New column in Metropolis M: Museum Manager 2011

Inspired by the computer game Football Manager, in which you are the trainer of a top football club, Juha van ’t Zelfde dreams of the game Museum Manager, in which you get to run a top museum.

Museum Manager 2010, the precursor of Museum Manager 2011

It will have been in 1995 that I managed to get my hands on my first copy of Championship Manager 2. CM2 was a computer game in which you could be manager of any of the big (and small) teams in the English, Spanish and Italian football competitions. The first edition appeared in 1992, and by the time its name was changed to Football Manager (FM) in 2005, the game had grown to become the ultimate sport management game, with football competitions and associated players from every continent.

You begin the game by creating a profile and selecting a team from one of the world’s many football leagues. Let us, for example, take FC Barcelona, the most successful team in 2009, with such famous players as Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. When you make up your profile, you are asked to do more than just fill in your name and age. You also make a choice about how you join the team as a manager: as a former worldclass player (a Rijkaard type), a successful manager (a Van Gaal type), or as an unknown rookie with no experience at all (a Van ’t Zelfde type). Let us begin as an unknown trainer: Juha van ’t Zelfde, 30 years old, half Dutch, half Finnish.

The next step is that you are welcomed to the team by Chairman Joan Laporta, Johan Cruijff’s famous friend. On behalf of the Board, Laporta expresses their faith in your appointment and their expectation that you will make their team the champions. With the likes of Messi, Henry and Ibrahimovic in your selection, this of course has to be possible, but should you need a little extra support, you have a transfer budget of €15 million at your disposal. Barcelona has a stadium that seats 98,000 spectators, world-class training facilities, state-of-the-art training for young players and a total budget of €664 million. You also have a staff, including an assistant-manager, coaches, youth coaches, physios and scouts. In short, everything is just as it is in real life, and you feel responsible for the future of the team.

What makes the experience of playing FM so exceptional is the dizzying array of statistics and data that come your way. Players have more than 30 different characteristics, divided into technical, mental and physical qualities that are valued by a number from 1 to 20. The lightweight World Footballer of the Year, Lionel Messi, for example, scores 20 for flair and technique, but only 9 for strength and 10 for aggressiveness. The managers, trainers and scouts also have statistics to chart their qualities. All of these figures fluctuate. They can go up or down, depending on how you deal with the players, how you employ your staff, the shape you give to the training, which tactics you use in the games, whether you win the games, how you respond to the press and how the public responds to you. If you improve, the players improve, and vice versa. The result of all this is that you really get the feeling that you are leading the team, that your choices are deciding factors in the club’s success.

After this, football is never the same again. The first time you go watch a real football game, you see it all through the eyes of an FM manager. Worse, you want the real managers to play FM as well, so that they too can make their clubs better.
When I recently played Football Manager 2010, it occurred to me how wonderful it would be to translate this to the museum world, so that you could become manager of the Tate Modern, or to bring it closer to home, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Alexander Ribbink would welcome you, express his faith in you and entrust the collection, the museum building and the staff to you. At the same time, he would make a budget available that you could use as you see fit. Suddenly, you would have to choose between purchasing a new work by Olafur Eliasson, appointing a new head of marketing, or developing the museum’s strategy in the field of Internet and new media. That new work of Eliasson’s is expensive, but it would bring in new visitors and generate a lot of international attention. A new head of marketing could mean an in-depth investment for the organization and make all of the museum’s departments more transparent. The online strategy would make the museum more approachable and accessible, but it would consume a great deal of time and require considerable external (and expensive) expertise.

Just as in FM, Museum Manager – which is of course what this game would be called – would let you begin with a smaller organisation and work your way up to the higher ‘divisions’. In the footsteps of Willem Sandberg, you could make the Stedelijk a unique museum with an exceptional collection that is squarely in the middle of society and actively seek collaborations with other disciplines. This would have consequences for relationships with the city, sponsors and other partners. If you are a success, New York’s MoMA will ask you to become manager of their museum, just as happens in the football world. Suddenly, you are in charge of an immense collection and astronomical budgets and have an international network of experts at your fingertips. But you are expected to produce results. Can you handle the pressure?

I cannot wait to play Museum Manager. Then, the first time I go back to visit a museum, I will observe it through the eyes of an MM manager. Moreover, I will want real museum managers to play MM, so they too can improve their museums.

Juha van ’t Zelfde is half Finnish, half DJ and half co-founder of Non-fiction, VURB and Viral Radio.
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This article has been published in Dutch art magazine Metropolis M. It was translated from Dutch by Mari Shields. Follow Metropolis M on Twitter.

