Practice Meets Theory: Some Questions

Peter SamisAssociate Curator,Interpretive MediaSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Museums & the Web 2012 San Diego, CA April 13, 2012

Jochen Gerz, The Gift (detail)

What does it mean to be a Curator of Interpretive Media?

What does it mean to be a Curator of Interpretive Media?

Homogeneous containers / heterogeneous realities

Museums.

Each artwork is like a foreign language, an undiscovered text.

We exercise a Dual Empathy:

• Identify with artists by re-creating their past contexts, concerns, and criteria for success

• Identify with visitors and build bridges to their lives and understandings today

We build tools to plumb these texts, and their worlds…

We experiment with time and place of delivery…

SFMOMA 2001

Google 2012]

[MIT 2000

We evaluate whether the tools help open up the artist’s world.

We use new media as a tool to rectify gender imbalance.

We draw from—and build—the Archive to do so.

We ask what these artworks mean to our visitors.

“Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making use of that object.”

–Olafur Eliasson

And we ask the question:What theory provides insights into—or a framework for—community responses to the art we present?

“You Are Here” contributory drawing activity in the California Portraits gallery at the Oakland Museum of CA

“the smartest person in the room is no longer a person but the room itself.

“this also means that if the room — the network — is stupid, we ourselves will be made more stupid.”

–Rebecca Rosen in dialogue with David Weinberger

“our task is to learn how to build smart rooms.”

It’s clear that our visitors—both on-site and online—want access to our material

• For creative use• For personal reflection• For projection into the

public sphere as part of their own life and identity

Are the artworks* ours to give?

*or rather their representations

Are they ours to withhold?

• For the artists?• For their descendants/Estates?• For the visitors who pay at the gate?• For the visitors who find us for free

through a link on the Web?• For the Future?

Just who is the Future—and where are they today?

For whom do we hold these works in public trust?