The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant.

The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence.

The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences.

Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Post-War Germany and the GDR's Vision
• 00:59 The Planned City of Eisenhüttenstadt
• 3:00 Andrea Wieloch
• 03:15 The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life
• 03:56 Daily Life in the GDR
• 07:35 GDR History in modern Germany
• 14:43 Future Plans for the Museum
• 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsener. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started.

After World War II, all of Germany was in ruins. Almost nothing was left standing after 12 years of Nazi rule and 6 years of war. Mass migration, hunger, and homelessness defined the immediate post-war period as millions of displaced people sought to rebuild their lives among the rubble.

For the newly formed German Democratic Republic or GDR, the chance to start over – and demonstrate the utopia of the socialist system – took on a great importance. The East German government saw urban planning as a way to both solve the housing crisis and showcase socialist ideals through modern, centrally planned cities built from scratch. I visited one of these planned cities about an hour and a half east of Berlin.

Andrea Wieloch: Where we are sitting now was basically forest 75 years ago, and then they decided to plant a steel factory and a city around it. It was back in the days where there was really everything destroyed by war. An island of a real utopia with nice housing and facilities for everyone. So people from all over GDR came here and when the city was first founded, it was called Stalinstadt. So, “city of Stalin”.

Stalinstadt, which started being built in 1951, is now called Eisenhüttenstadt, which literally means Iron Hat City for the steel plant. Planning and building a new city and a steel factory in a place that was just a forest during the Nazi regime was a sharp break with the past – the planned city reminds me of parts of Bulgarian cities also built in the socialist times, and unlike most places I’ve visited in Germany, I’m not immediately on the lookout for dark signs of the Nazi past. I can imagine the relief of this place for the first people who moved here. Maybe, for a moment, it did feel like utopia.

Of course, this utopia didn't actually happen, no utopia has. But the GDR lasted about 40 years and those 40 years covered a lot of daily life. I'm here to visit a museum that puts the tension of utopia right in the name: the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.

Andrea Wieloch: I do like the space in between utopia and daily life. That is my focus, that tension or ambivalence. And I'm frankly not really interested in utopia, I think, because it's a mind fabricated thing and I do like the blood and flesh kind of reality.

This is Andrea Wieloch, director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.

Andrea Wieloch: Hello, my name is Andrea Wieloch. I am a German museum professional and I am the director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.

The museum – a kind of documentation center of everyday life in the GDR – is built inside a former kindergarten which opened in 1953. The central staircase still features the original, very colorful, stained glass windows by Socialist Realist artist Walter Womacka depicting children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity.

Wieloch says that a big part of the collection comes from a public announcement for people to bring in objects that they wanted to save. Today the collection has 170,000 objects of everyday life and of every aspect of GDR life. The permanent exhibition, which opened in 2012, called Everyday Life: GDR, uses these objects to give the visitor an introduction to politics, society and everyday life in the country.

Right inside the entrance to the museum, under the stained glass kindergarten scene, is one of these objects: a rusty TV antenna.

Andrea Wieloch: The antenna you see in the front is a really great example for a life hack, basically, because someone did it himself.

People living in Eisenhüttenstadt could fashion an antenna to get western television broadcasts in part because of their proximity to West Berlin and favorable terrain. It started as something you could do if you were brave enough to do something forbidden, but by the 70s, it became a special privilege.

Andrea Wieloch: One privilege you would get here but only starting in the late 70s was getting West TV and radio, which was forbidden. But they needed workers, so that was a privilege here, not in other parts of the country.

Amazing. Well, it also illustrates, so before it was a privilege, it was a hack. And I feel, feel like that is the bridge between utopia and daily life. It's because , in a true utopia, there would be nothing to hack because everything is already perfect.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah and that's a two-way street. You go from hacking to utopia again, because of course in the 40 years that the GDR was existing, there were really waves. And you've seen upstairs the new exhibition we are putting on with plastic furniture, that was a wave of utopia again, in order to also make people not jealously look at the West, but really a propaganda to really tell we are able here, we are future, we can send a man to the moon as well, kind of, you know.

The privileges associated with working in the Steel Factory is an example of the centrality of work in the way this utopia was structured.

Andrea Wieloch: All aspects of life in the socialist society were organized around work. Which means your housing was organized around work. The way you made holidays, where you would put your children to kindergarten or school, how you would spend your free time. There were club houses all over the city. There were artists coming into the factories and the worker was very well taken care of in the socialist society. And here in that city, it meant you had a beautiful flat, you had all the facilities that would really enable you to be a good worker, be at work and not think of anything else.

Wieloch was born in 1983 in the GDR, and so has a better memory of the period after 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR dissolved, and the process of German reunification began.

Andrea Wieloch: I was six years when the Wall came down and I was living with my family at the Polish border, so really far away from what was happening. And I remember my parents sitting in front of the TV and relatives coming in and that it was something special, I remember that. But besides that, I'm more shaped by the reality of the 90s, mass unemployment and lots of friends leaving the area with their families in order to look for better places and a more prosperous life.

The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life, and the way it presents the history of the GDR, is unique in Germany.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think we are talking about a very young history. And it's – I hope I get the word right – it's a contested history. It's one that is not set yet. Where we know no history is set, but as soon as people who can talk about the history aren't there anymore, we rely on what we by then have agreed upon. And there are very different ways in which the history of GDR got told within the last, let's say, 30 years.

Wieloch says that she’d classify four types of museums that interpret the history of the GDR in modern Germany. The first is the entertaining museum, places like the slick GDR Museum in Berlin which caters to international tourists and highlights the most daring escape stories. Then there’s the museums, mostly founded by the government, which talk mostly about GDR's dictatorship and the oppression. The third is so-called “wild” or “amature” museums, where individual people, often not tied to any public institution, just collect the things they love and, of course, entangle their own memory into their collections.

Andrea Wieloch: And the fourth place kind of is our museum, which to look into all this life and find the ordinary and the extraordinary there, but also ask about structures and about various perspectives. And that way we attract not only visitors from all around the world. We also attract the neighbors, the schools, scientists, artists. Usually we attract people who are who like to read in between lines. All of them are getting into a really nuanced, interesting dialogue and it's always happening. And for me, the most exciting is, and then I really step back and just listen, when people who have experienced GDR talk to each other and they kind of compare their memories and they are not fixed with it. They are very open and flexible and they really get into questioning really what happened there, and did we interpret it right, or was it state ideology, and that's really awesome to see. I think it's just a great practice for life.

In my discussions with Wieloch, she underscored her feeling that many people from former West Germany haven’t taken the time to understand the experience of growing up in the East – and that museums like the GDR Museum in Berlin, while entertaining, aren’t helping.

Andrea Wieloch: We are very accepted by people who experienced the GDR because there's always this discussion, is that a western view on eastern history or is that something more outweighed? I don't know if that's the real – balanced. Is it more balanced? And, yeah, that's what you find here. Yeah. A lively discussion.

I noticed this lively discussion while I toured the museum. Groups of older people telling younger members of their family that the coffee thermoses were exactly the same ones in their kitchen or the ubiquity of one brand of baby powder.

Because material culture under the GDR was much more narrow than it is today, it is likely that your uncle had the exact same motorcycle, or your dad had the exact same portable radio on display.

I toured with my mom, who was raised in socialist Bulgaria, and she noted the similarities in the outfits of the “young pioneer” uniforms she used to wear and the graphic design of propaganda posters.

Andrea Wieloch: I want to create a space that raises questions. That's also a safe enough space for you to take the creative risk and maybe think twice and think if I just correlate your own memory and knowledge with it and and then get into a conversation. That's the aim that we have here. Therefore, we invite different people and in groups with their own practices and questions in order to really enrich the conversation, because it's complicated and we like it that way. You know, it's it's ambivalence.

Ian (in room) yeah. And it's also noticeably different from the way that the. media in the GDR operated because it's complicated was not the message. The message was actually it's simple and these are the reasons and if you are a pioneer and that means that you enjoy sport and you love to be clean and you love your parents and you love the workers and there is no, there's no ambiguity in there. And I think it's also what you've demonstrated is that you can also have that same kind of simplicity on the other side of the wall. And so creating a space where you say it's complicated is somewhat radical in itself.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think it is. And we all struggle with being okay with all the ambivalences and with not knowing the right or wrong answer. And it would be a mistake to paint the history here too sweet now, just because we don't concentrate on the repressive aspects. But I think it's for those people who experience GDR. It was their life. Just imagine someone comes to you and tells you the way you lived, you loved, you raised your children, you worked, you looked at everything is wrong. I think it's as damaging as to tell someone you're always right with things.

The museum seems so effective at addressing the audience of people who are familiar with the GDR, that it makes me wonder how the museum approaches today’s young people who never lived through it.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah. You're putting the finger right into our most vulnerable spot because it's mostly like that. A family comes in of different generations and then one teaches the other. That's how it works in the moment. But that is a big thing. But actually the new generation is very interested. So especially also foreigners, there are less clichés or less prejudice that way and big openness. So yeah, I have the feeling the interest is rather rising because people who lived here for a long time, they also want to see something new and not always circle around themselves.

There are plans for a permanent exhibition, with a target open date of 2029. The revamp would use some of the adjacent buildings as a campus with more room for programs and storage.

Andrea Wieloch: And we want to, first of all, give you a closer look into to our storage. And then we would like to really take all those questions and practices that all our cooperation partners brought here and discuss them with the audience to have different displays for parts of our collection that show the collection and show you already what is that material world that we are collecting in the museum world, we are really in the peripheral area. So Berlin is close enough for us to have visitors from a metropolitan audience too. But it is also too far away to be gaining from the prosperous big city. So we are in a city that was ahead a 56,000 inhabitants now has 24,000 inhabitants. 40% of them are over 65. And we have a wonderful task to address a metropolitan or even international audience, and then also be relevant for the community we have here. So you asked me for children, I can tell you our program for dementia. So we're working with the school that educates people in the care sector. And they have 600 students. And with them we developed a program with all day, everyday objects and from the GDR. And they bring them either to the care homes or people from care homes come here. And we do a lot of programming around that target group. I think that's really my focus. The museum as a set of cultural techniques, a toolbox to know the world, to get a hold of the world, and to also find a consciousness around those tools that you're using. So it's still a long way to go and a lot of money to collect. But yeah, that's what we do right now.

The everyday experience of the person plotting their daring escape was different from the person just trying to get by and they both were different from the worker content to set up a better antenna to enjoy western TV shows. But in the GDR at least, they may have all been drinking out of the same type of coffee thermos. And you can see it at the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. This has been Museum Archipelago.

In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology.

While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust.

Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Auction of the U.S. Constitution
• 00:43 Constitution DAO
• 01:36 The Role of Governance Tokens
• 02:02 Nik Honeysett
• 02:45 Balboa Park Online Collaborative
• 04:29 Museums and Crypto
• 05:24 Blockchain and Provenance
• 07:40 Smart Contracts and Museum Governance
• 09:56 The Outcome of the Auction
• 11:58 Museums as Trustworthy
• 14:00 Museum Archipelago Ep. 39. Hans Sloane And The Origins Of The British Museum With James Delbourgo
• 16:41 Conclusion and Future of Crypto in Museums
• 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️

Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month.

Join Club Archipelago

Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.
• 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.
• ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 107. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

In November 2021 an extremely rare, first printing of the U.S. Constitution was available to buy at auction. While the item was special – only 13 copies existed according to the auction house – the bidders were the usual assortment of wealthy individuals.

Auctioneer: “And now let's begin the auction. Lot 1787. The United States Constitution. We’ll start the bidding here at 10 million dollars. 11 million.12 million ”

Except for one. Among the individuals trying to buy the Constitution was not an individual at all. It was a new kind of organization – a decentralized autonomous organization better known as a DAO. This organization, ConstitutionDAO, had formed just a few weeks earlier for this exact purpose – to buy the Constitution.

I remember the memes – backers of the project posted images of Nicolas Cage in 2004’s National Treasure, drawing parallels between his character’s fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and this real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

In the weeks leading up to the auction, thousands of people contributed money to ConstitutionDAO using the cryptocurrency Ether. That money funded the bid – the amount ConstitutionDAO could pay to try to acquire the constitution. What the contributors were actually buying was a so-called governance token: governance rights, the ability to vote on what to do with the Constitution, specifically, which museum to send it to, and what text would be displayed next to the document in the gallery.

Nik Honeysett: The ConstitutionDAO is an interesting example of the public claiming back ownership of a document that, you know, really should be owned by the public. And I think, you know, that's the challenge for museums.

This Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, California.

Nik Honeysett: Hello, my name is Nick Honeysett. I'm CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, known as BPOC. We are a nonprofit, technology and strategy company located in San Diego's Balboa Park, which is a cultural park of about 30 institutions. And we provide a range of services on a shared service model. And we also work with museums across the U. S. and outside the U.S. largely providing digital strategy, to help organizations figure out what they should be trying to figure out as we enter a more prevalent digital world.

The genesis of BPOC came in the early 2000s. Because there’s such a high density of museum institutions in San Diego’s Balboa Park, museums realized they could pool their resources and they wouldn't need to start from scratch to build each individual institution’s technology stack,

Nik Honeysett: It's a very dense cultural environment. Some of the institutions are actually physically in the same building. There has to be an opportunity for us to do this collaboratively. To create a team of IT professionals that would provide IT support. So essentially a kind of separate IT service department that would serve the institutions. That they would pay for those services. So you were gaining the economy of scale. And so we did a lot of, in the early days, a lot of digitization, kind of collaborative digitization projects. We have a couple of collaborative infrastructure applications like digital asset management. And really the benefit is there's an altruistic need. So the larger institutions are offsetting the costs for some things for the smaller institutions. And we do serve some volunteer-only institutions and they have access to the same level of IT service and support that the larger ones do.

While BPOC’s shared service model pools resources from lots of different museums, it still operates as a normal organization with a board of directors and a CEO making decisions and some sort of legal counsel and a sustained collaborative relationship with museums. The focus is technology, but the methods are more traditional.

ConstitutionDAO, by contrast, was a spontaneous, decentralized effort to acquire a historical document that probably wouldn’t have been possible without crypto technology.

I’ve been working on this episode about crypto in museums for years: I recorded this interview with Honeysett in March of 2022, two and a half years ago. Most museum people I know are reluctant to talk about crypto for various reasons: concerns about the massive energy use of some blockchains, how from the outside, it looks like speculative hype cycle, and – maybe most importantly – there’s a wide cultural gap between the centralization of museum power and the decentralized ideals of blockchain culture. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t sound too appealing if your job is to make sure the ancient vases don’t shatter.

But I will argue that museums and crypto have some interesting overlaps. Museums and crypto both address the same fundamental issue: trust, and they seek to answer the same question: what happened?

Blockchains keep an unchangeable record of what happened, stored not in a warehouse or a datacenter, but distributed without a point of control or a single point of failure. The first and most famous use for these blockchains is to power cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they can do a lot of things, like, for example, provenance.

Provenance is the record of ownership and history of an item, tracking where it has been and who has owned it over time. Right now institutions like museums and auction houses handle provenance but maybe there are better ways.

