Co-designing with visually impaired people in the museum

This article aims to conduct an analysis of the use of co-design methodologies in accessibility projects for the visually impaired in museums. The article presents a discussion of the practices of participatory methodologies in museum projects, in particular the co-design approach. It proceeds with a comparative case study, analyzing articles that describe the implementation of co-design projects in museum and educational contexts. The purpose of this comparative study is to present different methods of co-design, what goals can be achieved by these methodologies and to analyze and compare the results and challenges found. The authors selected four co-design projects for this comparative study, analyzing their differences and similarities. The conclusion of this analysis is that participatory projects bring as a benefit not only the creation of new audiences, but the enrichment of the museum object itself, promoting new forms of enjoyment and acquisition of knowledge. This article aims to contribute to the development of future studies and projects on accessibility that may represent better

Co-designing with visually impaired people in the museum

This article aims to conduct an analysis of the use of co-design methodologies in accessibility projects for the visually impaired in museums. The article presents a discussion of the practices of participatory methodologies in museum projects, in particular the co-design approach. It proceeds with a comparative case study, analyzing articles that describe the implementation of co-design projects in museum and educational contexts. The purpose of this comparative study is to present different methods of co-design, what goals can be achieved by these methodologies and to analyze and compare the results and challenges found. The authors selected four co-design projects for this comparative study, analyzing their differences and similarities. The conclusion of this analysis is that participatory projects bring as a benefit not only the creation of new audiences, but the enrichment of the museum object itself, promoting new forms of enjoyment and acquisition of knowledge. This article aims to contribute to the development of future studies and projects on accessibility that may represent better

MUSEUM COMMUNICATION IN THE CONDITIONS OF DIGITALIZATION

The purpose of the article is to investigate the process of qualitative transformation of museum communication at the present stage, which takes place under the influence of digitalization factors. The methodology of the research consists of the application of analytical, system-functional, and culturological methods to identify features of technical and technological influence on changing the ways of museum representation in modern conditions and practical implementation of new forms of museum work mediated by new technological communications. The scientific novelty of the article is expanding and summarizing information on the updating of museums of communication strategies developed in connection with the gradual introduction of digital technologies in museums, and means as well as channels of communication designed to diversify forms of museum activities. Conclusions. As a result of the study, it was found that information and computer technologies occupy an important role within the formation of modern museum space, which can give new representativeness to the museum object and build multifaceted communication with visitors. Museum communication is increasingly mediated by digital technologies and means of communication, which directly affect both the way the museum is represented and the aspects of communicating with visitors, the positioning of museums in terms of the information space. In modern conditions, the visual communication of the museum communication occupies a significant place, which determines both the representation of the museum collection in digital format and the special communication channel that forms the field of museum semantics in the virtual information space. There is no doubt about the role of digital technologies in the process of musealization, which helps to choose the best ways to adapt the necessary objects for museum presentation. Keywords: museum communication, museums, exposition, information space, visual communication, virtual museum space, musealization.

Social object: museum object in the participatory museum

The «new museology» movement, which seeks to revise the principles and foundations of the activities of modern museums, has introduced a few new concepts into consideration, one of which is the concept of «social object». «New Museology» interprets a social object as the basis for constructing an exposition of a participatory museum, which makes it possible to consider a social object as an analogue of a museum item. Since the concept of a «museum item» is one of the key theoretical tools of modern museology, its content can be expanded within the framework of the scientific understanding of a participatory museum. Directions of such a theoretical study are presented in this article. The analysis of the transformation of a museum object into a social object during the transition from the traditional principle of building a museum exposition to a participatory one made it possible to identify several problems in the activities of a participatory museum related to the communication potential of its exhibits. The understanding of a social object is formed based on an analysis of examples of exposition and exhibition activities presented in the book by N. Simon «The Participatory Museum».

The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: A Present History of a Living Shrine, 2018–20

The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin, a tomb-shrine located south of Tehran, is well known for supplying global museums with iconic examples of Ilkhanid-period luster tilework. After providing a historiography of the site, including its plunder in the late nineteenth century, we explore its current (2018–20) “life” in order to illuminate the many ways that it can be accessed, used, perceived, and packaged by a wide range of local, national, and global stakeholders. Merging past and present history, art history and amateur anthropology, and the academic, personal, and popular voice, this article explores the Emamzadeh Yahya’s delicate and active existence between historical monument, museum object, sacred space, and cultural heritage.

