Stochastic visits

Let’s define it straight away: “‘stochastic’ being a fancy way to say ‘random’ and ‘unpredictable.'” That definition comes from Falk, J.H.. 2016. Identity And The Museum Visitor Experince. Oxford: Routledge, which is the very last bit of reading recommended by my external assessor that that I am writing about in this series of blog posts. I note its often cited in her own articles so I think its a heritage experience ‘bible’ she keeps close at hand. And its a good work, published after my literature review (it did include other Falk works), but one that addresses many of the gaps that I felt the review was missing revelations about visit motives that we knew within the National Trust through market research, but which were not expressed so clearly in the literature.

What Falk tries to do with this book is create a model for looking at the museum experience, which her says “is not something tangible and immutable; it is an ephemeral and constructed relationship that uniquely occurs each time a visitor interacts with a museum.” He starts though, with the visitor at the moment, before ether set foot on site, that they decide to make a visit. Their motivation is says is related to their identity (and we can have a number of identities. I, for example am a Cultural Heritage professional and a father. My reasons for deciding to visit a place will be different depending on which ‘me’ is making the decision. Falk says that identity related motives generally fall into one of five categories:

• Explorer – “The typical Explorer visitor perceives that learning is fun!”
• Facilitator – Facilitating parents and facilitating socialisers, both meeting the needs of others in their group
• Experience seeker – motivated to visit primarily in order to “collect” an experience, “been there, done that”
• Professional/Hobbyist – a tiny proportion of visitors but often much more influential
• Recharger – not a large proportion of visitors, but may be more regular visitors, as we discussed before

So where does ‘stochastic’ fit in? Well, Falk describes how each identity motivation has a trajectory to their visit.”Rechargers and Professional/Hobbyists probably have the “straightest” trajectories. These visitors typically enter with a fairly specific goal in mind, a relatively sophisticated understanding of the physical layout and design of the museum, and a fairly clear sense of how to accomplish their goals […] the trajectories of Explorers and Facilitators are much more generalized and less laser-like. The Explorer is seeking ‘interesting things’ while the Facilitator is seeking ‘interesting things for others.'”

Rechargers and Professional/Hobbyists “can and occasionally do get side-tracked by experiences outside of their initial intentions, but for these two groups, this is the exception rather than the rule. More often than not these visitors make a beeline to the exhibits or spaces they are interested in, spend whatever time it takes to accomplish their goal(s), and then depart. Although they may “graze” upon exiting, this is primarily to take
stock of things for their next visit.” But the Explorer is guided by “their own inner compass which is ‘magnetized’ by the visitor’s unique prior knowledge, experience, and interests. They can’t tell you what will pique their curiosity before they get there, but once inside the museum, they will know immediately what interests them!”

Facilitators “are primarily attuned to the social aspects of the visit; they are focused on what their significant other finds interesting and enjoyable. Facilitators […] tend to sublimate their own interests and curiosities unless they feel that by sharing these, they might be helpful in satisfying the needs and interests of others”

Experience Seekers come somewhere between the Explorer and Facilitator “but rather than satisfying their personal curiosity or the specific intellectual needs of their companions (though both of these are very likely to be strong secondary motivations), the Experience seeking visitor is in search of what is most famous and important in the museum. They have come to see the Hope Diamond or the Mona Lisa, or whatever the museum is most famous for.”

It’s important to note that whatever initial motivation a visitor has for going to a museum, they may well change to another one while they are there, depending on all sorts of factors – who they are with, something there see, all sorts of things. But Falk’s point I think is that Rechargers and Professional/Hobbyists are less likely to be distracted from their original motivation, and while experience seekers are somewhat more likely, they are on a tight timescale with other places to tick off their top ten list, so the groups most likely to make a stochastic visits are then Facilitators and Explorers. I think my Chawton experiment is deigned to respond to a guide stochastic visitors, so arguably more tied to these two visit motivations.

Finally, I love this quote about satisfaction surveys – its definitely something we noted at the National Trust:

Currently, the overwhelming majority of museum visitors find their museum visit experiences very satisfying. This is in part because the public has a fairly accurate “take” on museums and thus possesses relatively accurate expectations. It is also in part due to human nature; we have a propensity to want our expectations to be met and work hard, often unconsciously, to fulfill them, even if it means modifying our observations of reality to match our expectations.

