Among the crowd
The Voyagers wave
Last week I spent a thought-provoking two days at the National Maritime Museum, at their ‘Peopling the Past’ conference to coincide with the opening of the new Sammy Ofer Wing.
In a broad sweep of papers, the conference considered how we can tell the story of the past through objects, which is also essentially the over-arching concern of this blog. Two big, ongoing questions emerged from the papers for me. The first was over how we balance the big names and the ordinary man in our historical narratives when we inevitably tend to have more objects associated with the former. The second, related, question was over using new media to address this balance – community projects, new approaches to object display, and crowd sourcing to tell the stories of ordinary people. Three particularly interesting papers discussed such approaches at the Imperial War Museum, Australian National Maritime Museum, and the Museum of London.
New media as a means of widening the scope and audience of museums is something that increasingly interests me. With my ‘Electronic Media Editor’ of the Journal of Museum Ethnography hat on, I can tell you to look out for some excellent reviews of new projects in the 2011 and 2012 volumes of the Journal. These mostly consider websites, however, and I’m now becoming interested in how new media can be used in galleries (as an antidote, perhaps, to audio guides?). This is something that, I think, the National Maritime Museum’s new introductory ‘Voyagers’ gallery in the Sammy Ofer Wing does particularly successfully. Visitors are met by a huge wave construction that fills the front of the gallery, onto which are projected key words moving in a wave pattern, interspersed with images from the archives. This is accompanied by a sound recording of the sea.
Behind this, along the back wall, a single long case tells an introductory story of maritime experience through emotions – anticipation, love, sadness, pride etc – and key figures within each of these. Featured characters include Nelson, John Harrison, Matthew Flinders and other celebrities, but also many lesser-known figures. Both objects and characters come out of the crowd to give a real sense of what the National Maritime Museum collections are about.
As far as the new media initiative is concerned, I think it is a visually spectacular and courageous attempt to harness the powers of technology within the museum space, without detracting from the objects (something which many science museums could learn from). It will depend how well it works and wears as to whether the gallery itself will stand out from the crowd.