Contemporary Art: Who Cares?

Following our contribution to the ACCESS2CA seminar at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana (Slovenia) last year, the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN) has invited us to give a number of workshop at this year’s symposium ‘Contemporary Art: Who Cares?’. This international event will take place at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam this summer and is organized for (up-and-coming) professionals, from diverse disciplines, who are connected to the conservation of modern and contemporary art.

The symposium is co-organized by the Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands (SBMK) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Key note speakers include Stedelijk Museum‘s conservator Bart Rutten, Van Abbemuseum‘s director Charles Esche, Tate‘s Pip Laurenson, artists Eija Liisa Ahtila and Nedko Solakov and various other people from around the world with an interest/stake in contemporary art conservation with a special focus on complex, large scale multimedia installation works.

Our series of workshops will look at how contemporary art conservation can be made accessible to the public and the role of conservators and conservation information in this process. Participants of the sessions will learn about how organisations (in and outside of cultural heritage) are using new media and emerging technologies to engage with audiences. The workshop exercise wil give participants a first hand experience with (online) media, including various social networks, gaming, mobile applications and data visualization.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, ‘The Wind’ (2002) from reel aesthete on Vimeo.

The networked museum marathon

Here is a first reaction after our 5 hour interview marathon that took place during last Saturday’s Amsterdam museumnacht. We first would like to thank all our guests from the various institutions, our visitors in De Verdieping, and the n8 organisation for kindly letting us participate in the 10th museumnacht. We are very happy with the start of this ongoing discussion on the (changing) role of museums in 21st century cities, and the influence of networked urban environments on museums. We will take our time to write up a summary of the event, and hope to update soon.

Curating the city, a museumnacht marathon on metropolitan museums, responsive heritage and the city as cultural platform

Doug Aitken's Sleepwalker was projected on the exterior walls of the MoMA

This Saturday the 10th annual museumnacht (museum night) will be organised in our hometown Amsterdam. Non-fiction will take part with a special marathon on museums and the city, in their basecamp De Verdieping. A wide group of institutions, designers and thinkers will join us at the table to discuss how pervasive urban museums are, and how the city can become a interactive museosphere.

The programme starts at 7 pm and goes on to 12, after which Viral Radio will take over with wall-surpassing bass and rhythm collections compiled by Juha & Cinnaman with Mamiko Motto. Outside, the facade of the building will be used as an urban screen for the duration of the museumnacht by students of MediaLAB Amsterdam. Inside, artists Amie Dicke and Sarah van Sonsbeeck will host the workshop ‘Build your own mobile museum’.

Tickets are available through n8.nl, make sure you get them soon: the previous 7 editions sold out before the start.

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Programme:

19 – 00 Interview Marathon >> with Michiel van Iersel and Juha van ‘t Zelfde
We will navigate through the night together with our guests, visitors, Hyvers and Twitterati, to try to articulate the future of museums in the city.

19 – 20 MyMuseum >> Blikopeners, Zichtbaar Afwezig and Urban Screens
Students of the Rietveld, Sandberg, UvA and HvA will talk about appropriating, editing and remixing the museum.

20 – 21 Museums And The City >> Stedelijk Museum
Curators Bart Rutten, Leontine Coelewij and Marten Jongema will look back at Stedelijk in de Stad and will look ahead towards a new Stedelijk Museum.

21 – 2 The Mobile Museum >> De Appel, Platform21/Supermaker, NIMk, Mediamatic
Representatives of various art institutions in Amsterdam will talk about their transient adventures in pop-up structures and mobile pavillions.

22 – 23 The Digital City >> VURB, The Mobile City, Nationaal Historisch Museum, Habbekrats
Now things will get unphysical, with VURB and The Mobile City talking about urban informatics and the city as an interaction platform. The Nationaal Historisch Museum will talk about being a distributed museum, and design firm Habbekrats will elaborate on how cities are embedded in (music) videos on YouTube.

23 – 00 Museum = City >> everybody everywhere
How will the museums in the future inhabit the city? How can it go beyond its walls? What is a museum without a building? How can visitors become users and producers of a museum? Can a city be a museum? These questions will be addressed in the round-up discussion with all logged in.

00 – 05 Viral Radio x Beat Dimensions >> Juha & Cinnaman and Mamiko Motto.
Rhythmculture, bass experimentation and computer improvisation to ground the night after such abstraction. With Amsterdam’s digital duo Juha & Cinnaman, and the one-woman social music revolution Mamiko Motto.