Nik Honeysett: Provenance is extremely important in the museum world and I think provenance seems to be the ideal application for blockchain. Here is the irrefutable, definitive, provenance of this work. And we saw a huge issue with provenance, which is the Nazi era provenance issue, you know, when a lot of works of art disappeared from the record because they were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. And there's been a lot of research to reestablish the true provenance of works of art and repatriate them, in certain circumstances. Collections held in the public trust need to be presented to the public. If you look at what really engages audiences, there are some emerging strategies that think about collection objects, as a sequence of experiences. The first experience is it was created. A painting was painted. The second experience is maybe shown in a show. The third is that it was sold to its first owner. And then it was transported and then it was acquired by a museum or whatever it is. So you have these sequences of experiences and the painting interacting with a whole set of things, again, all which happened in a particular sequence.

Of course, somebody still has to write these experiences onto the blockchain as they happen and museums might be well positioned to do this.

But if a future fascist regime steals an object, they would never be able to delete or destroy the record of who previously owned the object the way they can destroy a museum or its records.

We have one more crypto concept to dive into before we can get back to the story of ConstitutionDAO. When ConstitutionDAO pooled resources, the money raised to buy a U.S. Constitution, the idea was to govern the organization using a set of smart contracts, code that runs on a blockchain. And that's why it's different from asking a whole bunch of people to contribute to a bank account that one single person owns. Sure, the owner of that bank account might feel that they must listen to the community of contributors, but nothing is technically stopping them from spending the money however they feel like. Legally, they could face consequences for misusing funds, but the money could still be spent before any legal action takes place.

This is much different from a smart contract. You could set up a smart contract that ensures – technically – that the money cannot be spent unless 50% of governance tokens have voted in a certain way.

The reason to have this code on a blockchain instead of just somebody’s computer is that there’s a much greater degree of certainty that the smart contract will be executed correctly when spread across thousands of computers: someone can’t just unplug their computer and the smart contract fails to execute.

Nik Honeysett: I can see parallels in the museum world. A group of museums could come together to purchase a seminal work of art that would guarantee attendance at the blockbuster level and they would come together, they would purchase it and then they would share it. So it would be a work of art that would travel. The ConstitutionDAO, ultimately somebody has to receive that thing. So, this group comes together, they pool their resources, they secure ownership of this object. But then, someone is responsible for doing something with it. Yes, there's, it's kind of by proxy. So the group will vote on what they want to have with it. But at some point, you know, it translates to a physical series of actions.

The organizers of ConstitutionDAO said they had interested museums lined up with various proposals on how to store and display the Constitution, including the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library.

But they never got the chance. ConstitutionDAO got outbid, rather dramatically, by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

Nik Honeysett: And so part of me wonders. It would have been, as fascinating as it was, it would have been much more fascinating. And I don't know whether the folks behind it were experienced enough to receive something as important as that and what they would be able to do with it.

Ian Elsner: Right. I think at some point though, we will actually see that play out. I don't know if it's sometime this year, some other ConstitutionDAO will pop up for a different historical object, Someone would have to decide, okay, how do we ensure it during transport? And instead of that being a decision made by museums or other institutions familiar with historical stewardship, that might be put to a governance mechanism in the DAO. And, then all of a sudden it would be asking a huge number of people to decide together, to come to a consensus about what the best insurance policy is to take out during transport of the object, or however that works.

Nik Honeysett: But, you know, and the challenge with that is that, that group, you know, that governance group needs to be informed. There's a danger of damaging the object if you don't understand what is required in transportation of an extremely valuable work of art, you run the risk of losing it.

Ian Elsner: I'm kind of curious about, about how you feel, if you were to walk up to, to an object like a copy of the Constitution and, you saw that, okay, this is owned by a collection of people, not necessarily all Americans, but people who are united in their interest in owning a piece of this. But that's the only loose connection. How does that make you feel as a museum visitor?

Nik Honeysett: That, you know, that's a really good question because if the public hold museums in the highest regard in terms of trust. They are one of the most trustworthy entities. And if that wasn’t the case, if you're looking at an object. I guess it's, you know, as I'm thinking about it, it's no different than a donor who has lent a valuable work of art to the museum. Your interaction with that piece is in the context of the museum with which you hold high trust and high regard for. So I guess the, the fact that that governing body had determined that the museum was the best place to, albeit temporarily, house that object, would make me feel comfortable, to know that something of such foundational historical value is actually in an institution that I know has the highest practices to preserve it.

Ian Elsner: I'm glad you brought up trust because that's one of the applications of blockchain in general is that it allows for various systems to happen in a trustless environment. if the two of us enter into a smart contract, we don't have to trust each other. That the money will be distributed according to the terms of the smart contract, we just have to trust that the smart contract itself is trustworthy, And there's this sort of interesting tension between, between very trustworthy institutions and then this system which is designed for actors that don't trust each other.

Nik Honeysett: It's interesting to noodle down on that. And so, Inherently, you know, people trust museums because, A, because museums tell them that they're trustworthy but B, you know, you can experience something and, and connect with your culture and your past and there's an implicit understanding that the museum is custodians of this thing and it's in his, you know, taking care of them and they'll see an object that might be hundreds of years old in pristine condition or something like that.

My theory is that museums have had two overarching eras: the power era and trust era. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes of Museum Archipelago, the first public museum that we would recognise as a museum was The British Museum in London, which opened in 1759. The point of the museum was to showcase the power of the British Empire, to indicate that anyone in London could see treasures owned by the most powerful people in faraway places. Slowly and over centuries, perhaps much more recently than we’re comfortable with, museums have entered their trust era.

Perhaps, museums are enjoying peak trust right now – scandals like museums naming buildings and wings after donations by the Sackler family, as well as the continuing holdover horrors from the time that museums were in their pure power era like decolonization and repatriation will slowly erode this trust. And the crypto world has so many scandals and general confusion that it’s certainly not trustworthy.

Nik Honeysett: I think partly for the public to generally accept the trustworthiness of the blockchain, they need to more tangibly experience it. So right now it's just, it's a couple of words and people don't really understand it

But the difference I think is that crypto technologies are built for a trustless world. Maybe, if we do start to see declining trust in museums, there’s some crossover appeal to bringing these crypto tools like blockchain-based provenance and smart contracts to the museum world.

Nik Honeysett: Museums they hold collections in the public trust. They are duty bound to be transparent in what they do, but they are clearly not. There is a lot of behind closed doors things going on. That would be a fantastically interesting governance model where everything is completely transparent if you translate you know, mission to smart contract right?

Nik Honeysett: So your mission is actually a smart contract with your community. What is the obligation that you set up in that smart contract that then , the public can hold you accountable for? We used to do this exercise, with museums and say, demonstrate unequivocally how your mission. Is being interpreted. Put some hyperlinks on your mission statement to where you've actually done what you said you did. But if that was open and transparent, that your mission was a series of smart contract statements that would be fascinating.

Immediately after Ken Griffin won the auction, it was announced that this U.S. Constitution would be temporarily loaned to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was put on display as part of the We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy exhibit in July 2022. Since ConstitutionDAO would have also displayed the document in a museum, not much is different from the outside. ConstitutionDAO made the refunds available for all contributors to claim and disbanded. Sometimes an organization only needs to exist for a short time and just serve a single purpose.

Museums should prepare for a world where a group of individuals, leveraging crypto technology, can plausibly – and maybe preferably – do things that were once only possible with museum institutions.

There’s still a lot of crypto to talk about and in part two I’ll dive deeper into projects that overlap with museums. Until then, this has been Museum Archipelago.

I remember visiting – and loving – The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) as a child. Opened in 1965, it’s an immersive space with cobblestone streets and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering into a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures.

And I’m not the only one with fond memories. When the museum announced that the exhibit would not move over to the planned new museum down the street, the public reacted negatively. Dr. Ellen Censky, president and CEO of the MPM, describes the reasons why the museum can’t – and most interestingly shouldn’t – move The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. It’s a story involving cherished memories, the distinction between collections and exhibits which isn’t always at the top of visitors’ minds, and public trust.

In this episode, we explore why the Milwaukee Public Museum decided to move (it’s the fourth relocation in its history) and Milwaukee Revealed, the planned new immersive gallery that will be the spiritual successor to The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which will cover a much larger swath of the city’s history. Plus, we get into the meta question of whether museums are outside of the history they are tasked with preserving.

Image: Bartender in Streets of Old Milwaukee at Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Flickr user JeffChristiansen

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s 2015 Renovation
• 01:17 The Streets of Old Milwaukee’s Visitor Experience
• 03:40 Dr. Ellen Censky, President and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum
• 04:10 The Decision to Move the Museum
• 04:45 AAM Accreditation
• 06:21 The Current Museum
• 07:42 Funding the New Museum
• 08:55 Milwaukee Revealed
• 11:14 Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11th, 2023
• 11:40 The distinction between collections and exhibits
• 12:45 “We owe future museum goers the opportunity to see something different”
• 13:44 Local Talk Radio Coverage
• 14:07 Museum Designers
• 15:29 Closing Thoughts and the “Next Best Thing”
• 17:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 106. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

I first learned about the impending closure of the popular The Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum, or MPM, back in 2015. The news came in the form of an email from a family member who had lived in the Milwaukee area her whole life. It was only a year after I started working in the museum world, and she was eager to talk to me – then a newly-minted museum professional! -- about what a colleague had told her: that Streets of Old Milwaukee, which had been there quote "forever", was about to close.

She wrote, "I was upset since this was always one of my favorite exhibits (along with the bison hunt/rattlesnake diorama, of course)."

A little later in the email she expresses a sense of relief learning that the exhibit wasn't closing permanently. The confusion turned out to be a renovation that would temporarily close the exhibit for about six months and reopen in December 2015. The panic faded a bit.

The Streets of Old Milwaukee, which opened in 1965, is beloved for good reason: it’s an immersive space with cobblestone roads and perfect lighting that evokes a fall evening in turn-of-the-20th-century Milwaukee. The visitor experience isn’t peering through a diorama, it’s moving through a diorama, complete with lifelike human figures. Visitors go in and out of inviting storefronts, old-timey police boxes, and a candy shop.

I used to visit as a kid and I loved how it transported me. I couldn’t say exactly where it transported me, but it was exciting. I remember staring at a figure of a grandma – who everyone just called granny – in a rocking chair on a front porch and trying to figure out the mechanism by which she was rocking.

Today’s guest, Dr. Ellen Censky, told me in 2015 when she was academic dean of the Milwaukee Public Museum, the MPM, on one of the first episodes of Museum Archipelago, that this attention to detail was one of the reasons why the museum punches above its weight.

Dr. Ellen Censky: It's an experience that you get when you're here. It's this immersive experience. And so we really need to understand that as we move forward to make sure that as we enhance things, that we don't take away what people love.

That skittishness over a beloved exhibit closing, or even changing, was apparent in the way that the museum presented their 2015 renovation plans. Listen to Al Muchka, then Curator of History Collections at the MPM, describe the renovation in an official video:

Al Muchka: “Don't you change my streets of old Milwaukee. That ownership came through and we understood that. I mean, many of the people here in the museum that work here, we, we grew up here, so we understand the idea of this is our place. These are our things. So when people would call us to say, don't change my exhibit, we get it.”

But that was 2015. Now, almost 10 years later, that fear has come true.

In a few years, The Streets of Old Milwaukee will close for good – not just for a temporary refurbishment.

And, predictably, the reaction has not been good.

Dr. Ellen Censky: Hi, my name is Ellen Censky and I am president and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Today, Dr. Censky is president and CEO of the MPM. The Streets of Old Milwaukee is closing for good because the museum itself is moving to a new building and the museum says it can’t move the exhibit as it is since it’s literally built into the old building – and even if they could, they probably wouldn’t.

So let’s explore each in turn.

Dr. Censky says that the decision to move the museum was triggered by the American Alliance of Museums, or AAM’s accreditation process. AAM’s accreditation process is a set of industry standards that is effectively shorthand for institutional credibility. The MPM first gained accreditation in 1972 and the accreditation process should be done about every ten years. If a museum is not accredited, it might have difficulty winning grants or handling loan agreements for traveling exhibits.

Dr. Ellen Censky: Back in 2016, as we were approaching reaccreditation for the museum, we were reflecting back on the past reaccreditation and in that reaccreditation, they had cautioned us that the condition of the building was not adequate for housing the collections. It was deteriorating to the extent that it could be causing harm to the collections. And, of course, That's what we are, is a collections based museum. And they said you need to do something about this. And, of course when we were thinking about reaccreditation which was coming up in 2020.

The building continued to deteriorate. It had not gotten better. And it had built up a significant amount of deferred maintenance. The building is not owned by the museum. The building is owned by the county. And the county has financial challenges as they own many, many buildings and have lots of things that they need to take care of.

And so building maintenance for the museum was just not a high priority for them. So we headed into this study to see what we could do should we invest in money. Putting money into this building to bring it up to AAM standards and thereby receive accreditation, or should we build a new building?

The museum decided to build a new building. This annoyed me at first. Surely any maintenance fixes would be cheaper and – well – less wasteful than building a new building?

I’m fond of the current building, on 800 W Wells St in Milwaukee. In addition to trying to figure out how the granny rocked, one of my formative museum experiences was noticing how the floor ramped down in the Living Oceans exhibit as we went deeper underwater. I remember feeling nervous as the lighting changed and I descended the depths. It’s all very cool and effective.

But you can find videos online highlighting the poor shape of the building itself. Not so much on the exhibit floors, which again, are awesome, right down to the rattlesnake button on the Bosion Hunt diorama. But down in the basement collections storage area there’s an actual leaking wastewater sewage pipe running right through the room, artifacts wrapped in plastic to try and save them from the humidity, and stalactites growing from the ceiling due to moisture.

I think a big part of the answer to ‘the why move to a new building’ question is in the ownership structure. MPM is a private, nonprofit company. Milwaukee County owns the building. Building something new is a much sexier donor pitch than maintaining something – particularly something you don’t own and particularly when there’s no guarantee of that maintenance continuing.

Dr. Ellen Censky: We also reached out to donors, doing a study to see if donors would support putting their money into a county-owned facility. The end result of those studies was that donors were not interested to put money into a county owned facility because there was no guarantee that it would then be taken care of, given that it hadn't been up to this point.

And they were also interested in supporting the project. a new building project. So at that point we headed down the road of building a new museum.

And that new museum will be right down the road, on a site about a 12 minute walk away, on Sixth and McKinley Streets. Critically for the future, the new building will be owned by the museum itself. Milwaukee County will continue to own the museum’s collections but will no longer be responsible for the building costs, though it will still provide some annual funding for collections care. Any additional collections will be stored at a separate offsite storage facility that presumably won’t have the same issues.

So now we get to why not pack up The Streets of Old Milwaukee and move it to the new location?

Dr. Ellen Censky: The Streets of Old Milwaukee are built in. They're poured into… the concrete in the buildings is poured into the building. The cobblestones are set in place. We cannot pick up and move the exhibits. They are so built into this building that it's impossible to do that. And really, we shouldn't.

It’s this ‘we shouldn’t’ that interests me the most – and honestly, I’m inclined to agree.

