Search Disabled |
|
|
|
Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site | ||||
|
|
|||||
| Home | Current Issue | Index of Back Issues |
| Issue 5 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Susan Hazan - October 2001
Susan Hazan, the curator of new media for the Israel Museum based in Jerusalem attempts to answer the question “If the intrinsic experience of a museum is about its material collections, why would a museum even want an electronic surrogate?”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If the intrinsic experience of a museum is about its material collections, why would a museum even want an electronic surrogate?
This is complex question that, much in the same way that museums around the world have been grappling with over the last decade, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem has been concerned with since the opening of the New Media Unit in 1991. We began to focus on electronic projects, identifying, visualizing and implementing new digital media incentives appropriate for the museum environment, and launched the first comprehensive Web site in 1995. The Web site [1] has since undergone three new re-designs with a fifth now under construction. An art or archeological museum is not about technological innovations, which perhaps may even be seen as an antithesis to the museum mandate, yet it has always been clear to our institution that there is much to gain from embracing new technologies to fulfill our institutional goals. Whether we are producing digital objects or artwork, electronic galleries or entire virtual museums, we need to question how this new augmented reality impacts the museum experience.
As a member if ICOM, The International Council of Museums, we adhere to the definition of a museum:
A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment [2].
Modifications of the ICOM Statutes were recently adopted by the General Assembly in Barcelona on Friday 6th July as (viii) cultural centres and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity).
This modification clearly brings into focus the realization that museums are as much about digital creativity as well as the historical mandate of preserving, exhibiting and interpretation of material collections. This article is not about a specific technology or innovative interface, rather it describes how our institution has learned to engage with virtual objects, on-line educational activities and electronic surrogates, in order to extend the museums’ holdings beyond the walls of the museum experience.
 |
| The Shrine of the Book, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem |
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, perhaps best known for the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, includes permanent collections ranging from prehistoric archaeology through contemporary art. It is the leading cultural institution in Israel and is one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the world, annually presenting a full roster of temporary exhibitions, publications [3], and educational activities. Its terraced complex, comprising nearly 50,000 square meters and a six-acre sculpture garden within its twenty-acre campus attracts over 800,000 visitors each year, about a third of them international tourists and including nearly 100,000 children in the educational programs at its Youth Wing. The Museum is committed to the preservation, study and display of its collections, fosters education for its public from within Israel and abroad, utilizing its extensive holdings of the world's pre-eminent collection of the archaeology of the Holy Land, the world's most comprehensive collections of Judaica and the ethnology of the Jewish people around the world and its fine art holdings from Old Masters in European Art through international contemporary art.
Perhaps the greatest challenge that any museum faces is digitizing its collections, whether they are for curatoral or scholastic research, as a provision of contextual information for the museum visitors or in an interpretation of the collections for remote visitors online.
Based on a lexicon that has been personally developed, each object is called up in parallel windows in the same screen and can be accessed, and edited in both languages. The lexicon was constructed from legacy terms that have been used in the museum for the last 30 years. Being a bilingual lexicon the terms are found in English and Hebrew in parallel tables that may be easily accessed while working on the database.
For a museum such as the Israel Museum, this is a formidable challenge, not only for the sheer quantity of its holdings but also in that the digital archive is fully searchable in both Hebrew and English. Allison Kupietzky, Collections Database Manager, [4] has risen to this challenge with a passion. According to Kupietzky, the lexicon was constructed from legacy terms that have been used in the museum for the last 30 years. Functioning as a bilingual lexicon the terms are found in English and Hebrew in parallel tables that may be easily accessed while working on the database. While this is a project that she and her team will be dedicated to for many years to come, some 7,000 objects have already been entered into the database. Once this project has been fully realized, the database will continue to provide the resources for new digital activities across the museum that rely first and foremost on their digital surrogate.
Amongst the complex of galleries and material collections, information kiosks in the galleries and computerized study rooms add a further dimension to the museum experience, providing the contextual information that serves to compliment and enhance the gallery experience.
The Study Center for Israeli Art [5] provides comprehensive information on thousands of Israeli artists, including painters, sculptors, photographers, designers - both graphic and industrial, architects, ceramists, jewelers, and all related arts and crafts. The archive includes biographic notes, press cuttings, videos, slides and photographs of works of art part of which can be accessed online [6]. A second study room, The Information Center for Judaica and Jewish Ethnography [7], enables the general public, students and researchers to access the Museum’s collection of Jewish ceremonial objects via a multi-level multimedia program enabling the viewing of a first analysis of over 300 objects within two main themes: The Life Cycle and The Cycle of the Jewish Year [8]. Two miniature manuscripts, illuminated treasures from eighteenth-century Vienna are currently on special exhibition in the Judaica galleries and are examples of the fine arts of calligraphy and illumination. To complement this exhibit an electronic version of the tiny pages allows visitors to "leaf through" the two manuscripts and enlarge them for closer study. While in reality this clearly would be obviously harmful to the artifacts, the electronic versions afford a compelling opportunity for visitors to engage with the objects in a meaningful and satisfying way [9].