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What digital technology can bring to historic houses

Two papers today, because one of them doesn’t have much of interest, I think, to my corrections – it does have one great word however, which I will come to later. The first paper is another look at the project at the Bishops’s House in Sheffield that featured in previous papers and posts. This third paper, CLAISSE, C., PETRELLI, D., DULAKE, N., MARSHALL, M. & CIOLFI, L.. 2019. Multisensory interactive storytelling to augment the visit of a historical house museum. IEEE comes with lots of quotable quotes about the sort of environment I work in (until next month at least): “Unlike traditional museums, artefacts in house museums are displayed in domestic settings, out of their protective cases and with limited written interpretation. Due to this unique layout, they need to be understood from an experiential perspective: ‘stepping back in time’ or ‘standing in someone else’s shoes […] Digital technology is conspicuously absent, apart from occasional interventions relying on mobile phones. While using mobile phones does not affect the aesthetics of the historical heritage, any other digital technology intervention needs sensitive design, careful integration and planning.” which a pretty sweeping but generally true generalisation. One thing I am less certain of though is the authors’ assertion that historic houses “are looked after according to special practice identified as house museology.” For a start, museology is the study of museums, not a conservation (looking after) practice. I have worked in and around historic house museums since, well … since 1985* if you count my volunteering, and I have never heard the term “house museology’ with reference to looking after such place. Looking at the source for that assertion, I feel the authors are misreading what “museology” actually is.

However the next thing they say is abundantly true. “Spatial and aesthetic constraints mean curators have to choose which part of the story of the house is presented to the public. Thus house museums tend to concentrate on a single period in their history where both the building and its interiors are restored or reconstructed to match a particular era or episode in time. Such exhibition practice was recently criticized for limiting interpretation strategy to one linear narrative, often focused on a leading character.” And the finish off this introduction to the challenge of historic house interpretation with “Digital ntechnology offers new opportunities to bring these places to life. However, experiments have been limited to individual installations or temporary exhibitions”

I won’t go into too much depth on what they did – my previous posts Gove more detail. But it is worth saying that actually what they did was create five “individual installations.” These were great, and I don’t want to dismiss them for their aesthetic qualities, or content, nor the process that went into creating them, but they are only a step on the way to a responsive environment. And of course they had to be activated by a tangible object with NFC tags, which I think adds an extra layer of complication to the interface which is not necessary. Having read about a number of these NFC-based tangible interactions now, and having been involved it one at Bodiam then only one where I think the object really added to the interpretation is the Votive Lantern offerings to the gods at Chesters. But these projects are indeed steps on the way to an ideal, and the ideal is described in the conclusion pot this paper: “the web of content is not embedded in a device, but distributed all around the house as objects and rooms, characters with their portraits, and the story they tell. It is the visitors moving around the House triggering content, observing and discussing that make this an interactive storytelling in place […] it gives opportunities for volunteers [people, would be a better word I think, including staff, visitors etc] to take ownership of the place and sustain participation over a longer period of time by generating new content and uploading new stories.”

There were fewer quotable quotes in the second paper: Ardito, Carmelo, Buono, Paolo, Desolda, Giuseppe & Matera, Maristella. 2018. From smart objects to smart experiences: An end-user development approach. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 114: 51-68. doi: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2017.12.002. Which talked about tools for non technical staff to create interactive narratives. Its useful stuff but in my corrections I think a reference to the paper will be enough. There is one useful phrase though which I feel I might need to insert – which I think is second nature to HCI people but not to Cultural Heritage staff, though I think its easily understood and that is “Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules”

Oh and I also like to this quote introducing MeSch, which I have already written about in my thesis but light add in “Very few contributions in the literature address the possibility of enabling CH experts to shape up smart visit experiences. One prominent approach is the one proposed by the meSch project, which aims to enable CH professionals to create tangible smart exhibits enriched by digital content. The peculiarity of
the meSch approach is that it does not require IoT-related technical knowledge: the platform offers an authoring tool where physical/digital narratives can be easily created by composing digital content and physical artefact behaviors.”

*Ouch, that feels like a very long time.