Dr. Ellen Censky: The streets covers a tiny part of history in Milwaukee. It is a seven year period, 1898 to 1905. Our collections are much more expansive than that, and so what we are doing is we are having an exhibit in the new museum called Milwaukee Revealed, which is set in a similar kind of streetscape where you can walk through, but it is timeless, in that it is, it will have old buildings, it'll have new buildings, and we'll be able to share many more stories , in the museum in the new exhibit.

The new exhibit, Milwaukee Revealed, will cover a much larger swath of Milwaukee's history, from the late 1700s to the present day. More people visit the MPM, and probably The Streets of Old Milwaukee, each year than the total number of people who lived in Milwaukee in 1900, which is one of the years the exhibit is set in. That kind of nostalgia really builds up. The exhibit, built in 1965, is about as distant from us in 2024 as 1905 was from those in 1965.

But that’s the fundamental point: the layout of The Streets of Old Milwaukee was never a real street, it was an imagined street. What visitors love about it, what I love about it, is that it’s designed for present-day visitors, it’s designed to evoke a reaction.

And oh boy has it.

Here’s an interview on local news station Milwaukee WTMJ4 from January 11, 2023 responding to a MPM Facebook post that The Streets of Old Milwaukee wouldn't be moving over to the new museum.

Steve Chamraz: This is Milwaukee.

Susan Kim: We don't like change.

Steve Chamraz: We don't like change in Milwaukee. Um, were you prepared? I mean, this started as a line in a newspaper story the other day and it just kind of snowballed into is Granny going to wind up in a dumpster when they demolish the old museum?

Susan Kim: Aw, poor Granny!

Steve Chamraz: Well, that's what some people thought.

I think a lot of museum people, like me, draw a huge distinction between the collections (or the artifacts) and the exhibits (or display of those artifacts). I think of artifacts like Lego bricks. Artifacts are arranged in such a way to create exhibits. The models created from those bricks are the stories told. But we can make a lot of different models – we can tell a lot of different stories – out of the same Lego bricks. Gluing the model together forever so the artifacts can’t be re-interrogated or the story can’t be retold is not what a museum should be – and it’s also not how storytelling works. The same sets of story points can, the same initial artifacts can – and I would argue should – be told differently.

Maybe it’s an arbitrary distinction to see the museum as outside of history, as somehow not subject to the same preservation as museums themselves are tasked with. But a museum is just a story.

Dr. Ellen Censky: We are at a different time than we were in the 1960s. And we owe the future museum goers the opportunity to see something different and new.

We've done workshops, we've done surveys, we've done, and we've been doing them, getting feedback so that we really could tailor things to what people were interested in.

My goal is that when you come into the new museum, that you see things that are familiar, but they are reimagined in a new way. And so if you had a favorite object, your favorite object you'll find, but it will be interpreted and imagined in a different way, a new way.

On the YouTube clip of that local news interview the least angry comments talk about the need to visit the current exhibits before it all disappears. It really doesn't seem like many people who cherish the current exhibit trust that the new exhibit will be good or will be worth the cost to the state to replace. These comments are echoed through the Change.org petitions to save the The Streets of Old Milwaukee, through the Facebook groups organizing to express their anger, and through local talk radio hosts like Dan O’Donnell that I’ve listened to while researching this podcast.

Dan O'Donnell: Now, I guess a lot of people sort of naively believed that a lot of the old favorite exhibits would in some form migrate over, Things like the Streets of Old Milwaukee, which is probably the flagship exhibit. the Milwaukee record, which is a local website. Did an excellent job in sort of digging into this and looking at the museum's own frequently asked questions about the upcoming move to conclude definitively no.

And you know what? We don’t know if Milwaukee Revealed will be any good, if it will be a worthy replacement for The Streets of Old Milwaukee. The museum has released renderings of the new gallery and descriptions of feelings it will evoke in visitors. These renderings are familiar to me, not because I’ve seen them before, but because I usually join a museum project when it’s at this stage.

My day job is producing exhibits for various museums, many times new versions of what has come before. The vocal backlash to The Streets of Old Milwaukee closing reminds me that I need to think about my work in the context of that bigger picture. When I'm in a meeting where exhibit designers are talking about how to best serve the visitor experience, I have to remember that museum-goers might have already soured on the process and on the changes long ago.

Even the official messaging, on the MPM’s Facebook page responding to a question about whether the museum would move The Streets of Old Milwaukee, focused on this museum insider excitement that I don’t think translates well outside the museum walls. It said, quote, “As you can imagine, making something new and refreshed, yet familiar and cozy is a fun challenge for our design team!”

But there’s always change. The current museum on 800 W Wells St is the fourth location of the museum. The first was in 1882 in rooms of the old German Academy building, the second a few years later in the Industrial Exposition Building, and the third in what is still Milwaukee Central Library. And the new building was built in 1963.

Dr. Ellen Censky: And when you look back at the, in the 1960s, at the newspaper articles, you, you would think you were reading what was going on today. “They can't move!”

It is really nice to see how meaningful these museums are to my Wisconsin family, and to the general public. And it’s true that we can only look back like this because the new versions were good. I'll let Dr. Censky have the final word on this.

Dr. Ellen Censky: A lot of people early on would say to me what are you bringing to the new museum?

What are you bringing? And early on, before we had done any of our planning, I couldn't say, and all I could say is that we are bringing the ingenuity that is the history of this museum. forward to that new museum. And that is the way we honor our past, is by continuing to strive to do the next best thing.

Because that's what people who did this, they were doing the next best thing. And it's our obligation to honor that and carry that forward.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

While working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the pandemic, Dr. Morgan Rehnberg recognized the institution's limited capacity to develop new digitals exhibits with the proprietary solutions that are common in big museums. This challenge led Rehnberg to start work on Exhibitera, a free, open-source suite of software tools tailored for museum exhibit control that took advantage of the touch screens and computers that the museum already had.

Today, as Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Rehnberg continues to refine and expand Exhibitera, which he previously called Constellation. The software is crafted to enable institutions to independently create, manage, and update their interactive exhibits, even between infrequent retrofits. The overarching goal is to make sure that smaller museum’s aren’t “left in the 20th century” or reliant on costly bespoke interactive software solutions.

Exhibitera is used in Fort Worth and Nashville and available to download. In this episode, Rehnberg shares his journey of creating Exhibitera to tackle his own issues, only to discover its broader applicability to numerous museums.

Image: Screenshot from a gallery control panel in Exhibitera

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Computer Interactives in Museums
• 01:00 Dr. Morgan Rehnberg
• 01:40 Rehnberg on Cassini
• 02:14 The Adventure Science Center in Nashville
• 03:30 A Summary of Computers in Museums
• 05:00 Solving Your Own Problems
• 06:30 Exhibitera
• 07:45 “A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit”
• 08:30 Built-In Multi-Language Support
• 09:30 Open Source Exhibit Management
• 10:30 Why Open Source?
• 12:30 Go Try Exhibitera for Your Museum
• 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 105. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

I’ve spent most of my career building interactive exhibits for museums. These are all visitor-facing: touchscreens for pulling up information or playing games based on the science content, projection walls for displaying moving infographics, and digital signage for rotating through ticket prices or special events.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Well I think most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad. And I don't think that's because they were necessarily bad when they were first installed, but major exhibitions can last for 10, 15, 50 years, and it's often quite difficult to go back and retrofit and improve something like technology as time goes on.

This is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg, Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville. Rehnberg offers that long-term maintenance is the reason most computer interactives in museums are pretty bad – and that is kindly letting us programmers off the hook for the other reasons why computer interactives can be bad. But I agree with him. When I build an interactive exhibit for a museum, I’m optimizing for opening day, and generally leave it up to the museum to maintain it for years after.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Hello, my name is Dr. Morgan Rehnberg and I'm the Vice President of Exhibits and Experiences at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville.

I actually started my journey in science. I did my PhD work in astronomy. And I worked as part of NASA's Cassini mission, which studied Saturn for many years. And it got to a point where we sort of dramatically crashed the spacecraft into Saturn. And I realized at that point that I was going to need to find something else to do. And kind of thinking back,I realized that I had been having more fun when talking about the work that we were doing than actually doing it.

So I started to look and see how I could turn that into a career, and I ended up in Texas at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History and spent five lovely years there, including the time during the pandemic. And as the world started coming back,, I felt like it was time for a change of scenery and made the switch to Nashville. And I've been thrilled to be here at the Science Center for just under two years now.

Like many science museums, we focus on families with young kids, full of hands-on exhibits, exploring all the areas of STEM. And we serve the public, we do field trips, we run summer camps, all the things that science museums do. But we do it with a team that's maybe a little bit smaller than you would have at some of the big museums, in cities like New York or San Francisco or Chicago.

And that team size becomes relevant to the long-term maintenance of computer interactives.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: Here in Nashville. We have touch screens that we installed in 2008 that still do everything that they did then, but what the world around them has done since 2008 has changed a lot. And so while the experience is the same as it always was, the expectations of visitors coming in are quite a bit different.

On the back end, most of the computers running in museum galleries are general purpose computers, normal PCs running Linux or Windows. Similarly, the interactive exhibit software running on them are often built using game development engines like Adobe Flash or Unity.

There are advantages and disadvantages to building on top of these platforms. On the one hand, museums get to benefit from the rapid iteration of consumer technology. On the other hand, these tools that were not designed for the museum environment, so there are all sorts of situations where you end up working at cross-purposes with your tools.

A good example: any general purpose computing environment needs to have an easy way, in fact many easy ways, for a user to close an app. However, in a museum's touchscreen setup, you wouldn't want visitors to be able to close the exhibits, so you have to invent ways to prevent that .And every time Windows updates, you might have to do it all over again in a different way.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a museum server room, satisfied with a job well-done, only to notice that a smart kid on the gallery floor has figured out how to close my interactive software and has pulled up a game of solitaire. And let me tell you – solitaire is the best case scenario. If that computer is connected to the internet, things can get a lot worse.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I think a lot of us who work in medium or larger museums forget that by number, the vast majority of museums in this country or anywhere in the world have staffs of one or two or three and have budgets measured in, you know, thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars.

Those places are never going to be able to afford the sorts of bespoke custom software that you might see at Boston Museum of Science. They're just never going to have that. But they shouldn't be left in the 20th century of all we've learned about the value of interactivity in museums.

So while working at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History during the covid pandemic, Rehnberg started looking for a solution.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: As I was looking at sort of this big idea of what could be a piece of software that would solve all my problems.I started looking at that and sort of subdividing those problems. And one category of problem was wanting to have new touch sensitive, visitor facing things. And I didn't have the money during the pandemic to hire a vendor to redo all the things everywhere. The second piece of it was how can I, with greatly reduced exhibit technician staff, manage all of these things with the least amount of effort. Because I know if I have one tech who needs to cover the whole building, they can't spend a bunch of time debugging a thing after a visitor has smashed the screen 50,000 times and frozen the computer. Those two parallel ideas have lent themselves to the structure of Constellation.

Constellation is the name of the free and open source exhibit control software that Rehnberg developed. Today, he calls it Exhibitera, but you still might catch him referring to it by its old name. And those two parallel ideas have turned into a suite of tools that a museum can use to build their own interactive exhibit software, and the control server, which is how museums can control the apps within the exhibit.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: All that guest facing stuff, you can use that all on its own. You basically install it on a computer, start configuring what you want your content to be, and then you can just set your computer to boot that every time the computer boots.

So instead of building interactive exhibits using engines designed for game development, museums can build interactive exhibits using tools designed with the museum’s needs in mind. Exhibitera has several common exhibit types built into it, like an info station, a media browser, and a timeline.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: One of the big focuses has been that it shouldn't just be technical people who can produce these things. And so a big focus has been creating ways for people to use apps they already know to create apps that are guest facing. For example, with our timeline application, the way you make a timeline is you just open up Excel and you make a spreadsheet. You make a column of dates, you make a column of event names, you make a column of file names for a picture, and then Constellation just ingests that and makes this beautiful touchscreen timeline. A classroom teacher should be able to create a museum exhibit. An educator we have here on staff should be able to have an idea and create at least a prototype, if not a complete exhibit, just using Word and Excel and those sorts of things. And they get turned into these beautiful guest facing experiences that at first glance, a visitor is not going to know the difference between that and something that a science center might've paid a hundred thousand dollars for.

Too often when building bespoke custom interactive media, accessibility is something that gets tacked on at the end. But for museums using Exhibitera, accessibility features are automatically built in.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: One of the things I'm really proud about is we've built in just a tremendous amount of accessibility at the core. So any one of the apps that uses language allows you to set up your language in an arbitrary number of languages. So it's not just English. You can say, I want English and Spanish and Arabic and Chinese and German.

And if that's your audience, it'll support all of those simultaneously. And it provides a nice little dropdown to switch languages. And then it also provides variable text size support by default in those applications. And those are things that I think we all agree are key aspects of professional practice to make our exhibitions as accessible as possible. It shouldn't be like a thing you have to remember to add on when you're building something. It should just be built in at the core and that's what we've tried to do with Constellation.

But then there's this thing called Constellation Control Server. And the idea here is, let's have a central server that communicates with all of the other Constellation components in the exhibit. And can help me remotely diagnose and remotely repair these things. So if one of those exhibit pieces has stopped checking in, I get an, I can see that on my dashboard and I can easily press a button from my desk to reboot that computer, cause maybe the app is still running, but I got a call in from somebody in guest services saying a kid's playing solitaire on the computer.

Without this software, a smaller museum might have a staff member walk around every morning to turn on each computer one by one.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: When I come in in the morning, the building basically just turns itself on in the morning and shuts itself down at the end of the day. And Constellation provides this really powerful scheduling system that allows you to set these schedules that vary day to day. So every Monday, you know, we close at three and every Saturday we close at five and so forth.

Exhibitera was built to support as many devices as possible, from the touchscreens from 2008 to Android tablets to mini pcs. There was never any doubt for Rehnberg that he would release this system as open source, for free – the problems that Rehnberg faced mirrors the problems faced at many other museums.

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: My background, having come from the world of science, was just really informed by the culture, this wonderful cultural open source that exists in science. I was working on studying Saturn and analyzing data, the code that I was using to do that had legacies of decades. I could go back and look at the changelog and see, you know, NASA engineers who were working on the same code in the 1980s. And that's what allowed me as a 20 something kid starting out in science to do these things that otherwise I would have had to reinvent from scratch. And I just got such an appreciation for the value of having something supported by the community as a way of opening more doors to that community.

If we all agree, and I think most people would, that having digital elements in installed exhibitions is just like a standard professional practice, then you shouldn't have to fork over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what is standard professional practice. It still might be the right thing to do to hire a third party company, and I've had great experiences working with those companies before, but it shouldn't be the only option.

Today, Exhibitera is being used in Fort Worth and in Nashville and several other museums But anyone can use it. I set up a little exhibit in my office on an old PC and just marveled at how many museum-specific features are just built-in .