As new temporary exhibitions regularly make their debut in the museum, both information kiosks and special sections of the museums website are designed, to augment the collections and to provide further depth to the museum experience. This year, the New Media Unit developed four such online exhibits in Hebrew and in English for both local and remote visitors. It's About Time, an exhibition on time for the whole family, afforded a special challenge as it was not easy to present an abstract concept that touches every part of our lives yet, for most of us remains vague and mysterious. "What will happen in a thousand years?" we asked some children. "Well, I'm sure I'll have a husband and children by then," one nine-year-old girl answered us [10]. The electronic surrogate of this exhibition for those visitors unable to come to the museum was presented as a Quick Time walk-through of the Youth Wing galleries [11].
 |
| Screenshot from the Quick Time "it's About Time" Youth Wing Exhibition |
Dreaming with Open Eyes" a comprehensive exhibition of the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art [12] opened on December 22, 2000 and included over 300 works by leading artists including Duchamp, Man Ray, Ernst, Breton, and Goya. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, ready-mades, photographs, and prints were complemented by unique items from the Museum's Dada and Surrealist library of art periodicals, documents, letters, and artists' books. Clearly some objects make their screen debuts more successfully than others. While prints, paintings and photographs are intrinsically formats that work well on the screen, installations, sculptures and time-based artworks are far more difficult to represent as digital surrogates.
 |
| Kay Sage, The Upper Side of the Sky, 1944 From "Dreaming with Open Eyes |
Written in the Stars: Art and Symbolism of the Zodiac; [13] opened on March, 2001 illustrating the origins of the Zodiac and its place in Western culture traced through ancient mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, ceremonial objects, and the fine arts.
Perhaps the most exciting exhibition for the Israel Museum this year was China, One Hundred Years of Treasures [14], which is the first exhibition of masterpieces from the People's Republic of China ever held in Israel. It affords a view of rare and priceless works of art spanning over 5,000 years up to the eighteenth century, tracing China's crowning achievements in bronze, jade, ceramics, porcelain, and gold and silver. Some of our visitors have already used the website to learn about the collection before the visit while others can read more about the collections in much the same way as they would have with a catalog of the collection, but for countless others, the web visit may be the only way some visitors have of experiencing this extraordinary collection of treasures from China.
 |
| Hair ornament in the form of a horse's
head with antlers Six Dynasties, Northern Wei period, 386-534 CE From China, One Hundred Years of Treasures |
The artworks in this exhibition come from twelve provinces throughout China, and were chosen for their beauty as well as for their significance in the context of their time. Most of the objects came from tombs, which serve as a kind of time capsule containing precious information about life and death in ancient times. They reveal what the aristocracy of each period prized in life and chose to take with them into the afterlife.
The wing that have harnessed new technologies with most enthusiasm is the Youth Wing, the education department of the Israel Museum. According to Nurit Shilo-Cohen, Chief Curator of The Ruth Youth Wing:
“Being intrinsically people- rather than object-oriented, the Youth Wing has, in the past few years endeavors to bring the Museum closer to the diverse communities visiting it and to make it increasingly 'user friendly,' enabling everyone to feel more at home. This approach takes a variety of forms, including orientation maps, leaflets for visitors to exhibitions, gallery talks, with the realization that our young visitors, the present generation of children was born into an age of videos, computers, fax machines, MTV, and other new modes of communication”.
The Youth Wing is renown for its didactic, and interactive, thematic exhibitions and shares its experience with colleagues from all over the world in exhibition exchange and through presentations at international conferences such as the Network of Children’s Museums, Hands-on-Europe [15]. Web sites presentations and electronic activities, merely a click away, foster productive exchanges with colleagues and sister institutions and new shared spaces. With a long tradition of engaging visitors in the exhibits and with a sense that the museum experience is as much about 'minds on' as 'hands on', the Youth Wing has developed numerous interactive projects both in the gallery and online.
In 1996 the museum opened up a video window onto one of its major exhibition, "Children of the World Draw Jerusalem at 3000", the Youth Wing [16]. A multimedia station was set up in the gallery, staffed by high school students from our Multimedia Education Unit to assist the gallery visitors in three separate activities, to play a specially designed game for the exhibition, to view the online galleries that augmented the material collections and to encourage the visitors to take on an active role in video conferencing. We soon found that our real life visitors did not need much coaxing and were delighted to become instant players on our electronic stage. We selected the program CU-SeeMe, a simple and intuitive program developed by Cornell University and for eight hours a day, for six weeks, we were able to extend some part of the museum experience beyond the museum walls.
