PLACEMAKING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Susana Smith Bautista, Ph,D.

University of Southern California

November 22, 2013

How digital technology enables museums to mark their places in new and innovative ways.

Technology frees us from the burden of identifying place as permanent, fixed, and physical to embrace a new notion of place as mobile, intangible, experiential, and changing.

Questions

• What are the new places that museums are occupying in the digital age?

• How do museums act with their visitors in these new places? How do these “new” places connect with the “old” places?

• What are the new places that museum audiences are occupying, and what are they doing there?

• How do museums “make” place, and is there a homebase?

What is Placemaking?

1. Marking your place2. Setting boundaries3. Creating destinations4. Shaping public space5. Creating and bonding community6. Community-driven, collaborative, sociable7. Context-sensitive and culturally aware

Project for Public SpacesArtPlace America

Placemaking in the Analog Age

Museums and Placemaking

Building museums to create place

Museums creating their own place

Chicago Art Institute, 1900 The Getty Center, 1997

There are 2 main reasons why Place has receded for the modern museum

1) due to technology 2) due to the primacy of experience

Both are related, as new digital technologies allow for new kinds of experiences, a continuous cycle of dependence.

What is Museum Experience?

ParticipatoryInteractiveImmersiveUser-generatedCollaborativeGamesIndividualCreates memoryLong lasting

How is PLACE different in the Digital Age?

“a space of flows”(Manuel Castells, 2000)

“rhythms”(Henri Lefebvre, 1974)

“locality”(Eric Gordon & Adriana de Souza e Silva, 2011)

“an event”(Edward Casey, 1996)

“an itinerary…a series of encounters and

translations”

(James Clifford, 1997)

“the experiential museum”(Hilda Hein, 2006)

“chronotope”(Mikhail Bakhtin, 1937)

“practiced place”(De Certeau, 1984)

TOPOS place

ATOPIA out of place, improper

UTOPIA not a place, nowhere

TELETOPIA to be telepresent technological globalization

Teletopia is replacing atopia and utopia (Virilio, 1997)

The “omnilocality” of place (Casey)

The case of the Guggenheim

in search of a place…

VeniceNew York City

Las VegasBilbaoBerlin

Abu DhabiHelsinki

GuadalajaraRio de Janeiro

Taichung

© Balsamo and Bautista 2011

The Distributed MuseumMusée imaginaire (museum without walls) – André Malraux (1967)

Deterritorialized hyperspace networks – Paul Virilio (1997)

The Distributed Museum

Moveable Museum Program, AMNH

Folk and Craft Art Museum, Los Angeles

“Since visitors do not make meaning from museums solely within the four walls of the institution, effective digital media experiences require situating the experience within the broader context of the lives, the community, and the society in which visitors live and interact.” - Falk & Dierking (2008)

Walters MuseumOff the Wall

Tate Art Maps, 2012-2014

Asian Art Museum at SFO Airport

Building Community

With practically every museum today having its own website, community now takes on a global perspective through the ability to reach anyone, anywhere, and at any time with an Internet connection.

“New communities are continually made possible by the innovations of new communication technologies, yet as these new communities form, fears surface that they will undermine existing networks of connectivity, the family and the neighborhood” – Marita Sturken & Douglas Thomas (2004)

Mapping your Global Community

Interactive mapsData visualization

To understand a museum in the digital age is to understand how its online & global community is related to the physical & local community, and to all the points and flows of interaction within its distributed network.

Social Media

Going to the places where your

audience is

Connecting your online and

physical places

Virtual Worlds

Place no longer implies physicality

Connecting back to the physical

Mobile Technologies

“Now that our devices are location aware, we are much better positioned to be location aware ourselves”

- Gordon & de Souza e Silva (2011)

The re-emergence of Place in the Digital Age as Experience

The re-materialization of digital techniques (Bruno Latour, 2011)

“The expansion of digitality has enormously increased the material dimension of networks: The more digital, the less virtual and the more

material a given activity becomes”

“People still want a sense of place, a sense of belonging, in a physical way”

– Katie Hafner (2004), Technological Visions

…but still grounded in the physical and local

“It is an ancient tradition of moving monoliths to mark a place. The idea is that LACMA’s campus really is a center for Los Angeles, a cultural center, a multicultural center, and this rock will mark it very physically, in a very timeless and light manner as you walk under it.”

– Michael Govan (2011)

“It may be a revival of localism, or a reaction against a world becoming too global and too plugged-in. Face-to-face and participatory experiences, especially in unexpected places, can serve as a counterweight to digital, virtual experiences.”

- TrendsWatch 2012, AAM

Susana Smith Bautista, Ph.D.ssbautista@yahoo.comwww.susanasmithbautista.com