Dr. Morgan Rehnberg: I really think long term, the biggest opportunity is to bring this level of digital interactivity to places that haven't been able to afford it before. And so I'm excited about this podcast because I think there is just this huge sea of places that want to be able to be the modern museums they are in thought also in physicality. And so far, just haven't had a good way to connect with those folks. Because I think, big museums, this will always be, at best, one thing in the play of many solutions that they've integrated together. But for a lot of smaller places, I think there's an opportunity for Constellation to really become a standard for the way in which they are engaging digitally, with their audience inside the building.

This has been Museum Archipelago. I have two quick announcements about Club Archipelago, our bonus podcast. I've been having a lot of fun making Club Archipelago, which is kind of a mirror image of Museum Archipelago. While the main show examines the landscape of real museums, Club Archipelago is the podcast that examines museums through the lens of popular culture, like movies and video games.

We've built up quite the collection of episodes from the Night at the Museum series to Toy Story 2. And honestly, I think more people should listen. So I've just added a seven day free trial to the Patreon. You can sign up, listen to as many episodes as you can and cancel before the trial is up completely absolved of any guilt.

Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club.

And finally I'm discontinuing the sticker rewards of the Club Archipelago membership. It's just too much of a logistical challenge to ship things from Bulgaria. And I want to focus all my time on the much more scalable podcast production. But if you're interested, regardless of whether you're a club member or not, just send me an email and I'll let you know where the closest museum is, where I've left a pile of stickers for you to collect.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com.

Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.

The Murney Tower Museum in Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a small museum. Open for only four months of the year and featuring only one full-time staff member, the museum is representative of the many small institutions that make up the majority of museums. With only a fraction of the resources of large institutions, this long tail distribution of small museums offers the full range of museum services: collection management, public programs, and curated exhibits.

Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor has dedicated her studies to understanding the unique dynamics and challenges faced by small museums, and is also the Murney Tower Museum’s sole full-time employee.

In this episode, Dr. Erdogan-O'Connor describes the operation of The Murney Tower Museum, discusses the economic models of small museums, and muses on what small museums can teach larger ones.

Image: Murney Tower Museum

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Understanding the Landscape of Small Museums
• 02:38 Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor
• 03:00 Murney Tower Museum
• 08:29 Overcoming Challenges with Digital Solutions
• 09:46 What Big Institutions Can Learn from Small Museums
• 09:54 The Power of Local Connections in Small Museums
• 13:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 104. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner.

Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Let’s say you sorted every museum on earth in order by the number of yearly visitors.

At one end, with yearly visitor numbers in the millions, would be large, recognizable institutions – places like the British Museum in London. There’s a cluster of these big institutions, but as you go further along the ordered list of museums, the visitor numbers start to drop.

At some point during these declining visitor numbers, you reach small museums. Exactly where in the order you first reach a small museum doesn’t really matter – one definition of small museums from the American Association of State and Local History is simply: “If you think you’re small, you’re small.” You could do the same sort by number of staff members or by operating budget – the effect would be more or less the same. The point is that once you reach the threshold where small museums begin, you still have the vast, vast majority of museums to go.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: You just realize how many small museums are there in the world. Unbelievable numbers, right? They're everywhere and they hold such an important space in local cultural landscapes. Even if I dare to say more than large institutions.

The sorting exercise illustrates a long tail effect – each small museum, while attracting fewer visitors individually, collectively hosts an enormous number of visitors. There’s just so many of them. The long tail effect was coined in 2004 to describe economics on the internet: the new ability to serve a large number of niches in relatively small quantities, as opposed to only being able to serve a small number of very popular niches.

But unlike the economics of the internet, where distribution costs are minimal, small museums face the challenge of fulfilling nearly all the responsibilities of larger museums without any of the benefits of scale.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What fascinates me most about small museums is despite being so small, they offer almost everything you can find in a large museum, Ian. So do they have collections and do collection management and care? Yes. Do they curate exhibitions? Yes. Do they offer public programs? Yes. Do they organize special events and do marketing and digital engagements? Yes. They make these things happen.

This is Dr. Simge Erdogan-O'Connor, who studies small museums in her academic practice, and works at one.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Hello, my name is Simge Erdogan-O'Connor. I am a museum scholar and professional, currently working as museum manager at a local history museum called the Murney Tower Museum located in Kingston, Canada.

Kingston, Ontario, Canada is a city of about 150,000 people and the Murney Tower Museum is Kingston’s oldest museum.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: It will turn 100 years old next year. The museum itself is based in a 19th century military fortification, which was built by the British government as a response to a territorial dispute between England at the time and the United States. And the building itself is called Murney Tower. So the museum, taking its name from that building, but also being based in this building, is very much about that history. Why this building was constructed, what's its relationship to broader Canadian, British, American relationships in the 19th century, but at the same time, the museum is very much about the local history of Kingston as well so we are very local in our focus.

No matter how you define a small museum, Murney Tower is a small museum.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: We hold about 1300 objects in our collection and we are seasonal. We are only open to the public from the end of May through September. And I'm the only full time staff member that the museum has, which can also show, I think, many people what small museums are in terms of operational capacity. And then we almost entirely rely on volunteers, interns, and seasonal staff members that we hire in the summer.

Ian Elsner: Right, I was going to make a joke about your, your staff meetings being super quick, but I guess you do have to have meetings nevertheless.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: But sometimes I make a joke about that too Ian, meaning, yes, of course, we have board meetings, I constantly have interns, every semester through universities, and in the summer I have three full time staff members. Regardless, sometimes I'm like, I'm the gatekeeper, I am the security guard, I clean the museum, I run the museum, right? I do all of these cool things, like I write the strategic plan, but then there are times that I'm on call waiting for a maintenance person to come to the museum and I just need to be there to open doors to him.

Ian Elsner: I can already see the challenge of having one person do all of those things that you described, but what are some of the other challenges of a small institution or your small institution specifically?

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: Simply because a big part of Ian, my professional, academic, personal life is concerned with this question of challenges, right? Whether understanding those challenges or finding solutions to those challenges. All my colleagues mention in any conversation that are very common to museums worldwide, big or small, and these challenges certainly affect my own institution as well, like the challenges of colonial and elitist legacies of museums, issues of reconciliation, repatriation, or funding limitations, or reliance on government funding, or contemporary challenges like COVID 19.

So all of these challenges that are very much common in the museum world. But then when I look at his lens of small museums a little bit further, I identify in two major challenges that are much more specific to small museums.

The first one is limited staff resources. I know I already mentioned that, but I still want to explain that a little bit further.

While you have 40, 50, or hundreds of people doing these things in a large museum, you have only, like in my case, one or two people carrying out very similar activities in a small museum. This is a huge challenge because, yes, you can maybe carry these out in some form and capacity, with several people.

But how can you make these activities really effective and impactful, with only a few people? This is a very important challenge that does not exist in large institutions.

And there is a second challenge related to this, is what I refer in my own practice as this incapability mindset. And I found myself in this mindset when I started my work in a small museum four and a half years ago, it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. This limitation creates a mindset both in the institution as an institutional mindset but a mindset also in staff members and team members that's very much based on incapability.

So you find yourself being almost conditioned, Ian, inherently to think small. Right? And this way of small thinking poses such a huge challenge to actual capacity of these small museums to grow and to make something meaningful. And, for example, you want to create a new website. You have the idea. You're excited.

And what's the first thing you think? Oh. But I cannot hire a webmaster. I don't know coding and I cannot hire a website designer. I will never be able to make that happen. Or you want to create new exhibits, new exhibitions, nicer panels. And then you're like, but I cannot hire a graphic designer or exhibit designer. I don't know graphic design.

And this kind of, this creates a chicken and egg situation where an idea comes and instantly a door closes. , this is another huge problem, Ian, simply because it took a while for me to get out of this way of thinking. And then the moment I did, I realized a huge potential.

Small museums could do the things they want to do. They can do it, right? Maybe not in a big scale, but you can still make these things happen. You can find a way to make these things happen, but it starts with that mindset. And that's, I think, a huge challenge that exists.

The manifesto writes itself – small museums, not small ideas.

Having only one staff member or not being able to hire somebody to make a website are downstream of not having enough resources. And it’s not obvious how a small museum could take advantage of internet economics because there’s no way to get enough scale such that the marginal cost of each visitor approaches zero. But there is a way to take advantage of internet economics on the production side.

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: What you said about the internet or digital world is actually, it's a solution to these two problems in a way that I mentioned meaning there's so so many digital resources out there that you can really run a museum on a budget. Of course you cannot hire a webmaster, but there's so many custom made website platforms that allow you to build your own website at a very low cost and quite easily.

There are digital design platforms like Canva graphic design, which has free subscriptions to non profits and they allow you to create really beautiful designs and two platforms, quite frankly, that I'm using in my work. You can leverage that digital world, take advantage of it and then make these things happen at such a low cost.

And then on the flip side, it also opens all of this range of audience engagement, allowing these museums to go out of their localities and becomes something bigger, like you said, at no cost. This is what we have been doing, like using social media, internet, and YouTube. Last summer, we were visited by 12,000 visitors, which was very impressive for us. And 7,000 of those visitors were local or international tourists. And they got to know us through the internet.

So I'm now curious, what, what can big institutions learn from small institutions?

Simge Erdogan-O'Connor: I'm so glad you brought that up. The first thing, Ian, that I really believe, and I'm really, really, really passionate about this, when it comes to small museums, is local connections. I think the biggest impact of small museums is their local connections. How they leverage these local connections to create local impact, but potentially global impact. And I think this is something that larger museums can really learn from them. These museums, they already hold a very important place in the local landscape, local memories, and local stories.

So they have a greater potential to connect with local audiences in a much more efficient and quicker way. And the way they connect with their local audiences is something I think large institutions could really learn from small museums. Because I know large museums that I work with on different capacities, they of course have local initiatives, community initiatives, of course they do, but I think that really understanding local connections and local concerns and histories, it's much different in a small museum, the way the small museums work that out.

And I will give you an example again because I know what I mean could be a little bit vague sometimes. Back in 2020, COVID time for all of us. At the Murney Tower Museum, we really wanted to do something to address the needs of people living in Kingston during the global pandemic, especially find a way to address their issues of social exclusion and isolation and foster connections in our community.

So we launched a local photo contest. We placed ads on local newspaper, TV, and basically we asked people living in Kingston to go back to their cameras, check their photo albums, and then check their childhood albums, and then check their family albums to see if they could find Murney Tower Museum, anywhere, right? And if they did we ask them to find the story behind it and send those pictures to us. So over the course of three months, I think we collected about 120 Incredible, Ian. Photos from 1920s, photos from, yeah, like 1940s,

It also speaks to the advantage of the scale that small museums are operating on, because it's so much less interesting to have that same idea with a big institution. If the British Museum says, everybody send us your images, I'm sure you'll find some great images, but the scale actually isn't meaningful because of course people were going to the British Museum 50 years ago. But having it be that local connection of actually we have 120 pictures and like, I really see that point. The bigger the institution is, the less interesting that exercise is.

It's, yes, absolutely, and the connection part of it becomes much stronger, and it in a way becomes much more intimate. It allowed us to leverage this local connection and I think large museums can really take that local focus from small museums. I think sometimes they can be lost in their big ideas and big collections and big audiences, which are equally important, I get that. But I think sometimes it starts with their neighborhood. Look at your region first, to create something global and bigger, go from there, much more focused perspective, rather than coming from something global or large and big into small.

This has been Museum Archipelago. I have two quick announcements about Club Archipelago, our bonus podcast. I've been having a lot of fun making Club Archipelago, which is kind of a mirror image of Museum Archipelago. While the main show examines the landscape of real museums, Club Archipelago is the podcast that examines museums through the lens of popular culture, like movies and video games.

We've built up quite the collection of episodes from the Night at the Museum series to Toy Story 2. And honestly, I think more people should listen. So I've just added a seven day free trial to the Patreon. You can sign up, listen to as many episodes as you can and cancel before the trial is up completely absolved of any guilt.

Of course, you're very welcome to hang around too. To get access to the free trial, just go to join the museum.club.

And finally I'm discontinuing the sticker rewards of the Club Archipelago membership. It's just too much of a logistical challenge to ship things from Bulgaria. And I want to focus all my time on the much more scalable podcast production. But if you're interested, regardless of whether you're a club member or not, just send me an email and I'll let you know where the closest museum is, where I've left a pile of stickers for you to collect.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com.

Thanks for listening, and next time, bring a friend.

Computing work keeps museums running, but it’s largely invisible. That is, unless something goes wrong. For Dr. Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University and his colleague Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes activities of museum technology workers was one of the main reasons to start the Oral Histories of Museum Computing project.

The first museum technology conference was hosted in 1968 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This prescient event, titled “Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums” was mostly focused on the cutting edge: better inventory management systems using computers instead of paper methods. However, it also foresaw the transformative impact of computers on museums—from digital artifacts to creating interactive exhibits to expanding audience reach beyond physical boundaries. Most of all, speakers understood that museum technologists would need to “join forces” with each other to learn and experiment better ways to use computers in museum settings.

The Oral Histories of Museum Computing project collects the stories of what happened since that first museum technology conference, identifying the key historical themes, trends, and people behind the machines behind the museums. In this episode, Paul Marty and Kathy Jones describe their experience as museum technology professionals, the importance of conferences like the Museum Computer Network, and the benefits of compiling and sharing these oral histories.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums
• 00:43 Thomas P. F. Hoving Closing Statements
• 01:41 Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University
• 02:11 Kathy Jones, Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School
• 02:18 Museum Computing from There to Here
• 04:08 The First Steps of Museum Computing
• 04:52 Early Challenges in Museum Databases Like GRIPHOS
• 07:00 Changing Field, Changing Profession
• 08:48 The Oral Histories of Museum Computing Project
• 11:32 Reflecting on the Journey of Museum Technology
• 14:12 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 103. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

On April 17th, 1968, less than two weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, the first computer museum conference was coming to a close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

This conference was hosted by the recently-formed Museum Computer Network, and had a hopeful, descriptive title: A Conference on Computers and their Potential Application in Museums.

At the closing dinner, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving acknowledged that “for some these three days have an unsettling effect” and that “these machines are going to put us on our toes as never before” but summarized, “the whole idea of a computer network is generating momentum, and is forcing upon museums the necessity of joining forces, pooling talents, individual resources, and strengths.”

Paul Marty: When I tell students that there is a group that has been meeting annually since 1968 to discuss problems related to the use of computers and museums, they find that hard to believe. That seems like a long time ago, and I guess it is a long time ago. But museums were always on the cutting edge of trying to figure out how to use this technology. Maybe not everybody was on board, but there was always somebody who was pushing that story forward.

This is Paul Marty, whose work focuses on the interactions that take place between people, information, and technology in museums.

Paul Marty: Hello, I'm Paul Marty, Professor in the School of Information at Florida State University.

Professor Marty, along with his colleague Kathy Jones, are collecting stories of the people behind the computers behind the museums as part of their Oral Histories of Museum Computing project. A selection of stories from the project will be published as a book.

Kathy Jones: Hello, my name is Kathy Jones, and I'm the Program Director of the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School.

The key question that both Jones and Marty want to answer is how did we go from there to here?

