Touching Art: A learning perspective - Universitetet i oslo · Touching Art: A learning perspective...
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Touching Art: A learning perspective Dimitra Christidou Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Education University of Oslo
Transcript of Touching Art: A learning perspective - Universitetet i oslo · Touching Art: A learning perspective...
Touching Art: A learning perspective
Dimitra ChristidouPostdoctoral FellowDepartment of EducationUniversity of Oslo
Overview
History of Touch in Museums
Research-Practice Partnership
Multisensory Engagement
Embodied Interpretation
Methodology
History of
Touch in
Museums
The boy who
breathed on
the glass in
the British
Museum, 1916
Hands-on & Interactive
Exhibits
From ‘seing’ to ‘sensing’
Research-Practice Partnership
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design:
Ann Qvale, Special Advisor
Line Engen, Curator
University of Oslo:
Dimitra Christidou, Postdoc
Palmyre Pierroux, Professor
Funded by the Research Council of Norway
Cultural Heritage Mediascapes (2015-2019)
Curator Line EngenAdvisor Francesca Bacci
Evighetens Form: Aase Texmon
Rygh
Multisensory Learning –Multimodal engagement
“touch […] as a learning tool, a means of aesthetic appreciation and exploration, and a way of engaging with an audience on a deeper level” (Levent & McRainey 2014, 62) as touch “encourages new ideas, feelings and thoughts, which spark curiosity, questioning, exploration and discovery (Lane & Wallace 2007, 8).
Embodied Interpretation
– We place visitors’ engagement in a sociocultural context, within which the social & the material resources are important
– Embodied interpretation: Shifting from the focus on visitors’ talk to including also visitors’ gestures, body & senses
MethodInteraction Analysis
“the dynamic process of recording and observing how the body engages in these activities, how people are moving or drawing, reading body
language, and so forth” (Romanek & Lynch 2008, p. 283).
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Structured interviews
1. Looking only (post-visit questions)
2. Looking and touching (post-visit questions)
Sensory engagement
facilitates physical (closeness), emotional (visceral), & intellectual (sensual empiricism) access to the object, the artist, & the stories around the object/artist. It also facilitates the social access to the object which is an important aspect of the museum experience.
Embodied interpretationHow may theories of psychology and creativity
help us to understand touch in interpretation?
– Artists make visible representations of human action, or possible actions, exciting imagination.
– Viewers anticipate, move into, and complete this action, extending narrative and interpretive moments through bodily movement and proprioception.
– Touch may precede and mediate internalization, while also serving as visible externalized displays of meaning for others.
One size does not fit all…
• When possible, invite haptic engagement
• When not, invite hands-on engagementthrough activities/museum learningprogrammes
“If museums seek to reduce this distance between person and thing, if displays and interpretations are constructed in such a way as to facilitate a wider or deeper sensory and emotional engagement with an object, rather than simply to enable intellectual comprehension of a story or a set of facts presented by the museum and merely illustrated or punctuated by the object, might visitors actually be enabled to appreciate more aspects of both the object and its story”
(Dudley 2012, 9)