Restorative Environments

One of the challenges of my viva was that I had presented cultural heritage as only a learning environment. Which was definitely not my intention. the places I have worked with especially, historic houses and palaces with gardens and parks, and countryside estate have long been recognised as places of spiritual recharging. I argued the case (obviously adequately as I passed) that I had not focussed only on learning, but perhaps some references to papers like this one will restore any intended imbalance.

“This one” is Packer, J. & Bond, N.. 2010. Museums as Restorative Environments. Curator 54: 421 – 436.and it starts of with a doozy of a quote that might be all I need: “Mental fatigue, caused by the stresses and strains of everyday life, is a common complaint in today’s society, and the need to escape from the personal and interpersonal demands of life is one of the major reasons that people have for engaging in tourism and leisure experiences”

The paper goes on to explain that al lot of the theory of restorative environments is based on the work of Kaplan and his Attention Restoration Theory. “The capacity to continually focus attention on a particular activity can be reduced or lost through mental exhaustion.” Recovery from just mental exhaustion requires that your “attention is engaged involuntarily or effortlessly,” which (I think) Kaplan calls “fascination.” Fascination allows your directed attention be rested.

Well, I think cultural heritage is fascinating, and this theory echos the theory of Flow, which I write about in my thesis, so it seems we are on to a winner with this paper. But there are three other components of restorative environments: being away (from routine); extent (the environment need to have enough content to keep you occupied a while) and compatibility (of interest – being bored is not fascinating). These sorts of things point to the infinite horizons of a walk in the countryside as being restorative (if the countryside is compatible with your interests) but analysis of responses to museums, art museums, gardens and zoos shows that the countryside is not the only place you can recharge.

So this paper looks to see if there are factors that make one museum a better restorative environment than another. To do so they use a “satisfying experiences framework” which focuses on:

• “object experiences, which focus on something outside the visitor, such as seeing rare, valuable, or beautiful objects;
• cognitive experiences, which focus on the interpretive or intellectual aspects of the experience, such as gaining information or understanding;
• introspective experiences, which focus on private feelings and experiences, such as imagining, reflecting, reminiscing, and connecting; and
• social experiences, which focus on interactions with friends, family, other visitors, or museum staff.”

They measured this and four different sites in Australia: a museum; an aquarium; a garden; and, an art gallery. Immediately they spotted that visitors to each find different experiences the most satisfying. The object experience of the fish in the aquarium was by far the most satisfying experience in any place, the cognitive experience of the museum was the most satisfying part of that visit (hmmmm). The social experience most satisfying in the gardens and, tough the art gallery was the most balanced between the four experiences, the social experience mattered to only 10.7% of visitors and the introspective experience mattered most to 29%. But it “was found that local visitors placed more importance on social and introspective experiences, and tourists placed more importance on cognitive and object experiences.” Tourists of course “are more likely to be looking for a learning and discovery experience—they want to discover new things and often try to ‘‘see as much as they can.’’ These experiences may be incompatible with a restorative experience.”

The study concludes “Not only were national parks and beaches considered more restorative than urban environments, but among the research sites, those that were focused on natural heritage (especially the botanic garden) were considered more restorative, both in attributes and benefits, than those focused on cultural heritage (the museum and art gallery).” But for frequent visitors (rather than first time visitors) museums can “offer an alternative to natural settings as a restorative experience.”

And more importantly, if “greater attention were given to visitors’ comfort, first-time and infrequent visitors, who are less familiar with the site, may be more able to experience restorative benefits as a result of their visit.” The authors also suggest that museums should “explore ways in which introspective experiences
might be encouraged and supported” and this I feel supports what I concluded at Chawton – while we insist on authenticity in our storytelling, we are privileging cognitive experiences over introspective ones.

Numinous

I’ve been head down, completing my upgrade package for weeks and so you have seen very little form me on this blog. But that package was submitted last Friday, and this week, I am at the University’s Hartley Residency, which is a refreshing opportunity to just learn and think.

