Boundaries, there was a wealth of provocative ideas – and a sense that the time for politely accepting austerity had long since passed. Cultural organisations, museums, libraries have all begun to speak up. The talks from No Boundaries are all up online and are worth digging in to.

We got to Bristol on the last day of Dismaland, Banksy’s dystopian theme park. I’d been watching how art critics and art press had dutifully lined up against it – “its bad art”, “its so obvious”, “its so, ugh, ‘general public'” – yet here it was overflowing with people. Numbers crunched, it turned out to be one of the most well attended art events of the last decade despite only running for six weeks, and being far from London. But numbers aside, what was striking about Dismaland was how unpretentious it was – theatrical, definitely, but exclusionary, no. The scale was immense – far beyond that which museums and galleries can ever hope to accommodate – and amongst the individual works that didn’t work, there were plenty that did like Jimmy Cauty’s massive model city sculpture ‘Aftermath Displacement Principle’. As far as providing an alternative to the ‘art market’ and its ‘art (un)fairs’, Dismaland was engaging and perversely gave us all a sense of hope at the end of a long ‘austerity UK’ tour.

Dismaland – The Official Unofficial Film from Jaybee on Vimeo.

7. Landing

The new thing at ACMI is well underway. Melbourne, it turns out, is a lovely city – and lives up to much of its ‘most liveable city’ hype.

My first months at ACMI began with a flurry of activity – several sprints with Tellart (interaction design), Morris Hargraves Macintyre (audience research), and Meld Studios (service design) – and has now settled into more of a rhythm. You’ll start seeing a lot more leaking out over the next few months as changes become more tangible, so follow along over at ACMI Labs if you’re curious. Much like Cooper Hewitt Labs, ACMI Labs is ‘just’ a semantic construct, not a physical reality – a space for all staff to be self-reflective in their practice by blogging quickly about what they’ve just done.

Not unexpectedly at ACMI, intellectual property is a big issue now that I’m back in Australia. It isn’t just that I’m now working with films, TV and games – but that Australia has no ‘fair use’ in its Copyright system, and that much hope of change on that front is lost as the Australian Law Reform Commission’s report is effectively on ice.

8. Jetlag

Somewhat bizarrely I had two trips to Europe on my schedule shortly after I started at ACMI. These had been on the calendar for many months, from well before I’d even thought of moving out of the northern hemisphere . . . and so in mid October I was in Salzburg to lead some workshops for Salzburg Global Seminar’s latest cohort of Young Cultural Innovators. It was my third time in Salzburg and like the previous times, spending time with the attendees was fascinating and energising. On the way back through Vienna I called in to Ars Electronica (Linz) and MAK (Vienna) to see what they were up to. I was particularly entertained by Ars Electronica’s new 8K cinema and MAK’s handwritten object labels – each at very different ends of the technology spectrum.

A photo posted by Seb Chan (@sebsnarl) on Oct 24, 2015 at 2:01am PDT

The second trip back to Europe took place in November and I spoke at an event at the newly expanded Museumplein in Kerkrade in the south of the Netherlands. The Museumplein now features three institutions – the long running science centre Continium, along withe newly built Cube design museum and Columbus ‘Earth Theatre’. The Cube is attempting to be a new type of design museum focussed entirely on the design process with labs throughout where students from the nearby universities are researching, prototyping and making. The Columbus Earth Theatre is a bit like an upside-down planetarium, built to look down into the earth. The surrounding towns have a long history of coal mining and the theatre allows visitors to look down into the earth below them. Its other use is to look at the whole of the earth from space, simulating the ‘overview effect‘ that astronauts are thought to experience when they look back from space. The overview effect’s main proponent, Frank White, was at Museumplein speaking at the same event and it was interesting to hear him describe the potential impact that VR and immersive experiences like the Earth Theatre might have on people.

Heading back to Amsterdam to fly back to Melbourne, I took a short day trip to Maastricht to visit the Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture where Dutch artist Levi van Veluw had taken over the historic house with a vast immersive artwork. Director Valentijn Byvanck has been exploring ideas around multi sensory museum experiences for quite a while and his commission – also crowdfunded – pushed van Veluw, known mostly for his works on paper, to make a work that emphasised other senses.

Van Veluw’s The Relativity of Matter was one of the best things I’ve seen/experienced in the last few years. As a booked solo or duo experience only, visitors are led through the front door of Marres and then left to explore on their own – devices, bags, everything is taken away. The 350sqm installation is dark and disorienting, some rooms feel damp and musty, others are scented, and I felt hyperaware of everything once inside. Many of the rooms are based on Van Veluw’s charcoal drawings – which will give you a sense of what it looked like along some photos from this Dutch review. As a site-specific work built especially for the rooms of Marres it is unlikely it will pop up anywhere else.

8. Epilogue

Melbourne, it turns out, is pretty far away from the rest of the world.

Crossposted with fewer images over on Medium.