Paul Marty: How did we go from a world where curators were saying there will never be a computer screen in our galleries, to a world where when you're setting up a new exhibit the first thing you ask is where should we put the iPads? How do we go from a world where we will never share digital images of our collection on the internet to a world where there are hundreds of millions of open access images in the public domain on the internet by museums?

To answer that question, Jones and Marty looked to their own experiences going to the many museum computer conferences that came after. But they both underscore how remarkably prescient that first meeting proved to be.

Kathy Jones: That first Museum Computer Network meeting I just want to emphasize the importance of meetings, even that early and now of bringing new ideas to the field. everything evolved based on the technologies that we had at hand. And museums weren't the first to adopt something like a scanner or to do multimedia, but as soon as we saw the possibilities, we certainly began to do that.

Paul Marty: I actually just pulled up the table of contents for the conference proceedings for the very first Museum Computer Network Conference. And, there were a lot of papers in there sort of predicting what the future of computers in museums were going to be. And of course most of them were focused on inventory control and this. But there were also people talking about computer graphics and what that was like at the time. J. C. R. Licklider who is the the founder of ARPANET, which is , the original backbone of the internet, was there and spoke about the current state of computer graphics technology in the late 1960s, and , he was predicting a world where there would be digital images of museum artifacts, where people could have an interactive art museum where you would use digital computer images of artifacts. And it took a while for us to get there, but it's wonderful that people were thinking that far ahead in the 1960s.

Computers first entered museums as a form of inventory management. Edward F. Fry summarizes in his 1970 review of that first conference, “the rapid increase in the size of museum collections in the United States has in fact reached such a point in many instances that a more efficient means of cataloging than that of the standard index card file has become a desperate necessity.”

Paul Marty: Remember the final scene at the end of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? So many of the Smithsonian warehouses look exactly like that and it's really easy to see how things could get lost there for a very long period of time. You have more stuff than you have staff and time to deal with.

The early inventory management systems were limited to only a few variables and lots of manual work, as Kathy Jones learned when she started her career at the Florida Department of State.

Kathy Jones: I worked on a mainframe computer to be what they called the keeper of the Florida master site file. That was a large database, or is, that keeps track of all of the archaeological sites and historical properties in the state of Florida.

Kathy Jones: It was a database called GRIPHOS, and it was used by archaeological groups, the State Historic Preservation Office. There was nothing visual about it, not even images or things like that. It was hardly relational, and every field was just about 80 characters. I mean, this is so long ago, Ian, that we had to use punch cards to do the data entry and then have them read per computer in batch form. Pretty archaic.

GRIPHOS stood for General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies – I can’t get enough of the direct naming conventions of this early computer history – and it was actually published by the Museum Computer Network, the organization that hosted that first conference in 1968.

Paul Marty: So GRIPHOS was the database system that ran on mainframe computers developed in the 1960s and disseminated by the Museum Computer Network. And part of the goal of the Museum Computer Network was to help museums learn how to use GRIPHOS to organize information about their collections. Kathy, I don’t know if you wanna talk about what it was like at the conferences…

Kathy Jones: It was the first attempt at standardizing information, and that was because we had limited fields and limited values, but it did lead to a profession-wide attempt to standardize how we describe all types of information. So not just the art world, but also the history world or the object world.

The early systems for cataloging collections were rather rigid, which meant that the museum staff had to get inventive to bridge the shortcomings. This process would repeat itself.

Kathy Jones: As the field changed we were looking at what the public needs were, we began to discuss early on where we would fit in the museum. What was our role now? Initially, it was a behind the scenes type of thing with registrars, museum registrars mainly, having to learn a new skill set. Having to be somewhat digitally based, and doing their job now with new technology. Then in the mid-1990s and later we could add imaging to that set. And we had to learn about scanners and what they might do to the art, or how we could use them safely and efficiently to process the image, because we're a visual field. And then we got into multimedia, and both, , in the gallery and online, and another skill set emerged.

Paul Marty: You went from physically plugging in computers and wires to figuring out how to present information in a way that can be used by people inside the museum, that suddenly people realize, “hey, there's people outside the museum with all this information as well.” And then this can also become used in exhibits in the galleries and then eventually online.

Paul Marty: It's just been a constant process of the museum technology professional having to keep up with those changing technologies, keep up with the increasing demands that keep getting put on them. They have to figure out how to use new technology to accomplish new goals. I think that this entire profession has evolved over the years to tackle these problems. Because when museums started doing this, there, there wasn't, you couldn't go to school for this.There wasn't a job title for this. Kathy talked about registrars. You were organizing the information on paper files behind the scenes and somebody said, “hey, look, we can do this better and faster if we start using a computer here.” And you're the one who had to figure out how to do it.

As museum technology professionals themselves, Marty and Jones realized that shining a light on this type of work would be a good basis for their next project.

Paul Marty: Kathy and I have worked together on a number of projects in the past. We published a book together back in 2008. We had been meeting to work together on another book for a long time and we had been meeting regularly once a week or so and chatting about different project ideas and I guess it was 2019 when we first started talking about an oral history project because among other things, we were inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Museum Computer Network, and they had done some work trying to capture some voices from the field and some of that history there, and we realized that there was a great need for that particular work.

Paul Marty: We were also very interested in the question of how do we shine a light on the behind the scenes activities of museum technology workers? Most of the people who do this job, you don't see their work. You see the end product of their work. You see the database, you see the website. You don't see what they're doing behind the scenes. Like most information technology workers writ large, not only is your work invisible in the sense that if you see me working, I'm probably doing something wrong, but the system that you built is also supposed to be invisible, right? It's supposed to be like plumbing. It’s difficult to work a job where if your work is visible, that means something has gone wrong. And so we were really trying to help both preserve the history and shine a light on that behind the scenes work that so many people don't see.

When I’m not doing Museum Archipelago, I work as a computer programmer making interactive exhibits in museums. That should put me neatly into the category of museum technology professional — but I have to admit that I made it to this part of the interview before realizing Marty and Jones include people like me.

Maybe it’s just a slight aversion to the term “museum technology professional” which has the clunkiness of those direct naming conventions of early computer history. Maybe it’s actually the perfect term.

Marty and Jones invited about 120 professionals to participate in their oral history project, successfully compiling 54 oral histories from individuals whose careers focused on bringing technology into museums.

Listening to the stories in this collection, which feature some past guests on Museum Archipelago, I’m struck that the types of problems museum technology professionals solve mirror my own experiences: computers in tight places on the gallery floor that nobody realized needed to be manually rebooted every few days, custom software running long after any who remembered what its for left the museum, and the wire that isn’t long enough to run from the exhibit floor to the server room.

Kathy Jones: “What we're doing also lends credibility to that invisible work and really does shine a light on it, bringing it out for the field, but also Paul and I both teach. So it brings it right to our students in a way that I think is important. I, in my museums and technology class, post podcasts for different topics so that my students can hear from Jane Alexander or other people in the field about what they're doing. And I mentioned Jane Alexander because she has been able to really raise the visibility of what she doesfrom the server room to the boardroom. And I think it's so important to see that we can have a voice, that we could be, if not part of th e C suite, that we're getting pretty close to being there so that other people understand what it means to be digital in the museum world now and not take it for granted.“

Paul Marty: We captured stories that people never heard before. These were the people who were making the magic happen behind the scenes. To get their perspective on that was just absolutely amazing. We didn't want to tell a chronological history of the field. That's been done. We are at center identifying the key historical themes and trends that cut across the past 60 years and really drove the field forward. And then telling that story, using examples. In the words of the very people who who did that work.

Which is remarkably similar to what Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas P. F. Hoving predicted back in 1968 – that the only way to roll with the momentum that computers in museums generate is to get all the humans together, sharing resources and expertise. After all, no museum is an island.

Paul Marty: One of the things that I think surprised me as we went through and gathered these stories, analyzed these stories, was how positive and enthusiastic everybody was about the work that was done. Because you know, in a technology profession, it's easy to be negative. It's easy to say, well, we don't have enough resources. We don't have enough money. We don't have enough time. This is always the perennial problem. Of course, but when you step back and you take the 30,000 foot view and you look at what's been done over the past 60 years. And I think we heard this from every one of our participants. When you look at that, it's amazing how far we've come. And it's hard not to look at that scope and not come away with a positive perspective on what we've accomplished. And our hope with the book that we're writing is to convey that sense of enthusiasm to help inspire the next generation of people who are doing this technology work in museums

Kathy Jones: “Ian, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk about something that we love.”

This has been Museum Archipelago.

On Berlin’s Museum Island, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE in Samʼal (Zincirli) in southern Turkey. And one is a plaster copy made a little over 100 years ago.

Pergamon Museum curator Pinar Durgun has heard a range of negative visitor reactions to this copy — from disappointment to feeling tricked — and engages visitors to think more deeply about copies. As an archeologist and art historian, Durgun is fascinated by the cultural attitude and history of copies: the stories they tell about their creators’ values, how they can be used to keep original objects in situ, and their role in repatriation or restitution cases.

In this episode, Durgun describes the ways that museum visitors’ perception of authenticity has changed over time, how replicas jump-started museum collections in the late 19th-century, and some of the ethical implications of copies in museums.

Image: Reconstructed Lion Sculpture Sam'al near modern Zincirli Höyük, Turkey 10th-8th century BCE by Mary Harrsch

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Sam’al/Zincirli Lions
• 01:09 Pinar Durgun
• 01:22 Museum Island
• 01:40 Find Divison
• 02:28 Gipsformerei
• 03:12 Replicas Jump-Started Museum Collections
• 04:35 Trending Away from Copies
• 05:27 When Visitors Feel Tricked
• 06:00 When Visitors Are Okay With Copies
• 07:28 Ancient Cultural Contexts About Copies
• 08:07 Hokusai’s Great Wave
• 08:35 “Immersive Experiences” Made Up of Digital Copies
• 09:08 Digital Copies
• 12:39 Museum Archipelago 97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does.
• 13:32 How Should Museums Present Copies in Their Collections?
• 14:36 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 102. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

On the Museum Island in Berlin, four stone lion statues perch in the Pergamon Museum. Three of these lions are originals — that is to say, lions carved from dolerite rock between the 10th and 8th centuries BCE. And one is a plaster copy carved a bit over 100 years ago.

Pinar Durgun:  When you see these lions, you cannot tell the difference which one is a copy, which one is original.

And lately, curator Pinar Durgun has been wondering how visitors feel about that copy.

Pinar Durgun: But when I tell visitors, this one is a copy. So how do you feel about that? How do you feel about a copy being here? Do you feel like you've been tricked?

Pinar Durgun: And if I ask a question like this, they say yes. They say, I don't like copies.

Durgun works at the Pergamon Museum, where those Gate lions from Samʼal are now perched -- well, some of them.

Pinar Durgun: My name is Pinar Durgun. I'm an archeologist and art historian, currently working at the Pergamon Museum as a curator.

Pinar Durgun: We're on the Museum Island. And it's funny because you always say museums are not islands, but we are literally on the Museum Island, one of the five museums on the museum island, but they're all kind of interconnected, I would say.

Ian Elsner: That's terrific. They're in their own little archipelago.

Pinar Durgun: Yeah, exactly.

The Gate lions from Sam’al, also known as Zincirli in Southern Turkey, were excavated in the early 1890s and came to Berlin through a colonial-era practice called Find Division, which was a system to divide up ownership of excavated artifacts.

Pinar Durgun: So during the Ottoman period when excavations were happening, so for instance, Germans or other foreigners were excavating in the Ottoman Empire, there were some agreements between the Sultan and the Kaiser here in Germany. So they were basically dividing objects that they were finding, and half of them would come here and half of them would stay in Istanbul.

Of course, the extent to which this division was carefully adhered to depended on the local and international power dynamics, so in many cases it was more than half. But when an original artifact was to remain in the Ottoman Empire, the excavators would use a molding shop to make a copy.

Pinar Durgun: The Berlin State Museums has its own plaster workshop called Gipsformerei. And this is a very old institution. I think it's one of the oldest in the world. It's 200 years old and the people who work at the Gipsformerei create these copies that look almost exactly like the originals.

Pinar Durgun: And they take pride in creating copies that are skillfully made, skillfully prepared. So it is difficult to distinguish between originals and copies.

The late 19th century was a time when the modern museum was taking shape, and institutions all around the world were seeking to fill collections. And copies, particularly paster copies from skilled molding shops like Gipsformerei made that possible.

Pinar Durgun: So this interest in having ancient objects in museums or in university collections was growing as an idea based on education basically. So you would acquire a copy for your art school, let's say, and then people who could draw these Roman or Greek statues that they would otherwise never see. Now we can travel and see these statues, but think about a time when you could not do that, where you could not go see the statue of David whenever you wanted to, or you couldn't Google a picture of it. Canonical highlights or quote unquote masterpieces were being distributed around the world in universities, museums, and schools.

Pinar Durgun: And this is a time where museums were basically coming to being, right? They were being formed. So a lot of the collections were built through these copies. The Metropolitan Museum, for instance, bought a lot of copies.

The idea behind acquiring these copies was to allow museums like the MET to showcase a “survey of art history” for the interested public, more like a textbook. And many museums still follow this model.

Pinar Durgun: Science museums, natural history museums we're so used to seeing reconstructions or copies of things or for instance, things that are like blown out of scale. It's a copy. It's not an original, but it communicates information that you cannot otherwise communicate. So people are on board with those things.

But during the 20th century, many history museums trended away from showcasing copies. Museums that built up collections based on copies started giving the copies away to smaller collections or smaller universities as the perceived value of a copy waned and the cultural aura around an original increased.

As Durgun says, the visitor's attitude of feeling tricked when presented with a copy might have something to do with the shift – but even that is not clear.

Pinar Durgun: There was a recent survey, I think it was 2020 that they did in maybe nine German museums to see how visitors react to copies. And it was very mixed. There was no solid conclusion that people don't like copies or people like copies. It's very much context dependent and how you present information.

Pinar Durgun: The only thing that they don't like is being tricked, and I think that's also a challenge for us curators. How do you make people feel like they're not being tricked, and how do you signal that this is a copy?

But it’s not like the lion is trying to hide the fact that’s it's a copy. The label on the plaster copy clearly indicates that it is a copy. So if a visitor is feeling tricked, that feeling might be based on a visitor's expectations of what they might see when they enter a museum. Of course, museums are responsible for setting those expectations.

Pinar Durgun: When I say for instance, think about a copy of an object that is lost during the war. Because this also happened, right? Some of the Berlin museums got destroyed during World War II. Some of the objects got lost. So what if we only had a copy of this object, and then we have that in the museum. Then their approach changes a little bit. Or if I say, let's say, we have an object in this collection, but it is requested from the country of origin, and it's returned, and we keep a copy of that object in the galleries and talk about this whole process of restitution, then they're like, yes, you know, that makes sense. That would make sense. Or for instance, if we have a copy and then you can go touch this copy. Recently one of our conservators here created a copy of one of these dragon figures from the Ishtar Gate as a touchable copy. The label encourages you to go touch it. And in this case, everyone loves it. Everyone loves to touch things in museums, as you know. So if there's a copy that you can touch, everyone is on board with copies. So it really depends on how you present the copy to the visitors.