Yesterday we had a seminar, and then a lecture form Steven Rings, of the University of Chicago. I always thought I was a bit a fraud in the archaeology department, but now I am in the music department (Did I tell you I have transferred to the music department? That’s another story.) am I listening to stuff I know nothing about. “But,” as they say, “I know what I like.” So thank the stars that Steve was talking about liking music, and writing academically about music that we like. He kicked of with his talk, quoting Max Weber, who, correct me if I am wrong, accused modern thought, secularism, science and academia of  “disenchantment of the world.” Rings argues that there is an academic pressure to distance oneself from the music one studies, to analyse it scientifically, reducing it to numbers, or socio-politically, reducing it to a series of choices made within a dominant ideology. In a way, to destroy it – to remove from it any sense of aesthetic pleasure, or “enchantment”.

All this talk of enchantment, reminds me of a couple of papers I read months ago, but didn’t blog about. To be honest, and didn’t think either contributed much to my thesis either. But they are in my mind because I recently went back to them and added a couple of bits from as least one of them to my draft. Keirsten Latham writes about “the Numinous Museum”, and something about enchantment, and secularism made me think about that term. In the 2007 paper, The Poetry of the Museum: A Holistic Model of Numinous Museum Experiences she says “Numinous experiences (also referred to as reverential, pivotal, profound) with any museum objects/exhibits are akin to aesthetic experiences with objects of art and encounters with the beautiful.”

“Reverential, pivotal, profound…” is this the same, or similar to “enchanting”? She goes on to say that “Numinous experiences are seen as a deeply felt, connective encounter with any object not just artistic works or beautiful things and can happen anywhere and anytime, depending on the coming together of many things at one point in time.” Which is interesting because it potentially equates the mundane with the spiritual. For example, visiting Crete recently, I was was intellectually stimulated by my day-trip to Knossos, but my own numinous experience was at a less visited palace at Malia. There, it was the act of looking down at threshold stone as I stepped on it, that gave a profound, emotional feeling of stepping on the same stone as someone had thousands of years ago. I understood it a Knossos but I hadn’t felt it.

Latham explains the term she uses comes, via Catherine Cameron and John Gatewood, from Rudolf Otto who, in his book, The Idea of the Holy used the word numen to describe a religious emotion or experience that can be awakened in the presence of something holy.

Which brings us back to secularisation: are we reluctant to talk about music (or anything) we love in terms of enchantment, for fear of being seen to worship it?

Apps not worth it, hard numbers

I’ve got to point people’s attention to this excellent blog post from Colleen Dilenschneider. Colleen works for a US market research firm called Impacts. They have a couple of hundred visitor facing clients, including for example, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and they combine their data from all the research to produce the National Awareness, Attitude & Usage Study, which is informed by on-site interviews, randomly selected telephone interviews and an on-line component. So though its commercial market research, and not academically peer reviewed, the approach seems to be pretty robust. I’ve been looking for some hard numbers about the benefit (or otherwise) of mobile device interpretation, not just for my research (and my talk next week), but also for work. It was a work colleague who pointed me to post, but I’ll happy include some of the data in next week’s presentation.

I’ll let you read it for yourself. Some if it is not so surprising, when it offers some numbers to support what has already been reported anecdotally. For example, that people are more likely to use the place’s website, social media and review sites to plan a visit, than an institution’s app, or that people are more likely to use social media than an app when they are on-site (old readers will be familiar with my usual rant on this subject, now available in print 🙂 ).

But there’s one chart I want to draw out, which makes two key points (both important enough for Dilenschneider to use bold text):

People who use mobile applications onsite do not report significantly higher satisfaction rates than those who do not.

and

People who use social media or mobile web while they visit a cultural organization have a more satisfying overall experience than people who don’t use social media or mobile web during their visit.

She illustrates both points with the same graph.

Image (c) Impacts, copied from: http://colleendilen.com/2017/04/05/are-mobile-apps-worth-it-for-cultural-organizations-data/

All of which adds weight to the argument that institutions like the one I work for should prioritize  installation of free, easy to log on to, pervasive wifi over the commissioning of expensive, unused apps, and direct content development efforts towards the mobile web, in the knowledge that even then, users may prefer to publish out from a place, rather than read the content that you’ve created.

Some places get it.

 

 

Now Play This

Last week, I went to Somerset House for Now Play This, a three day event of experimental games. The Guardian beat me to a write up (curse you, full time journalists!) so read that, and think of this short post as an addendum.