Through on-line quests, inter-school projects and competitions, and the direct and active of involvement of students, teachers, and families with curators and museum staff, the Israel Museum has brought the Museum to School [17] via an interactive and dynamic web site for students, teachers and their families. Until recently, out-reach museum educational activities were associated with traditional media delivery; brochures, kits and video, providing information for the pre-museum visit and an opportunity to take a little something back to the home or classroom after the visit. Internet delivery of educational material can add a further dimension - interactivity.
While it is fairly simple to translate educational print and video material into the www environment, the real challenge for museum educators lies in their ability to create a link between the school and the museum, between student and student, from school to school and from the home to the school. The Youth Wing designed an interactive school program, The Museum @School, based on the 3D virtual exhibition, 'The Light of the Menorah' [18], a photo realistic 3D gallery tour, streamed at 15 frames per second over standard dial-up modems with embedded 3D-hyper links enabling students to interact with the movie. This is an adaptation of a major temporary exhibition at the Israel Museum, 'In the Light of the Menorah: Story of a Symbol' which traced the manifold incarnations and interpretations of the seven-branched candelabrum, from Biblical sacred object to national emblem, as represented in objects from the extensive Museum's collections of archaeology, Judaica, and the fine arts, and through icons from institutions world wide. This offered an opportunity to devise new and exciting activities, incorporating the real time interactive component.
 |
| Screen shots from the'The Light of the Menorah'a photo realistic 3D gallery tour |
The Dead Sea Scrolls, and activities of the Shrine of the Book, perhaps the most visited galleries in the Israel Museum, yet again provided a compelling cultural message that is pushing the parameters of ‘old’ new technologies. Educational activities at The Shrine of the Book include both traditional and contemporary pedagogic methodology that illustrates the manuscripts and their compelling aesthetic presence. In order to explore new avenues to disseminate the cultural and spiritual messages, the Israel Museum in partnership with the Politecnico di Milano are researching an innovative digital platform to reach out to local and international visitors across the World Wide Web. While still in an early stage of development, the online virtual reality environment, will present a shared 3D space for visitors to visit the Shrine of the Book and the exhibits while interacting with each other is groups under the direction of a trained guide. This will provide a compelling experience for the visitors to take part in a real-time discussion on the Dead Sea Scrolls, evaluate the manuscripts and supporting collections while activating exhibits as they go.
This was recently presented as a full paper at ICHIM 2001 [19], Milan, Italy, as From the First Millennium to the Third, the Content is the Message! [20]
 |
| CAD rendering of the Shrine of the Book |
September, 28, 2001, the Youth Wing is launching a new thematic exhibition, Hands. We use our hands to touch, feel, "see", create, and connect; our hands are our ambassadors to the outer world - the mediators between ourselves and our surroundings. As such, they have generated a host of beliefs, customs, and images in various cultures and throughout the ages. These are illustrated through games, activities, films, artworks, and objects in the Youth Wing's interactive exhibition. This exhibition affords new opportunities to integrate new technologies in the interactive gallery experience and several activities have been especially designed for our visitors. For remote visitors this will be translated into online activities on the Web site – so bookmark this page!!! [21].
The Israel Museum has a strong tradition of exchanging exhibits with sister institutions across the world as well as full exhibitions. Drink and be Merry: Wine and Beer in Ancient Times, was exhibited in 2000 both in New York and in Italy and this year, a number of archeology collections will be traveling to locations in Europe. In 2001, the museum is sending exhibits to Sacred Foods, Bread, Wine and Oil in the Ancient Mediterranean to be hosted at the Museu d’Historia de la Cuitat in Barcelona, and El Toro I la Mediterrania at the Centre de Cultura Sa Nostra: Salamanca, Centro Cultrual Caja Duero in Palma de Mallorca.
The list is too long to be included here, but for visitors to the Israel Museum who are unable to see the material collections with their own eyes, we are proud of our virtual objects, on-line educational activities and electronic surrogates, which serve to extend the museums’ holdings beyond the walls of the museum experience. Perhaps the question that engages us so often while designing these electronic experiences is whether we produce experiences that are so satisfying that visitors are satiated by their virtual visit, or that they indeed serve to whet their appetite and entice our visitors to come to the real museum, to see the material collections with their own eyes, and bring the kids!!!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Susan Hazan
Curator of New Media
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
shazan@imj.org.il
http://www.imj.org.il/
Phone: 972 55 550686
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For citation purposes:
Hazan, S. "The Israel Museum and the Electronic Surrogate", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/israel/>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Related articles:
If you would like to view similar articles to this one click on a key word below:
< - Israel - Museum - surrogate - collections - >
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
|