Here, Durgun is focused on archaeological objects, and underscores that coping indigenous objects or ethnographic collections is a completely different issue. In those cases, the indigenous groups need to be involved in the decision to make copies at all.

But even with archaeological objects, the challenge of presenting copies to museum visitors includes understanding different cultural attitudes about the perceived value of copies.

Pinar Durgun: The other cultural context is the Mesopotamian, the ancient cultural context. How did people perceive or think about copying in ancient Mesopotamia? So I'm kind of looking into that as well, because in ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, an image of a person, or a God or a king is not just an image, it's not just a copy of that thing, it's the thing.

Pinar Durgun: It stands in for the thing. So when you make a statue of a king there are all these rituals that go around it, and then the statue becomes the king. So there's a different way of thinking about images and objects in ancient Mesopotamia. So how do I bring in that while presenting these copies.

Pinar Durgun: We also treat some of the artworks in the same way. For instance, if you think about the Hokusai Great Wave, right? There are multiple copies of this because it's a wood block print that was produced, in multiple versions.

Pinar Durgun: So the British Museum has multiples of them. But when you see the Great Wave in a museum, you treat it as this is an original object, even though you can think of it as like a photocopy in some ways, right? But you don't treat it that way.

There’s even a whole industry of immersive exhibitions of famous artists whose work is in the public domain, all displayed as digital copies.

Pinar Durgun: If you think about these more commercial, immersive exhibits that are popping up everywhere, like the Monet's Garden or Van Gogh's World or something like this. And then you just go to this exhibit and there's not a single original painting. Everything around you is a copy, is a digital copy. You're looking at screens, and people don't mind paying 20, 25 euros to go see copies.

The perceived value of a copy also looks different in a computer. Copying is the native function of digital systems – and a digital copy is a perfect replica. The computer doesn’t have a way to know what is an original file, and I’m not sure what that would even mean. Even the concept of moving a file from one location to another in a computer system, which has a clear physical-world analog, is actually achieved on many systems by copying the file to another location, confirming that the two files are identical, and deleting the first.

There seem to be two ways that the digital world intersects copies in museums. The first is translating something in the real world to digital information and back again. A process achieved by digital photographs, by 3D scans and 3D printers. Here the marginal cost of storing, distributing, and copying approaches zero.

Pinar Durgun: I feel like with 3D scanning and copying, because it was such an amazing opportunity to create copies and make things more accessible or documenting things, we all jumped on it really fast before even thinking about what are the ethical implications of copying? If the purpose is we are scanning this building, or this, let's say, open air relief because we wanna preserve this information for the future because it's exposed to the weather and the rain and everything. So it may not preserve in let's say 20, 30 years. Then you need to think differently. It is probably good to have some sort of documentation of these objects because, Wars always happen, catastrophes always happen. The National Museum in Brazil had a big fire a couple of years ago, and a lot of objects no longer exist. So if there was a digital scan of them, maybe that could have been good.

Pinar Durgun: So it has benefits obviously, but then we have to figure out do the benefits justify the fact that there are all these problematic ways of using copies. As a museum, you legally have the right to scan something. You don't really have to ask anybody.But then some of the objects that are in museums come from other places. And then who is the owner of the scan or the copy or who gets to have a saying on what can be and cannot be copied is also I think a question that we haven't really figured out, both like ethically and legally.

Pinar Durgun: You see these replicas in museum shops that basically copy the original objects on display, and I am guilty of this as well. I love buying little replicas of museum objects. But in the museum, it makes money out of this, so what is the ethical implication of this is another question. Do you actually own these things? And do you own the rights to replicate these things, even if it's for education, even if it's not commercial. I find that a difficult question to answer.

The second way that the digital world intersects copies in museums is the increasing amount of culture that’s digital-only. The historical record contained in online forum posts or art that was made and distributed digitally doesn’t really have an original.

There are now digital tools that recreate scarcity in the digital world, that reintroduce the concept of an original to a digital system.

There’s no question who owns a bitcoin for example, and there’s no way to copy your bitcoin and end up with two bitcoins, like you could with any other digital file. NFTs are a way to apply that same scarcity to an arbitrary artwork or piece of information.

Pinar Durgun: Ten years ago were we this much obsessed with authenticity? is a question that I'm trying to ask myself, I'm trying to find more writings about it because I feel like this whole, like NFT or this, AI or the deep fakes, I think you wrote about this as well.

Pinar Durgun: There is this anxiety around things not being authentic and original. So is that the reason why we feel a little bit anxious about copies? It seems like there has always been some sort of anxiety around copies. Maybe not in these early years of the establishment of the museum collections because then they didn't have original objects, so the only thing they had was the copies. But again, like even from like 20 years ago, there are these writings about original objects having their own aura or you having some sort of like genuine experience with the original, whereas you don't have that with the copy.

So where does this leave museums? How should museums present copies in their collections? For Durgun, it might mean actually highlighting the history of the copy itself – how it came to be, what was the reason for making the copies. In other words, valuing the copy as an object with its own history, puncturing the common expectation of museums as public treasure boxes filled with priceless artifacts.

Pinar Durgun: I feel like one of the best ways to open up museums and make them a little bit more welcoming is the possibility that the museum would acknowledge the fact that they're not the sole authority. And saying that we don't know what to do with copies. We have these now in our collection and we're trying to find a way to make them useful. But what do you think about them?

Pinar Durgun: I think this is a better way of moving forward. Maybe some people hate it, but we should also say that for some people,copies may not have any kind of value. But here are maybe some ways that they can be valuable and useful. So showing these different kind of perspectives on the issue of copies, I think is also a good step forward.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.

But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation.

But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.

In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform.

Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.
• 01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains”
• 02:40 The Original Visitor Experience
• 03:02 Dora Ivanova
• 03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47
• 03:35 Entering the Building
• 04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof
• 05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves
• 06:25 The Inner Mosaics
• 07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show
• 08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation
• 09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation
• 10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform
• 11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built
• 12:30 Acting before memory becomes history
• 13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary
• 14:05 The Panoramic Corridor
• 15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society
• 16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum
• 17:20 The preservation as proof of change
• 18:05 “Buzludzha is about change”
• 19:15 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 101. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.

Opened in 1981 to celebrate the grandeur of the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha is an imposing building, an enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria. Rising out of the back of the disk is a tower, 70 meters high, and flanked by two red stars.

Dora Ivanova: It was built to impress. It was built as part of the political propaganda and education as they called it during this time. Its shape looks like a UFO, actually. This is also on purpose because it had to show how the socialist idea is contemporary, it’s the future.

Visiting the site, you can still see the care that went into the sightlines – the approach from a winding mountain road, the drama the first time the building comes into view, the photo opportunities of the still-distant building flanked by smaller sculptures. There’s an eerie similarity to some well-designed corners of Disney theme parks, using scale and space and sightlines to transport the visitor – a Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains.

But the original visitor experience didn’t end outside the building. In those first years during communism, the building received tour groups by bus every four hours. Visitors entered Buzludzha through the front doors underneath the cantilever of the disk. Once inside, they were led up the stairs and into the belly of the building, which makes up an impressive amphitheater surrounded by colorful mosaics of Marx and Lenin, and a variety of Bulgarian communist leaders. At the center of the domed ceiling is a hammer and sickle mosaic whose tiles spell out the words, “Workers of all nations, unite!”

But visitors haven’t been able to officially enter Buzludzha for many years. Those front doors are locked and grated with metal bars – the worn concrete covered and covered again in graffiti, like the words “Enjoy Communism” written in the style of the Coca Cola logo and the all caps motto “forget your past”. I’ve visited Buzludzha many times over the past few years, but I’ve never been inside. Until now.

Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was open to everybody, but we had to register in before. So it was not open to individual tourism. It was open just to groups who had registered before like a school was coming to visit or the local factories coming and seeing the monument. People will come here and then , they'll go first down the staircase to leave their coats and bags, so you cannot go with them up. And then you'll put something on your shoes because you cannot go on the bright, perfect white marble with your dirty shoes from outside.

This is Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova, founder of the Buzludzha Project. When I first met her in 2018 – and presented her story on episode 47 of Museum Archipelago – she was working on a proposal to save this monumental building. But since then, the scope of her work has increased significantly.

Today, after more than three years of work recruiting international conservators, stabilizing the building, and basically running a fundraising and PR campaign for the monument, Ivanova hands me a hardhat, unlocks the grate, and leads me inside.

Dora Ivanova: click “And be very careful with the staircase and that you don't fall somewhere.”

Because there’s no perfect bright white marble underneath visitors' feet anymore. After communism collapsed in Bulgaria in 1989, Buzludzha just sat there, exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures. The regime changed, Bulgaria headed towards a democratic form of government, and people started stealing anything they could from Buzludzha – the glass from the windows and from the red stars, the copper roof and marble sculptures which were sold for scrap, and the perfect white marble perhaps used in a bathroom remodel.

Ian Elsner: Buzludzha bathroom!

Dora Ivanova: Yeah, many people have it, I’m sure.

Buzludzha has been a ruin way longer than it was a functional building and that’s why Ivanova and her team's efforts have been focused on stabilization.

Dora Ivanova: As I was walking on the roof, I was thinking, it's like a very ill person who can still get better. And can still be saved and it can still function. And I think if we started this whole initiative like five years later or 10 years later, there'll be very little less of the building to protect.

Protecting the building is a complex process, which requires a lot of coordination between technicians, and a deep understanding of the structure. Ivanova jokes that she used to think saving Buzludzha would take just a month of hard work.

Dora Ivanova: At the beginning I was thinking, okay, this month I didn't manage to save the building, but next month I'll save it! laughs

Today, the blue sky is clearly visible through the roof of the amphitheater, sunlight streaming through the scaffolding erected to preserve the hammer and sickle mosaic on the ceiling. It’s only now that we can safely walk around with hard hats.

Dora Ivanova: So metal sheets like this will fall down and a big pieces of wood like, like this there and bigger will fall. And this is why, on the first place, this building is not safe for visitors because anytime something can fall down, and that's why our task was to, we're thinking could take down only what is needed, but it turned out that everything is unstable and you can just touch it and everything's moving. and also this is like not stopping the water in any way. It's not helping the building because we have just like a metal sheet here, but it, the water falls from the three sides of the metal sheet, so you're not stopping kind thing.

Dora Ivanova: We had a ceiling out of aluminum, with rings, many rings, which are missing, which was completely stolen from the very beginning. And the top covering was this copper sheet, which was also stolen in the nineties in a very professional way, by the way. This is absolutely hard work. Now we know it.

Ian Elsner: You have new respect.

Dora Ivanova: Well, I'm very respectful to the thieves. It was very hard!

Surrounding the amphitheater are colorful mosaics– this is the inner mosaic circle, we’ll get to the outer mosaics a little later. Yes, here we see Marx and Lenin, but there’s also a mural called The Victory of September 9th, 1944 – when the new Bulgarian communist state was declared, and another called The Fight depicting workers with pitchforks defeating a fire-breathing beast.

Dora Ivanova: There was a partisan fight, anti-fascist. And then the idea is that three generations are gathering at Buzludzha and that the fathers were working or fighting for freedom. And then the sons were fighting for socialist freedom. And so they wanted, that's absolutely propaganda stuff. So they connect to the history, which is very well acknowledged and which is very well perceived by the public and show that communism is the final best stage of the entire Bulgarian human history.

Dora Ivanova: So something like this. So that they were using everything on the way to make their point.

Visitors to Buzludzha in the 1980s would have stood in the amphitheater and watched a narrated light and sound show projected onto the inner mosaics, lighting up certain figures at dramatic moments in the story.

Dora Ivanova: So the people will be watching this show of light and sound. They were standing, they were just watching from here, the mosaics. They were also not going to the mosaics to see them up close. So this was the place to experience the building. So there was a voice and there was lightning on the different spots and they were telling for different images.

Ian Elsner: And the computer equipment to play this recording. That was all stolen soon after?

Dora Ivanova: Yes, absolutely everything, yes. we don't have the video and we don't have the text as well.

But Ivanova thinks that it’s only a matter of time until these types of details surface. Up until now, ensuring that the mosaics don’t fall any further and the ceiling won’t collapse has been her team’s main concern.

Dora Ivanova: I'm sure over the time we may might get to this information as well. But this is again connected to the topic of interpretation. Until now we are very focused on the structural integrity of the building if it stands and if the music falls. And we had all our attention on those first topics, and I'm sure that's when we dig deeper into the story that we can find information like this.

Dora Ivanova: I'm not sure we'll find all of them but we had a lot of archives, mainly drawings and mainly construction papers. So not really a lot about the mosaics or the artwork because it was a private archive and not so much about the visitors' experience.

Dora Ivanova: There are three tour guides, who were working here who are telling the stories. And one of the lady who wrote down everything, she knew it until today. Like, all the words and how it was and what. So we have a little bit from that.

These tour guides, using the building as intended, would have been reading from a script that the communist party approved – that version of history where communist bulgaria was the end of history.

But Ivanova and her team realized that the preserved building could host the stories of the people in the audience, presenting as many narratives about communism as there were lived experiences.

Dora Ivanova: In the beginning it was different. In the beginning I was thinking, so now we go there and we preserve this building and it'll go very nice and I'll be very happy because the building will be preserved. But with the time I realized it's actually not the motivation line and the purpose line a nd the idea of the whole thing.

Dora Ivanova: Of course, we want to preserve this building. But the goal is not the entire purpose of the journey. So the journey is the purpose.

Now she recognizes that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.

Dora Ivanova: What we really want is a storytelling platform and that's the building tells stories and this is the best place to tell these stories and to allow the different views, to allow the criticism to allow different points of view.

Dora Ivanova: I mean, for some it was the labor of their life, and of course they're touched in some way to it. For others it was the most terrible time. And that's okay. And both things are okay and they can live simultaneously in the same world. So we don't, doesn't need to destroy the one or the other narrative.

Collecting stories from all over Bulgaria conjures an interesting symmetry with Buzludzha’s original intent – as a celebration of Bulgarian communism, the idea was that all of Bulgaria would contribute to the construction.

Dora Ivanova: There are so many different actions that they did in order to make it a national big initiative. So first it was funded by the people. So it could be funded by the party.

Dora Ivanova: This was not a problem for the party, but they decided everybody should participate. Not everybody can work on site, so everybody should donate. So it was not really a choice, but I think everything back then was working more or less like this. Yeah. So it was from the one side ordinary thing, but from the other side. Yes, it was, mandatory donation or just taken out from the people. And I even know that some children were collecting paper and selling it for reuse, like to recycle paper so that they can get the money and donated for Buzludzha.

Dora Ivanova: And the second thing is that there were 6,000 people working and out of them 500 were the, solders so there were military forces which constructed it., there were many people who were craftsman. But there were also a lot of volunteers. Again, “volunteers.” laughs

Of course, the critical difference is that this time, while anyone can contribute, nobody has to. Ivanova and her team have been gathering interviews, oral histories, and anything that could be presented in a future interpretive center. And like stabilizing the roof of the building, the team feels an urgency to act before memory becomes history.