I took my boy (aged 12) with me and our favourite game is also the top of the Guardian’s list. Dead Pixel (above) is a simple, snake-like arcade game with up to nine players, co-operating in teams of three. Its easy to pick up, and you quickly find yourself allying with a rooting for people you  never previously met and will likely not see again. By the late afternoon of the first day though, the joysticks were showing signs of wear, I wondered how many would be working at all by Sunday. Its perfectly playable with just two, unlike the platformer pictured below, the name of which I can’t recall, which relies on loads of players co-operating to get through each level. And each level is an almost entirely different game, so it takes a lot of practice, and didn’t satisfy me in the shared environment, where you want to make sure everyone gets a turn.

In contrast, Telephone, was simple joy that took less than 10 seconds to play, and you could come back to it again and again. You can try the link in the picture, but surprisingly few players actually say anything its seems…

The ten second games room was a lot of fun, especially the Brexit version of Operation

We were disappointed that the “post-apocalyptic crazy golf” outside wasn’t running on the Friday. But apart from these and the other games written about in the Guardian article, there was a whole room dedicated to one big wordsearch, a “third person stroller” wherein you control a naked man walking around on (and in!) the gigantic body of a naked man, and a case full of computer games that didn’t exist.

 

Tom and I also enjoyed a less frenetic room, that included quieter, slower games, simple mazes and one interesting plinth with letters cut into the top, that had mirror writing on one side. That side faced a mirror, but you needed to be lower than I could get to read it, so I send the boy onto his hands and knees. The rules were thus (paraphrased) “stand together looking at and admiring the plinth, talk about it sotto voce, laughing occasionally. Then leave it and see if anyone else in the room comes to see what you were talking about. If they do, you’ve won.”

We won.

 

Simulating ideology in storytelling

The Story Extension Process, from Mei Yii Lim and Ruth Aylett (2007) Narrative Construction in a Mobile Tour Guide

Another great piece from Ruth Aylett, this time from 2007. Here, she and collaborator Mei Yii Lim are getting closer to what I’m aiming for, if taking a different approach. They kick off by describing Terminal Time, a system that improvises documentaries according to the user’s ideological preference, and an intelligent guide for virtual environments which take into account the distance between locations, the already told story, and the affinity between the the story element and the guide’s profile when selecting the next story element and location combination to take users to. They note that this approach could bring mobile guides “a step nearer to the creation of an ‘intelligent guide with personality'” but that it “omits user [visitor] interests”. (I can think of many of a human tour guide that does the same). They also touch on a conversation agent that deals with the same issues they are exploring.

This being a 2007 conference paper, they are of course using a PDA as their medium. Equipped with GPS and text to speech software, a server does all the heavy lifting.

“After [an ice-breaking session where the guide extracts information about the user’s name
and interests], the guide chooses attractions that match the user’s interests, and plans the shortest possible route to the destinations. The guide navigates the user to the chosen locations via directional instructions as well as via an animated directional arrow. Upon arrival, it notifies the user and starts the storytelling process. The system links electronic data to actual physical locations so that stories are relevant to what is in sight. During the interaction, the user continuously expresses his/her interest in the guide’s stories and agreement to the guide’s argument through a rating bar on the graphical user interface. The user’s inputs affect the guide’s emotional state and determine the extensiveness of stories. The system’s outputs are in the form of speech, text and an animated talking head.”

So, in contrast to my own approach, this guide is still story lead, rather than directly user led, but it decides where to take the user based on their interests. But they are striving for an emotional connection with the visitor. So their story elements (SE) are composed of “semantic memories [-] facts, including location-related information” and “emotional memories […] generated through simulation of past experiences”. Each story element has a number of properties, sematic memories for example incude: name ( a coded identifier); type; subjects; objects; effects (this is interesting its lists the story elements that are caused by this story element, with variable weight); event; concepts (this that might need a further definition when fist mentioned); personnel (who was involved); division; attributes (relationship to interest areas in the ontology); location; and, text. Emotional story elements don’t include “effects and subjects attributes because the [emotional story element] itself is the effect of a SE and the guide itself is the subject.” These emotional memories are tagged with “arousal” and “valence” tags. The arousal tags are based on Emotional Tagging, while the valence tag “denotes how favourable or unfavourable an event was to the guide. When interacting with the user, the guide is engaged in meaningful reconstruction of its own past,” hmmmmm.

