“All museums must be prepared for war,” states director Alexander Sokurov during his ongoing narration of his latest film, Francofonia, a meditation on European cultural heritage and conflict via the Louvre. Continue reading
Stepping into the Virtual Reality Weekend Immersive Fulldome in the Great Court at the British Museum yesterday, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had read the press release for the event, and knew that I was about to experience a digital recreation of a 4,000 year-old bronze age roundhouse, complete with digitally scanned recreations of objects within the British Museum’s collections – but what form would this actually take? Continue reading
A year ago, I wrote a post about 3-D printing and its impact on cultural heritage in the museum world. Last week, I presented an expanded version of the essay as a paper at the tenth annual Arts in Society conference at Imperial College London.
You can now read the paper on Academia.edu.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Without location, these fragmentary
patterns drift among disorder
in the spaces between echo and decay.
They do not withstand a second listen,
these collected memories of significant events unseen,
but they are no less powerful.
Signals and receptors, objects motionlessly spinning,
all
clinging to the revolving stillness of forever.
Another moment has passed. Your time
is not mine,
it is hours —
an aura
to archive,
and let history
forget.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
I often experience a sensation of temporal simultaneity when visiting museums, a merging of past, present, and future in which my sense of history is seldom linear. Even if the museum’s exhibition designers have organized their collections chronologically, visitors rarely follow their intended path. The actual routes taken by museum visitors often, if not entirely, involve a great number of chance operations in tandem with a curatorial guide who, unavoidably, is only partially in control of the situation. Continue reading
Phonomnesis 