Dora Ivanova: We have to take the stories before the people are gone. And do have this entire big project, I'm sure with this interpretation and analysis and historical research. But we don't have the time because we have to take the stories now. That's why we are doing this oral history campaign and those will be major stories that we are going to tell inside of the future building.

But it’s critical that the storytelling platform provided by the future interpretive center doesn’t end with the collapse of communism in Bulgaria – because that narrows the focus and complicates the politics of preserving Buzludzha in the Bulgarian context. Before Ivanova started the project, the building’s fate was presented as a binary: destroy it as a symbol of the collapsed communist government, or restore it to its former glory as a rallying cry to reinstate the system that built it. Charting a different path means acknowledging the decades since the collapse and the need for a space to reflect on the communist period. That’s why the team is also carefully documenting what happened since – including the graffiti.

Dora Ivanova: The general idea is definitely that the graffiti will be saved. And if all the graffiti or not, it's a matter of further discussions. But I think this is also something nice on the way that we don't have like a super fixed idea. This is how it's going to be. And this is exactly the target. Is exactly the function. This is exactly the way it's going to look like. But this is, again, a process and it develops according to needs, ideas, functions, people,partners, and interests.

After the original visitors watched the narrated light show, they would have climbed stairs to the outer walkway around the amphitheater, called The Panoramic Corridor. Here, with giant windows facing the rest of Bulgaria, visitors would have contemplated what they just watched and connected it to the familiar landscape. It’s windy out here since there’s no glass anymore, but the views of the surrounding mountains and valleys are beautiful – almost like a real life background to a propaganda poster. Opposite the windows are the outer mosaics. Unlike the inner mosaics of Communist figures and dramatic battles which were dyed with artificial paints to make them colorful – there’s a lot of red as you might imagine – the outer mosaics are made of natural colors from Bulgaria’s rivers – they have a grayscale dignity to them. Here the titles of the murals are things like The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society.

Dora Ivanova: So not only the people had to donate their time and money, "voluntarily" but also the nature. So the mosaic stones from the outside mosaic ring are from all the different rivers in Bulgaria, so that the nature gives it's gift and participate in this project. So this is The Care For Next Generation. This is the name of the mosaic and it's actually even the name of the entire, project for preserving the mosaics because this is the also our idea care for the next generation. So we have the mothers and the children. There's one very pretty chicken there.

Dora Ivanova: Yeah, so this is one of the unpolitical mosaics: this is The Role of The Women in Our Society – a very nice mosaic. So we have the woman with many hands because she has many roles and has to do many things. So she's concerned. The woman lover and the woman caretaker. And the woman everything possible.The woman who wants to run from all this stuff cuz it's too much.

It’s so easy for me to imagine this Panoramic Corridor as part of a future museum at Buzludzha. The connection between the past inside the building and the future of the country, spread out beyond the windows, makes me shiver – not just because of the wind. Even though I didn’t choose to become a Bulgarian citizen until a few years ago, I can feel the potential standing in front of the open windows pointing in all directions.

My mom is Bulgarian, but I was raised in America. My choice to connect with Bulgaria was future-looking – I’m interested in where Bulgaria is going and I want to help where I can. But I’ve been struck by the general cultural unwillingness to talk about the communist period that defined the country until fairly recently. The physical remains of that era and ideology are scattered around the country, but for many Bulgarians, they remain in the background – overgrown and unmovable – a kind of cynical proof that not much will change.

Which is why what Ivanova and her team have done is so impressive. She says that the visible signs of recent preservation has actually gotten people to pay attention for the first time – to think that there is movement, and this physical proof has made people more likely to come forward with stories or offer to help.

Dora Ivanova: You change people's ideas and you involve people and people find motivation and inspiration and, and they multiply, multiply the, the effect. So, I think that the building is the tool to create this impactful processes in this site. But I think this is also the only thing that can keep you motivated

While there is a brutal finality in what Buzluzdha was built for, a way to present the final triumphant stage of history – a finality that turned out to be brittle, the way that Ivaona and her team are approaching it gives it the flexibility to mean whatever Bulgarians will find important.

Dora Ivanova: And so at the end of the story, I think, it's about values, it's about change. I think even mostly about change. It's about the changing nature of everything which is related to humans and to humans, beliefs and human understandings. It's such a powerful place to tell these stories. And also with the traces of time, with the traces of, if you want to religious somehow communist ideology, but with all the graffiti with all the comments of the people, with the time, with all the artwork, which was created already here, which will be created here in the future. When you have this visibility and the, especially, this is a very visible thing. We cannot deny it. Yeah. And I think somewhere that is the motivation and the meaning for me.

Thanks to the efforts of Ivanova and her Buzludzha Foundation, you’ll soon be able to go inside Buzludzha. Exactly what you’ll find inside is still being worked on, but it will all be in a future episode of this show.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum.

As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name?

And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview.

So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs
Archipelago Museum.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Why is Ian in Finland?
• 00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days
• 01:30 Same Name
• 03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum
• 04:05 Naomi Nordstedti
• 04:30 Life on the Archipelago
• 06:04 Opening the Museum
• 06:54 Boats
• 07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition
• 08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes
• 10:40 Thanks For Listening
• 10:54 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 100. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum.

Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”.

Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland”

But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago.

Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…”

When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands?

And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck.

Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland.

Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ”

Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left”

For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, instead of my podcast.

It didn’t really bother me – well maybe a little – but no, it didn’t really bother me. Archipelago is a great word, and the museum was all the way in Finland, and it certainly was around for longer.

But as my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. I would wonder what they were up to. I wondered if they had heard of my podcast. Maybe they came across it one day? Maybe I was annoying them with my similar name. Every few months, I would think to contact the museum, to highlight the similarity and hopefully make a new friend – only to remember that they didn’t have an email address. An old email address, from an archived version of their website, bounced back with an undeliverable error.

The more I thought about it, the more it sank in: the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview.

A few years later, with help from those of you who have supported the show through Club Archipelago, visiting the museum finally became possible.

I decided to hop on two planes, book a rental car, spend a night in an airport hotel in Helsinki, drive down the coast, and visit the Archipelago Museum in person.

Even if there was nobody there willing to talk to me, it would still make for an interesting 100th episode.

Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left. Then your destination will be on the right.”

Field Audio - Ian: All right. This is the Archipelago Museum.

Field Audio - GPS: “Your destination is on the right.”

Field Audio - Ian: “ Wow. I think it's open and I see a WC sign! Okay, I'm gonna park where it says parking.

The Archipelago Museum is a long, old stone barn on the Gulf of Finland that’s packed full of boats.

Field Audio - Ian : *walking over stones”

Field Audio - Ian: “How are you?”

Field Audio - Naomi: I'm fine, thank you. How are you? Welcome.

Field Audio - Ian: “I’m very good, thank you! I would love to visit the museum. One ticket, please.”

Field Audio - Naomi: Yes, you are welcome. That’s 5 euros. With card or cash?

This is Naomi.

Naomi Nordstedt: “Hi, my name is Naomi and I work at the Skärgårdsmuseet Rönnäs [Rönnäs Archipelago Museum]. So as the cashier, guide, whatever.”

Naomi told me that the museum usually gets one or two visitors from the US every summer.

Naomi Nordstedti: How did you find us? Or like how did you, how did you come to Finland of all places?

Field Audio - Ian: “Well, to visit this museum!”

Naomi Nordstedti: Oh wow!

The Archipelago Museum tells the human story of life on the archipelago off the coast of Finland. The main area of the exhibition underscores the centrality of surviving among the remote islands by fishing, seal hunting, and cattle breeding. The main idea is

Naomi Nordstedti: To see how people lived within the archipelago and like how the archipelago has sustained the people, while the people sustain the archipelago. The sea is very important. That's the most important thing. And it, since it's very like the people who live here live very scattered cuz it's a bit remote. We have couple neighbors, but then to one side there's nothing but forest for like kilometers. So you become closer with the people who live close by. Sometimes you have to go a bit further to meet. And that becomes also part of like, you meet up with bigger groups of people a couple times a year because you know, you might not see them that much otherwise.

And also just as a side point, most people here have a boat. Most people sail. That's just a thing. You do that here.

People have been making this part of the archipelago their home for 500 years, and the reasons always come back to geography.

Naomi Nordstedti: We know there's been a medieval village here since the 13th century. Over here, there used to be an inland lake. This is all, there's no water over here now. And so like the water line is over here. Which means that there used to be back in 1414 or 1421, there have been records that people used to live here and this used to be like a bigger, for that time, bigger town, because this made it possible for commerce to happen way more since this led to the sea.

The medieval village disappeared and over the centuries, various families lived in the area, surviving, using boats, and building barns. By the mid 1970s, the stone barn we’re in now sat abandoned.

Naomi Nordstedti: This building was left and it was like, nobody owns it. Nobody was like, just kind of living in it. It's a beautiful building. So then it was just decided that a lot of people like around here were like, well, what should we do with this building? It's a beautiful building. It's a shame to just let it go to waste. So this is the guy who was like, hey, should we start a museum? Cuz he made boats. And they were like, yeah. There was a lot of, support from the local community and from the other people. 1985 is when we opened. There's a lot of beautiful things there and so much history that isn't really known about.It's only known about like from families and within families, and they tell the stories. So it's nice that other people get to see too.

As the museum’s brochure says, “the boat occupies the central position in being the prime tool of the population.”

Naomi Nordstedti: There is information about how to build boats, how boats have been built throughout the centuries, and our collection of the working boats that have been used here in the archipelago.

Most of the stories that the local community tells about the archipelago are indeed told through boats – school boats, the differences between the boats that year-rounders used compared with the people who built summer cottages, the engine development and design through the 20th century, and the way that boats were used to used to smuggle alcohol during the period of Finish prohibition 1919 to 1932.

Naomi Nordstedti: People in Finland have never drunk as much alcohol as they did during the prohibition. So it did not work, but it was interesting. This is how they smuggled alcohol. They filled these canisters with pure alcohol. Most of them from Estonia or some from Germany as well. You can fit about 10 liters in one of those. Then they filled those canisters, this whole thing, filled them up like that and then they took the rope, attached it to the boat, and then went, and then if they got caught by the authorities. Like you can see over there on that picture they'd cut the rope and then this thing would fall to the bottom. And then they have this little thing. So this is a buoy. It's attached to , a bag of salt or sugar, which means that they would go to to bottom. And then the sugar or salt would dissolve in a couple days. So jump up again and they could recover. Yeah, they had a lot of clever ideas.

The Archipelago Museum is only about 500 meters from the coast, so I ended my long journey by walking over to see the archipelago for myself.

Field Audio - Ian: *walking over stones”

Field Audio - Ian: So here I am on the Gulf of Finland, overlooking the archipelago overlooking some islands. Extending out into the distance, some boats and people in them, some islands that are not much more than just rocks… it’s a good place to think about 100 episodes.

Doing museum archipelago has helped me expand my understanding of museums – far more than I expected when I started work on episode one. It allowed me to have conversations with people at tiny museums – museums so small they haven’t been built yet – and giant museums where change seems impossible. It enabled a new relationship with guides, exhibit designers, and the visiting public.

Walking through almost 100 museums for this project, it’s still tempting to see each museum as an island – every episode, it’s easy to focus on just one museum, to examine their unique collection or an updated exhibit.

But zooming out helps too and is useful in its own way. Anyone’s local museum can be a beloved fixture, but museums as an institution have a centuries-long history undergirding white supremacist, colonialist, and racist ideologies and helping them flourish. Interrogating museums as a whole hopefully allows us to better recognize colonial structures embedded within an individual one.

We can’t forget the power that museums hold. And by examining the larger forces acting on this rocky landscape of museums, we have the chance, if we’re careful, to wield that power for better uses than the ones that created museums in the first place.

Thanks for joining me on the journey so far. I’m so excited for where we get to voyage to next.

Thanks for listening to 100 episodes of Museum Archipelago!

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players.

But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting.

Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process.

In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside.

Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0)

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin
• 01:23 Joe Kalicki
• 02:06 Namco Museum
• 03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games
• 04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith
• 05:25 Occupy White Walls
• 07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins
• 10:11 Animal Crossing
• 11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums
• 12:44 Joe Kalicki’s new podcast, Panoply
• 13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
• 13:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 99. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games. The central interpretive throughline, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry through 50 individual games: from Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT to the latest console and PC games.

But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with original controllers.

The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games their year of their release: games like Asteroids or Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment, early home computer games like Oregon Trail live inside your parents home office, while the home-console classics like Super Mario Bothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early 90s suburban home in the U.S.

So you can play a Japanese video game in an American home inside a German museum — but what about putting a museum in a video game?

Joe Kalicki: I think we're in a very important place right now where we need to assess the value of fully digital educational experiences in the context of the museum. But particularly I also wanna explore the value for educating everyday people on how to appreciate and interact with brick and mortar museums as well.

This is interaction designer Joe Kalicki.

Joe Kalicki: Hello, my name is Joe Kalicki. I'm an interaction designer, musician, and podcaster.

Kalicki remembers the first time he encountered a museum-like space in a video game.

Joe Kalicki: In the late nineties, the Namco company published a series of games called Namco Museum, and this was earnestly the first attempt to create mainstream historical documentation for video games and it’s a very pivotal example for me in thinking about digital museum spaces.

Namco Museum was a digital version of the Computer Games Museum, but all the video games presented in the collection, like PacMan and Dig Dug, were originally made for Namco arcades.

Joe Kalicki: They actually had a fully 3D-rendered museum space. You would walk into the front, into the atrium where a receptionist would greet you. And then you would walk into the main hall and go into the specific wing of the gallery for a particular game. And you would walk around this space and you could do things like view concept art for the game or view documents and artifacts related to the game.

Joe Kalicki: And then of course you could go on and you could play the game. There was theming in each of the wings to represent something about the game itself. And as a, I guess I was probably six or seven when I played this, this was mind blowing to me. Not only was this game taking the time to put me into a place and contextualize these games that I was playing, it provided so much more value and actually frankly, kickstarted me really deeply caring about the history of video games and the history of these things that I was interacting with rather than just hopping in and playing a round of Dig Dug, and then turning it off.

Playing Namco Museum today, it’s easy to see the match between a museum space and the video game technology of the 1990s. White gallery walls are easy to render, and navigating through sparse 3D rooms and hallways is a prerequisite for any first-person shooter game.

And white walls with the occasional object is all it takes to read as “museum” and – as we talk a lot about on this show – “museum” conjures up a whole lot of cultural signifiers about how we should treat the information and objects presented.

The fact that Namco Museum decided to present its games in a virtual gallery space was a way to signal that these video games were important – a statement that these games were worth engaging with like historic or artistic object.

A 2021 project by game designer and programming instructor Kate Smith called Museum of Memories delibrary employs a gallery space to signal important objects.

Joe Kalicki: Kate Smith and a couple other developers created Museum of Memories as a project for a game jam. She had an open invitation to send in an item that people cared about. Send in an audio recording of yourself saying why you care about it. And then she put together a very straightforward museum space: classic pedestals and wall mounts and whatnot.

Joe Kalicki: And somebody would send in a reference photo or, so a cookbook, for example, and Kate and her team would create a 3D version of that item, put it on display and you can listen to why these objects are meaningful to the people that submitted them.