So their prototype, a guide to the Los Alamos site of the Manhatten project, the guide could be either “a scientist who is interested in topics related to Science and Politics, and a member of the military who is interested in topics related to Military and Politics. Both guides also have General knowledge about the attractions.” I’m not convinced by the artifice of layering onto the interpretation two different points of view – as both such are being authored by a team who in their creation of the two points of view will, even if striving to be objective, will make editorial decisions that reveal a third, authentic PoV.

When selecting which SE to tell next, the guide filters out the ones that are not connected to the current location. Then “three scores corresponding to: previously told stories; the guide’s interests; and the user’s interests are calculated. A SE with the highest overall
score will become the starting spot for extension.” The authors present a pleasingly simple (for a non-coder like me) algorithm for working out which SE goes next. But the semantic elements are not the only story elements that get told. The guide also measures the Emotional, Ideological story elements against the user’s initial questionnaire answers and reactions to previous story elements and decides whether or not to add the guide’s “own” ideological experience on to the interpretation, a bit like a human guide might. So you might be told:

“Estimates place the number of deaths caused by Little Boy in Hiroshima up to the end of 1945 at one hundred and forty thousands where the dying continued, five-year deaths related to the bombing reached two hundred thousands.”

Or, if the guide’s algorithms think you’ll appreciate it’s ideological perspective, you could hear:

“Estimates place the number of deaths caused by Little Boy in Hiroshima up to the end of 1945 at one hundred and forty thousands where the dying continued, five-year deaths related to the bombing reached two hundred thousands. The experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing was the opening chapter to the possible annihilation of mankind. For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends, is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human action. In the bombing of Japanese cities it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end.”

I guess that’s the scientist personality talking, perhaps the military personality would  instead add a different ideological interpretation of the means to an end. As I mentioned before, I’m not convinced that two (or more) faux points of view are required when the whole project and every story element that the guide gets to choose from are already authored with a true point of view. But in many other aspects this paper is really useful and will get a good deal of referencing in my thesis.

Two books

In the last couple of weeks I’ve received a couple of books. I’ve not read much of them as my PhD reading has been disappearing down Chawton story rabbit holes. But I thought I might share them here, while they are still fresh.

The first especially, because if you buy The Museum Blog Book, you’ll be buying my words! (I won’t get any money, the sum total of my payment is the book itself, the delivery of that was a pleasant enough surprise though.) Its a chunky book, almost 700 pages of bloggy goodness. As I mentioned, I haven’t had time to read much. Given the relative shortness of each piece it feels like a bedside book that I should dip into of an evening. Some of the title intrigue me though, so I thought I’d post a few links here. If you follow them you’ll read them before I do:

Visitors, apps, post visit experiences … and a rethink of digital engagement, seems the closest to my own work and my own point of view. Museums, we need to talk, is a great looking, challenging but loving poem, from technologist Chad Weinard. Is negotiating not a museum thing? intrigues because I think the collegiate culture of cultural heritage sometimes obfuscates plain speaking and can inspire passive aggression.  I have no idea yet whether that’s what the piece is about though.

I have to mention Michelle Obama, Activism and Museum Employment, if only because a colleague thought the erstwhile First Lady had actually written the piece, and that I was sharing a book with her, which indeed would have been cool. It’s no less cool to the sharing a book with Rose Paquet Kinsley, Aletheia Wittman and Porchia Moore, the actual authors. I’m intrigued by the title of On Place and Proximity, but I’ll likely read The New Museum Conversation is Not About You first.

The second book was handed to me the day before yesterday. I’d met its author, Clare Hughes of Feilden Clegg Bradly Studios through work a couple of years ago and was very impressed. Since then, she has been around the world with Winston Churchill Memorial Trust bursary, examining the museum experiences and postulating upon its future. She spoke at an internal National Trust conference last month, and copies of her book, Made You Look, Made You Stare, were prizes for our Move Teach and Inspire awards. Its a really accessible and insightful illustrated record of her museological  travels.

