Making things public in Ljubljana

A few weeks ago the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Heritage courteously invited us to join them at the ACCESS2CA seminar in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The long acronym stands for ‘Access to Contemorary Art Conservation’. It was jointly organised with Museo Reina Sofia, and wonderfully hosted by the Moderna galerija. Present were conservators, art historians, museum professionals and students.

We were invited because of an article we had written for Metropolis M (‘Ubiquitous Museum‘), in which we looked at the opportunities for museums that arisen through the vast dissemination of new media and widespread adoption of mobile devices. Our objective was to give an insightful and inspiring 360 panorama of best practices in the museum domain, and to provide an updated context of developments in the fields of ubiquitous computing, gaming and social networking.

The presentation we gave was titled ‘Making Things Public’, and focused on social networking (Twitter in particular), gaming and augmented reality. Examples were used to show the viral reach of Twitter, to underscore the engaging power of gaming (Foursquare, Modern Warfare II), and to illustrate the innovative opportunities AR is offering (through applications like Layar). These general observations were then repeated, but this time with relevant examples from with the cultural realm, by artists, museums and heritage professionals.

In the afternoon, the presentation was followed by a workshop with the same title. After a brief summary of the morning’s presentation and an introduction on the how and why of the workshop, we challenged the audience to form groups and use all the instruments and media that had been presented (besides Twitter, games and AR, also Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, TV, Wikipedia and books) to think about a public strategy for one of five art works that were part of ‘Inside Installations’, a previous INCCA project. The underlying idea, inspired by website usability testing, was simple and effective: try to think from the audience’s perspective about your daily practice, and use the new public infrastructure and related behaviours and expectations to make your work really public.

The workshop exercise gave the audience a first hand experience of the opportunities and threats of the rapid developments online. Surprising and some hilarious results were presented by some of the groups. A remarkable one was: micro-financing elements of a Thomas Hirschhorn work, crowd-funding the conservation of a fragile and complex piece existing of many different parts. One of the constructive outcomes for the INCCA network was the discussion on how to use the various social networking to share knowledge and stay in touch in between public events like ACCESS2CA. Linkedin, Facebook or Ning? Twitter yes or no? For us it was equally rewarding to hear that some of the participants wanted to use this workshop for their own students or colleagues.

The outcome of the seminar was twofold positive: (new) insights into the workings of the ubiquitous web, and through these insights new ideas how to organise the professional INCCA network. This is a wonderful base to work upon, towards the next event in 2010: Contemporary Art Who Cares. This will take place at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. For us working with the organisation was a very interesting and highly enjoyable experience. Also, being in a country where your name means ‘soup’ made it extra saucy.