Reflections on Foam’s The Future of the Photography Museum and thoughts about Volt

Photo by Dimer van Santen/Foam on Flickr.

If you name your exhibition The Future of the Photography Museum you’re sure to spark my curiosity. And if one of the installations makes it to the Huffington Post where it unleashes a storm of negative comments – as happened with the stunning 24 Hours Photos by Erik Kessels – you can be certain there’s something worthwhile going on. And there is! If you’re in Amsterdam before December 7th (for GLAMcamp Amsterdam, DISH 2011 or leisure) it’s a must-see.

The Future of the Photography Museum and its accompanying magazine What’s Next? by Foam in Amsterdam are an investigation into the possibilities and trends of photography as a medium, the photography museum as intermediary, the relationship with the audience and even monetary and organisational aspects of the museum of the future. The exposition is slightly messy, which is not bad as it’s a mash-up of different ideas by four guest curators: Lauren Cornell, Jefferson Hack, Erik Kessels and Alison Nordström.

What stayed with me from the exposition is the position of the visitor and the general audience in the museum. We’ve been talking for at least ten years about the transformation of people from consumers to producers of information, but the role of the museum in this new world is still mostly unclear. Foam does some different suggestions for this, ranging from new forms of ‘passive engagement’ using digital presentation – Jefferson Hack’s Mother Sculpture – to ‘passive participation’ in which the wealth of UGC on the internet is used to create installations – Erik Kessels’ 24 Hours Photos – to active participation in the Activating programme, where visitors can contribute to the museum. Read the rest of this entry »

Building our community of objects with visitors of the Uitmarkt

Update 09/09/2010: Nina Simon posted this post as a guest post on her (amazing) Museum 2.0 blog. Thanks!

Last weekend my museum presented itself at the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam. The Uitmarkt is an annual festival that opens the new cultural year. Instead of handing out flyers about our upcoming expositions, we decided to ask the visitors to contribute to our ongoing project the National Vending Machine. The National Vending Machine is a travelling exposition that tells the historical and personal story behind everyday objects. All these objects and stories together we call our ‘community of objects’.

I thought it was a perfect chance to put one of the ideas in Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum to the test. Her case study about Structured Dialogue in the Signtific Game in chapter 3 describes a project where people engaged in conversation online about wild ideas. For me the beauty of the Signtific Game lies in the way people are guided by a select number of possible responses to a wild idea. This structures dialogue and makes it more productive.

We translated this online game to an offline activity around everyday objects. I believe it worked brilliantly. Over the course of the weekend a small team (three people each day) engaged in conversation with hundreds of people, individually or in groups and encouraged them to contribute to our community of objects with personal stories and new objects.

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Intimate Strangers – A special exhibition experience in FOAM

Yesterday during the MuseumNacht (Museum Night) in Amsterdam, I had the chance to visit ‘Intimate Strangers‘, a temporary exhibition in the FOAM Photography Museum on the work of the Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes.

The MuseumNacht is an annual event in which 26,000 people visit the museums of Amsterdam at night, often for the first time in their lives. Sanne’s work is slightly erotic and intimate in its nature. On top of that, although photography is a very popular form of art, I think it’s one of the more difficult ones to engage your audience with. It’s easily accessible, but difficult to have people take their time to really discover the layered experience good photography can give you.

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