 

Adventures in Moominland

In the evening after I visited the V&A, I’d managed to bag the last ticket for the last entry slot that day of the exhibition at the South Bank Centre. I’m a Moomin fan, having read all the books when I was a child. I’d already seen much of what was on show at the public Library in Tampere, Finland, which is the guardian of most of the Tove (best pronounced something like “Toover”) Jansson archive. The South Bank exhibition, Adventures in Moominland, takes advantage of the Tampare collection moving to a new home there in May to borrow part of the collection for a similar presenation to last year’s very successful Wondercrump World of Roald Dahl. Just like that successful family exhibition, this one also uses the author’s work to explore the life of the author.

Tove Jansson’s life was not entirely happy, she grew up during civil war in Finland, with loving parents whom she loved and respected in return. But while she was a progressive left winger, her father sided with the Fascists. Not only that, she had a hard time coming to terms with her lesbian sexuality. These are some quite challenging concepts to share with an audience as young as might visit this show, but the curators and interpreters did a very good job of it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this exhibition sees less actual children than last year’s. While Dahl’s popularity has endured with every generation, in the UK Moomins grabbed the imagination of a good part of my generation in the seventies, and had brief surges of popularity with a couple of later children’s television series, but it seems to me that they are best known by people of my age, and not so quickly recognised by younger generations (except, I’m willing to bet, by the children of older fans – I know I read all the books to my own children).

The group assembled for my tour were, apart from one young fan, all adult. It’s harsh of me to say its what I expected – it was after all the last tour of a workday in term-time, so even the home-schoolers will have likely gone home. (And I bet, given the lack of school in the novels, that there is a correlation between homeschooling parents and Moomin fans, but I digress.) The format followed Wondercrump’s successful formula. An introductory talk from a host who warned of scary dark experiences ahead, but reassured us that though the Moomins often had scary adventures, they always ended happily. “Apart from Moominvalley in November” I said. Then she handed over to a guide, a young woman dressed in such a style as to resonate with Jansson’s illustrations of the Mymble, Fillyjonk and Toft, etc., without actually trying to be one.

The guide led us in and as with Wondercrump, we discovered she was playing a two-hander with a disembodied voice. This time, it was Sandi Toksvig – guess Danish is a bit like Finnish. So so we progressed with these two guides, recorded and live, through spaces that evoked Sniff’s cave, Snufkin‘s tent, the woods of Moominvalley, a raft like that in Comet in Moominland, Moominpapas lighthouse island, and the Moominhouse itself. In each space the guide and exhibits focussed (mostly) on one of the books, and explained what each book had to reveal about Tove’s life. Even the youngest reader will recognise (even if they might struggle to put it into words, as I did when I was seven or nine or whatever) that the novel series (there were a couple of picture books too, but I only found those as an adult) start out as outward facing proceedural adventures but become more inward looking, dramatic, and psychological with each publication. It can put some young readers off the later books, but those who persevere have their first introduction to existentialism.

The South Bank adventure doesn’t follow the books in order, but structures the story about Jansson coming to terms with her sexuality and acknowledging her love for her life-long partner Tuulikki. Moominland Midwinter thus becomes the climax of the exhibition’s story. In the novel young Moomintroll wakes up early from hibernation, in strange new snow-covered world, which he doesn’t like at all, until he meets Too-ticky, the girl who shows him its wonders. I admire the curators’ resistance to chronology in favour of a more satisfying emotional journey, preceding Midwinter with the loneliness of Moominpappa at Sea, which actually came eight years later.

Maybe wisely, they avoid the last novel Moominvalley in November, altogether. As a young reader, this was the most important work for me. Taking place after the Moomins have left for the lighthouse island in Moominpappa at Sea, the other inhabitants of the valley move into their house and try to recreate their life, waiting for them to return. But they never come back. Jansson’s mother had died while she was writing this final novel, and she is said to have said she “couldn’t go back and find that happy Moominvalley again.” I can’t quite explain the emptiness that fills my chest, even as as an adult, as I remember finishing the novel as a child. I am convinced it was a vital moment, maybe the very first step in my journey to being a grown-up.

So, I wrestle with some dissatisfaction that the experience didn’t feature my favourite work, while at the same time being impressed with the effectiveness of their story construction. I was also even more impressed with the “mixed media” approach of exhibit, lighting effects, audio commentary and sound and live guide. In a way its a more scripted version of what I’m trying (and currently failing, it feels) to do at Chawton.