New article in Metropolis M: Ubiquitous museum

Crisis in Darfur, a mapping initiative by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

According to Wikipedia, the term ‘ubiquitous computing’ dates from 1988 and was first used by the American, Mark Weisner, when he was chief technologist at Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center. Ubiquitous computing refers to the omnipresence of the computer, a phenomenon now moved well beyond the desktop and fully incorporated into our portable functional objects. The best-known example is probably the iPhone, which has revolutionized the cellular telephone, altering it into a convenient little computer capable of ‘doing everything’. We can also think of the onboard automobile computers that keep track of tire pressure, fuel levels and the routes being driven. Computers that tell us what we should purchase have, of course, been a reality for some time (such as the Tamagotchi electronic pets, dating from 1996). We are, however, not so far advanced that we use our iPhones to communicate with our refrigerators, let alone our stomachs (something that those who call themselves transhumanists are all too happy to predict).

What we increasingly understand, however, is how we can make use of this technological development to make our collective heritage more visible and accessible. A few years ago, in the United States, the Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington began employing Google Earth and Google Maps to better inform their visitors of the history of the Holocaust and chart current-day threats of genocide, such as in Darfur, in Sudan. On the museum’s website, you can look through the lens of the museum as you travel Google Earth for an overview of international crisis spots. This project moreover came about in collaboration with the United Nations, Amnesty International and the international photography associations, making it more topical and up to date.

Another example of an institution using the Internet to reach beyond its walls is the Prado, in Madrid. The Prado also uses Google Earth as an instrument, but in contrast to the Holocaust Museum, it does not use the museum to zoom in on the world, but uses the world to zoom in on the museum. Google Earth is making it possible to look at works by Velazquez, Rubens and Rembrandt at a resolution of 4 billion pixels, or 14,000 MB (!), and to zoom in on details of masterpieces in ways that would never be possible in the museum itself.

In Amsterdam, a group of software developers have spent several months working with Narb, an iPhone application that allows museum visitors to take photographs and provide commentaries to the works they are viewing. This can then be shared via different social networks. It is relatively simple to create a personal route for yourself, or for someone else, and to share and compare it with friends and strangers. The advantages for the museums are manifold: works of art move beyond the walls of the institution, in more personal contexts, and are coupled with other works from different museums (not just locally or nationally, but soon, also internationally). A less evident, but socially and economically very interesting and pertinent advantage of this is that Narb allows museum visitors to express their own opinions about the works of art. The ‘app’ was introduced at the recent Rotterdam Museum Night and is now being further developed for a number of museums and art fairs. Its developers hope to be able to activate museums and involve them in the project, further enriching the database and making it more attractive for visitors and institutions alike.

These are only three examples of an expanding domain of new developments in the land of the museums. Each year, academics, developers and marketing experts meet at the Museums and the Web symposium in North America, to discuss the latest state of affairs, compare products and most of all, in the breaks between seminars and lectures, daydream about endless ‘museo-spheres’ with no walls, no opening hours and no entry fees.

This ubiquitous museum is coming ever closer. It will make it possible for museums, archival institutes and monuments to establish themselves as important links within the interwoven fabric of the Internet. A museum can be everywhere at all times, on your iPhone at the bus stop, in your hotel room in a foreign city, in that extra hour at home, sitting on your balcony. This is a world in which you can immerse yourself, an historical dimension that you can call on at will, a search engine with all the original documents that you could possibly ask for. It would be wonderful. For those who are horrified by the idea, who envision empty auditoriums, have no fear. This scenario is simply an extension of existing practice and will be found outside, around the museum, not in place of the museum. It offers alternative access to the ultimate encounter with the actual objects. It is a bit like the navigation system that assists you when you are driving a car. It could hardly be a bad move on the part of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum if they were to appoint the former CEO of Tom Tom as their new Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

This article was published in Metropolis M of June/July 2009.

Non-fiction relocates to Amsterdam’s cultural heart

The Non-fiction office has relocated from the Scheepvaartmuseum to the former laboratory of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, right in the busy museum district and the cultural heart of Amsterdam. Overlooking the famous Museumplein and neighbouring the Stedelijk Museum and the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, we are (again) in good company (and so are they).

On your way to or from one of our big(ger) neighbours you are always welcome to stop by for a chat and a fresh coffee or to visit the studio of our girl next door Amie Dicke.