The ideal essence of a museum object

The article examines the museum object from the theoretical and methodological positions of the idealistic approach, placing the Human Creator at the center of culture and history. The museum object is characterized as a substance of nature from the theoretical point of view. Also, it is designed in accordance with the ideological content of human consciousness and having value from the point of view of the main ideas of society’s worldview. An explanation of the phenomenon of information of a museum object is provided in the article. The process of endowing a museum object with such a specific property as museum character is substantiated and the procedure for its creation is described. At the same time, it is indicated that the main properties of a museum object are not immanent, but they are instilled in it by the consciousness of a museum worker and a visitor. The value of a museum object is determined by the ideas of the dominant worldview; when it changes, the value of the museum object also changes. The degree of expression of the main properties of a museum object such as expressiveness, attractiveness, and associativity also depend on the ideas of the current worldview. Original objects that sufficiently express the main content of the subject are of the greatest value. From the authors’ positions, criticism of views on the most important properties of a museum object is made. From the standpoint of an idealistic approach, a definition of authenticity of a museum object is provided and the particular importance of authentic objects inthe current time of multimedia and interactive technologies being introduced into museum practices is emphasized. The article concludes that the idealistic approach, offering a solution to many problems in relation to a museum object, nevertheless, is not at the moment an all-encompassing theory that can explain it in all manifestations of creation and functioning. However, according to the author, in comparison with other theories the idealistic approach is able to give more answers to questions in this area than other museological concepts.

Objects in Time

As artists’ films have become more common in museums, artists have begun to film the museum and its objects with increasing frequency. The artists’ museum film opens up a dialogue between the moving image and the museum object, in which the medium’s capacity to preserve and remodel time resonates with the object’s power as a repository of past time. Through two examples, Tacita Dean’s Day for Night (2009) and Elizabeth Price’s A Restoration (2016), this essay explores the ways that these artists’ understanding of the temporalities of analogue film and digital video underpin their poetic expression of the temporality of objects. Rather than dematerializing its objects, the museum film is rematerialized by them, through the encounter between their specific temporalities.

THERE IS NO STANDARD INTERPRETATION. MISREADING VERSUS THE MUSEUM PUBLIC

Resorting to the arguments of the theory of the interpretation of culture texts, particularly Harold Bloom’s concept of misreading, the power of interpretative ascertainment achieved by the museum public and the museum institution is equalled. Relating the literature theories to the museum realm, the Author discloses the contingency (namely the conditioning always dependent on the context) of the interpretative activity in a museum institution. In a series of four intellectual experiments the interpretative instability of a museum object is approximated, while its possible consequences for a museum institution are pointed to.

“To Recognize and Read Something as a Document...”: (The Transfer of Things in Research Reflections by G.L. Dain)

This article examines the cultural aspects of museum documentation as a process of identifying items to be preserved and actualized as historical documents. In the system of concepts of museum technology, it is designated as a selection process, from the point of view of museum philosophy — as implementation of the specific/museum’s attitude to reality. In the categories of cultural studies, the documentation can be considered as a subject-contextual transfer of things. This case’s formation can be now traced in the articles by J. Dolák, A.N. Balash, A.A. Nikonova, E.V. Abroskina.Basing on the analysis of published materials of the art historian G.L. Dain’s expedition diaries, the article considers the path of a thing to a museum. In addition to institutional factors, the range of her research setting includes the scientific credo of a scientist with a pronounced cultural discourse. This is “the study of toys in living connections with folk life and art, as part of the entire complex of children’s culture”, the knowledge of “the spiritual side of the mechanism of succession in folk culture”. On its basis, a corpus of individual field work methods is formed, relevant to the logic of the modern interpretive turn in the cultural sciences. Their initial message is the perception of a thing as a textual model of national culture, the setting on its multi-layer readability based on the idea of culture as a text. The article considers the subject-contextual transfer of things on the examples of acquiring the items of Bashkir, Chukchi, Eskimo and Buryat traditional cultures for museum collections. Special attention is paid to recreating things from memory by the bearers of the tradition. As a result, a conclusion is made about the five-component structure of the museum documentation process, which includes: cultural metareality — thing — document — object of museum value — museum object. The logic of transformations of things is concretized by the scheme of systematic cultural analysis: document — text — context — discourse — interpretation.