Then there are experiences that invite the player to create their own museum space – not just contributing objects and stories. Kalicki points to Occupy White Walls, where people construct a museum and fill it with art – then invite other players to come inside.

Joe Kalicki: It's a free-to-play game that was released a couple years ago and essentially you are dropped onto a plot of land and you have a building and it's kind of a rinky dink little art gallery, and you can essentially remodel it and take art that either people have uploaded into the game or exists in the public domain. And you can essentially decorate and design your space. And you could totally build a bunch of white walls and throw things up that you like.

Joe Kalicki: You can do it as densely or sparsely as you like. You can create sort of fantastical spaces and then present the work that you're placing into the 3D space in a way that pleases you, or maybe you want to create some sort of lack of harmony, and dissonance and you know, freak people out. And the really cool thing about the game is that you can hop into other people's galleries and you can go take a look.

Joe Kalicki: And I checked it out last night, for example, and I teleported to somebody's gallery and there were five or six other real people walking around and looking at things and chatting about the art. And the cool thing about it too, is there would be,something that I would've formally a piece of art that I would've associated with a Tumblr or a Deviant Art back in the day next to a Caravaggio or other Renaissance classics and whatnot.

In the same way that Roller Coaster Tycoon – a video game from the late 90s – encouraged players to think deeply about the logistics of designing a theme park, Occupy White Walls gives players control over a museum gallery in a way that’s really difficult to achieve in real life. But by doing so, it asks players to think critically about museums in the real world.

At a certain point, the cultural signifier of a museum space could become limiting – if designers and developers can make anything at all, why make white walls and display cases?

The latest versions of the Assassin's Creed series of video games feature something called a Discovery Tour. In the Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins, which takes place just before the Roman occupation of Egypt in about 40 BCE, the video game’s players – free from their assenination duties – walk around the crowded ancient cities of Alexandria or Memphis on a guided tour.

Joe Kalicki: And this era, which the game has built out for the purpose of you running around and, you know, killing people just to put it simply – they stripped away all of that and your avatar, your character could walk around the world and basically take a guided tour of basically every nook and cranny of Egyptian society at that time.

Joe Kalicki: So you could walk into a city and a nice, documentary style narrator would talk to you about the city and what the various classes of people would do in the city. You'd walk through the markets and observe that. But as you reach certain locatio ns, if you would go into a tomb for example, and there would be a sarcophagus, well, an image viewer would pop up and you'd be able to look through some of the high resolution photos that were used for reference modeling or other purposes.

In the Discovery Tour, the cultural signifier of a museum is replaced with the cultural signifier of a narrated guided tour. The level of detail – both in terms of historical research and digital recreation – is the primary selling point of the main game. But since studios had to put in all this work anyway, it’s not too much of a stretch to build an educational module on that same foundation.

Joe Kalicki: Every game that's created there's something called a like a content bible or development bible, or, there's various names for it. But the idea is it's kind of like the master guide for the world. And it helps when you're basing your game in an area of the world that's been heavily researched and documented and actually existed that can become very fleshed out very quickly. Especially these triple A where there's many, many, many millions of dollars, budgets, exceeding massive blockbuster films going into these games.

Joe Kalicki: So, why not create some additional value out of it? Personally, I would love if companies like this could release modes like that either for free or in some context where, yeah, you're not getting to do the thing where you're running around and, jumping off of ledges and assassinating people, but you can access this big, beautiful world that all this work went into.

We’re probably already at a place where museums in video games are easier to access than museums themselves. Since its initial series release in 2001, the popular video game Animal Crossing has featured a village museum where players can place culturally or aesthetically valuable items that they find in the world of anthropomorphic animal.

Joe Kalicki: for a child thinking about this in a, in a real, ground level situation where you are not a person that has the lifetime and historical context of what museums are.

Joe Kalicki: It's the early 2000s, and you're playing one of the first Animal Crossing games: you may or may not have even been to a museum yet. And you're going around the world and you're finding precious items that you care about. You’re excited that you caught the butterfly or you dug up a fossil or a rhinoceros gave you a painting or whatever it is.

Joe Kalicki: And when you donate those to the museum and then you see them represented and you see them respected and displayed proudly there's that may be a formative experience for someone even knowing what a museum is. And so that person then goes on a field trip or they travel with their family or whatever, and they're gonna go to a museum and they're gonna say, somebody had to find all this stuff. Somebody had to bring it here. And they had to decide that this belonged in a museum rather than keeping it in their house.

And one final point blurring the line between visitor and player. All of these games rely on video game engines – the foundational code on top of which these games are built. Occupy White Walls uses the Unreal Engine, while Kate Smith used Unity to render realistic museum spaces in Museum of Memories.

These engines, designed and tweaked for video games, are also the fastest and cheapest ways to develop interactive exhibits for museums. I use Unity for exhibits I develop because that gives me access to a whole toolbox of solved problems (like realistic lighting, 3D model support, and a stable tech stack) meaning I don’t need to worry about making a custom solution from the ground up.

At the Computer Games Museum in Berlin, even the interactives that aren’t the video game artifacts – interactives displaying information like text and images – are built on a game engine. And the interactives at your local museum probably are too.

I wasn't able to find a game in the Computer Games Museum that featured a museum-like space: so I could have the delightful recursion of being in a museum in a video game in a museum. But with more and more museum-like spaces popping up in video games, it’s only a matter of time.

Joe Kalicki is starting a podcast called Panoply – the first episode releases on August 15. The podcast is about learning through oblique strategies and will feature interviews with musicians, academics, and historians and is not afraid to be obscure and esoteric. You can subscribe now and listen to the trailer by visiting the awesome URL: panoply.space.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

The next episode of Museum Archipelago is episode 100. To celebrate this milestone, I want to hear from you! I’ve set up a place on the internet where you can send a voice memo to be included in the very special 100th episode.

There, you’ll be presented with two questions: one, where do you listen to Museum Archipelago, and two what museum would you like to hear about on a future episode of the podcast. You can answer by recording yourself, or just writing in a text field.

Visit museumarchieplago.com/party to join the celebration. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks for listening!

Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast, guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Thanks so much to everyone who supports the show by being a member of Club Archipelago. You can join them by going to http://jointhemuseum.club. Thanks again for helping make this show possible.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal’s construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal.

Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she’s determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered around Panama as a point of connection from pre-Colonial times to the present day.

In this episode, González describes the geographic destiny of the Isthmus of Panama, how America’s ownership of the Canal physically divided the country, and how her team is developing galleries covering Panama’s recent history.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 The Panama Canal's Politically Sensitive History
• 01:20 Ana Elizabeth González, Executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum
• 01:35 Opening of the Panama Canal Museum in 1997
• 02:44 Making the Museum About Panama, Not Just The Canal
• 03:10 Geography is Destiny
• 03:30 The Isthmus of Panama as a Point of Connection
• 04:20 A Brief History
• 04:50 French Attempt at a Canal
• 05:10 Treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla
• 06:30 Construction of the Canal
• 07:00 "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll"
• 08:00 Martyrs' Day
• 08:50 Work In Progress: Galleries of Panama's Recent History
• 09:10 Panama's Recent History, Briefly
• 11:10 The Museum's Future
• 11:15 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
• 12:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️

Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 98. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned in school about the Panama Canal told a narrow story.

Ana Elizabeth González: The history of the canal that was told here was told in a way that was very politically sensitive at the time. So it didn't want to ruffle any feathers.. it's mentioned in schools, but not in depth.

Up until 1979, the United States fully controlled the Panama Canal and a 5 mile zone on either side, and until 1999, the United States jointly controlled the Canal with Panama. The presence of the United States, and the politics of the Canal, meant that the safest story to tell was one that was mostly focused on the technological feat of building it.

Ana Elizabeth González: The history was very carefully constructed so that it praised the engineering feat of the United States, but it completely ignored the fact that Panama was home to people from 97 different countries to build this Canal, which causes such a diversity in our country.

Ana Elizabeth González is now Executive director of the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City, Panama.

Ana Elizabeth: Hello. My name is Ana Elizabeth González and I'm executive director of the Panama canal museum, El Museo Del Canal.

González became director in 2020, but the Panama Canal Museum itself opened in 1997, two years before control of the Canal was returned to Panama. The museum – a non-profit which is not government funded – was created out of a hope that, among all the changes, Pamana’s complex relationship to the Canal would not be forgotten.

Ana Elizabeth González: I was in school at the time, but, I remember it was, I think the then President of Panama and the Mayor and a lot of other people that created the board of trustees and I think it was the idea that this history of this struggle to gain our land and to find our sovereignty and the generational struggle that had been going on. There was a fear that it would have gotten lost in memory or forgotten. So I think that the museum back then was created to preserve and study and research everything surrounding the Canal history and promoting the education of what an impact it had.

So for González, the Panama Canal Museum is really a museum about Panama.

Ana Elizabeth González: I think people come with the preconception that the museum is just going to be about how the Canal works and how the locks open fill with water. And we don't really have that in-depth here. That's why the Canal has a visitor center that explains how it works in terms of technology and engineering. But it's something we just brush over here because we deep dive into the history of Panama as a point of connection. And as this route that changed the world.

The first gallery of the museum begins long before the Canal and highlights the unique features of Panama’s geography: a small isthmus that’s both the only way to travel between the North and South American continents by land and also the narrowest land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Ana Elizabeth González: We've been a trade route or over a route of connection. Ever since Panama – well, the territory sort of resurfaced from, from the oceans, because we were always a bridge between north and south America for animal species and then indigenous peoples. So we've always sort of been a point of trade and contact both culturally and commercially. You enter, the first exhibition space, which is the sort of emergence of Panama as a land in this sort of Omni globe that we have, and you see how it connects both landmasses of North and South America. And you go through the exhibition towards the pre-colonial living traditions, and what Panama was like before the Spanish colonization, then the importance of Panama as part of the Spanish crown and monarchy until 1821.

After three hundred years as part of the Spanish monarchy, the isthmus’s geography started to look even more useful to outside interests during the 19th century, as global trade started to pick up. Here, goods and passengers could bypass a much longer and much more dangerous journey around the Strait of Magellan on the southern tip of South America. In 1855, a railway was built across the Isthmus, facilitating the movement of people and goods in time for a wave of the California gold rush.

Ana Elizabeth González: And then in 1881, if I'm correct, the French after the success of the Suez Canal, the French chose to build a canal through Panama. Unfortunately, due to yellow fever and other diseases and badly managed funds, the enterprise did not succeed, but it was bought from the French by the United States through the treaty of, Hay–Bunau-Varilla, which we signed upon getting our independence as a country.

The 1903 treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla granted the United States complete ownership over a 50 mile long slice of land that was to be the Canal. In the gallery, visitors walk through a hallway that’s completely covered in words from that treaty. Powerful words like “perpetuity” and “authority” look down on them.

Ana Elizabeth González: The United States had rights for… well for forever it wasn't even a question of whether or not they owned it. They owned the land where it was going to be built and the land where they had to operate and the land where they had to create their offices and their ports. Back then the country was completely divided, through a gap that was considered the canal zone. And that was United States territory and Panimanians were not free to wander into it, and it did separate the country in a massive way. And that treaty, which no Panamanian negotiated or signed, was actually the seed of our struggle with international relations during the whole 20th century until the CanalI was transferred back to Panama in 1999.

But first the massive task of actually constructing the Canal through that slice of land. The project required enormous numbers of people, and Canal administrators tried to entice workers from all over the world to take part in the project – yet another way that this isthmus was at the forefront of a more globalized world.

Ana Elizabeth González: We had people obviously from the Caribbean, we had people from Europe. We had people from Asia. So there's a big mix and such a big diversity that came with the construction of the Canal.And many of them remained in the country after the Canal was built and they made their life here, but what is also not known is the amount of racism and discrimination that these people faced. Because in order to work in the Panama Canal construction, you were assigned either a gold roll or a silver roll.

So the payroll was either you were paid in American gold or in Panamanian silver and the American gold was reserved for white Americans. And sometimes there were some exceptions with some Europeans, but the remainder of the population whether you were Asian, Caribbean, European, or even Panamanian, you were paid in Panamanian silver. The living standards for silver roll were appalling. The law even, because I'm assuming some of it was important from the Jim Crow laws at the time, they had segregated entrances for silver roll and gold roll. The schools were segregated. And this is a history that not many people in Panama or elsewhere know. And I think a lot of that ripples into certain racial tendencies and racism that permeates through our society today.

After taking people through the construction of the Canal, the museum’s exhibits end abruptly in 1964, with an event known as Martyrs' Day in Panama.

Ana Elizabeth González: And it ends in 1964 because we had a very significant moment in history at the time where students from a high school in Panama peacefully protested with their flag towards the Canal Zone. And there was a scuffle, there were a lot of tensions and in the end, many of the students died, shot by Canal Zone police, or otherwise, and the flag was torn. And at that moment, Panama became the first country to break diplomatic relations with the United States. And we still commemorate that day as the day of the Martyrs' that day. And that was a turning point in the negotiations of a new treaty. For the Canal and that's where we are at the moment, because the next exhibition rooms are completely empty at the moment. We're continuing to renovation plans for those.

González and her team are developing the galleries that feature the rest of the story, up until the present day – this includes the Torrijos–Carter Treaties in 1977 which defined the handover of the Canal at the end of the 20th century, and the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. When the new galleries open, it will be the first time much of this history has been presented in a Panamanian museum.

Ana Elizabeth González: Yeah, it's our next challenge. Many people may not know this, in 1968 we had a coup d'état. the government was deposed and we had a military regime and it's a history that not many Panimanians talk about till this day. There's still a lot of sensibilities I think that could be hurt, from it because there are still people around that were part of both the military regime and families of the victims it disappeared. But it was a big part of our history and it was a big part of the negotiations for the canal because, general Omar Torrijos who signed the Canal treaty with president Carter from the United States was in fact that a dictator and not many, not everybody agrees on that terminology, but, he eliminated political parties. He eliminated media that was not government controlled. We had another dictator until 89 when the United States following a clause from the treaty from 1903, and also 77, which said, they can invade Panama at any point where they, when they think that Canal is being endangered, invaded the country to a lot of human losses, but managed to successfully arrest our dictator.

All of that is a very difficult history to share. And I think that's why maybe in 97 when the museum was created. It was still too soon. But it's something that we're definitely going to tell now. And I think it's going to be a really important dialogue with the people's Panama to remember maybe parts of history that are hurtful to remember, maybe embarrassing to remember, but that need to be remembered in order not to be repeated. So that's our next step.

González says that the new galleries featuring recent history will be open in September 2022. In the century since the Canal was built, the globe has only become more connected – and the Canal remains the world’s biggest trade route. González is sure that Panama’s place as a global point of connection will only grow – and wants to make sure there’s a museum that tells that story.

Ana Elizabeth González: I think it's important for people to know the Canal is not just a recent history. To know that Panama has been a link between peoples and. cultures and points of trade since we've existed is quite important. We've been geographically blessed and such a small country plays such a big impact in the world that it's an honor for me to direct the museum that tells that story.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

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