#interact labs

I went to my first masters-related conference on Thursday 17th November 2016. It was a joint venture between DeMontfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies and Guangdong University in China. It had a nice mixture of backgrounds on the panel - not just artists but product designers and even a tourism guy from Leicester’s City Council. In the afternoon there were some workshops where I participated in the “Digital Curation and Accessabilty” as that sounded very related to my interests.

A couple of participants expected to be given knowledge about how to be accssible, I think, when the workshop was more of a debate/discussion/mind map. This is a format I’m used to from being on my masters course and it was good. It got a bit heated, though, as an old white man with a museums background had obviously come to the workshop with a personal agenda. He would not get beyond letting the rest of us know that curating’s original definition means to look after a collection. Like 100% shut up. He kept saying “I just want us to be aware of that original definition” until finally I was like “We ARE all aware of it and we can’t have a discussion until YOU move passed it!” Unfortunately I had raised my voice but it did have the desired effect and the discussion was able to move forward.

The discussion was divided into 2 mind maps. The first was the “digital curation” part where we debated (or tried to lol) first what we all mean when we say “digital” “curation” and “digital curation” and things of that nature. This was very similar to the “role of the curator” module on my course where Mike asked us to discuss our understandings of these words. We have vastly different cultural backgrounds so even an obvious word like “gallery” meant different things to each of us.

In the workshop at the IOCT event I was comfortable with this kind of discussion, but it was definitely the over 40s white men who dominated the conversation with their [outdated?] opinions and experiences. That’s me being biased ;)

The second mind map was the “accessibility” part, which is a big concern for me as an artist-curator into new media and who has been super poor and homeless herself. We all agreed that even though smartphones are more accessible now than ever it's still paying for the services/data that is a challenge often times.

Other participants in the workshop came away feeling like they should have found answers to what we discussed, but because I’m currently institutionalised I was ok with just coming away with thoughts and open questions. As I am researching new media in museums I know there are still not any concrete/cookie cutter/one size fits all solutions. The experience also confirmed a few generalisations about traditional institution staff that I can continue to try and problem solve (their unwillingness to even contemplate the needs of society NOW in particular).

+~+~