I feel it might be a technique that other places (and yes I’m thinking of the National Trust places I work with) should experiment with.

Building the Revolution

I finally got to the V&A today, for their exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution. I got turned away at the end of Cromwell Road last time, as the museum was being evacuated after a bomb-scare. 

I’m writing this review on my way home, using my phone (so please forgive my typos) partly because I want to recommend you go, and there is not long left to see it. 

The exhibition charts the western cultural revolution of 1966-1970, though John Peel’s record collection, plysbof course fashion and design from the V&As own collection and other items, such as an Apollo mission space suit borrowed from other institutions. 

One of the gimmicks of the show is the audio, an iteration of the same technology used at the Bowie exhibition a couple of years ago. I didn’t get to go to that one, but I had a demonstration of that tech from the makers Sennheisser, at a Museums and Heritage show. 

I wasn’t very impressed. Though these headphones, which play music or soundtrack to match whatever object or video you are looking at, were well  received by the media back then, in my experience the technology was clunky. Other friends who’d been confirmed that they changes between sound “zones” could be jarring, and that it was possible to stand in some places where music from two zones would alternate, vying for your attention. 

The experience this time was an improvement. It was by no means perfect: I found the music would stutter and pause annoyingly, especially if I enjoyed the track enough to find myself gently nodding my head. Occasionally the broadcast to everyone’s headphones would pause so everyone in a room could share a multimedia experience (of the Vietnam war for example) across all the gallery’s speakers, screens and projectors. These immersive over-rides were effective, in much the same way as those at IWM North, but when a track you were enjoying or a video that you found interesting was rudely interrupted, one couldn’t help but feel annoyed. I found myself forgiving the designers however, for this and even the stuttering sound of the headphones, because it all felt resonant with that late sixties “cut-up” technique. 

Where the technology really worked however was on two videos that topped and tailed the exhibition. In the first various icons and movers of the period were filmed in silent moving portraits of their current wrinkled and grey selves. Their reminiscences of the time appeared as typography overlaying their silent closed-mouth gaze, a little like Barbera Kruger’s work, while  over the headphones you heard their voice. The same characters appeared at the end, that s time as a mosaic of more conventional talking heads. And for the first time, the interpretation was didactic as each in turned challenged the current generation to build on their legacy. 

For me, one of the highlights was the section on festivals, which invited visitors to take off their headphones, lie back in the (astro)turf and let (another cut-up of) the famous Woodstock documentary wash over them on five giant screens. 

The other things I loved were, dotted around among the exhibits, tarot cards that, at first glance, looked like they might have been designed in the sixties. But then you notice references to things like Tim Berners Lee and the World Wide Web. You realise these are a subtle form of interpretation, telling a future of the sixties that apparently came true and for those of us from that future, creating correspondences and taxonomies that connect the events of 1966-70 with today. The V&A commissioned British artist Suzanne Treister to create the cards, based on her 2013 work, Hexen 2.0. And the very best thing about them is you can buy them (pictured above) in the shop which must be the first time copies of museum interpretation panels have been made available for purchase. 

Of course, the aren’t the only form of interpretation. About from the soundtrack, there are more traditional text panels, labels and booklets around the exhibition. But the cards show how cleverly the layering of meaning and interpretation has been created. Many visitors will have passed them by unnoticed, given them a cursory glance or chosen to ignore them, and will have had an entirely satisfactory experience. But for those that paused to study them in more detail a whole new layer of meaning opened up. 

I visited with a sense of duty, to try out a responsive digital technology. But I found so much more to enjoy. This is a brilliantly curatored exhibition. So much better than the didactic, even dumbed down permanent gallery of the new Design Museum which I visited before Christmas. I urge you to go, if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s only on for another month. 

A colleague who had visited the exhibition before told me how depressed it had made him: the optimism of that period seems to have been dashed upon the reactionary rocks of 2016, Brexit and Trump. But I came out with a very different mood. 

One of the early messages of the exhibition is the period as a search for utopia. The final tracks you hear as you walk out (after the video challenge issued by the old heads of the sixties) are Lennon’s 1971 single Imagine and then, brilliantly, Jerusalem. 

No, of course they didn’t find the Utopia they were looking for in the sixties, but we could build it…