Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13

From Museum-going to Museum-ing:

Visitors as Creative Agents within the Museum

by Jon Stam

December 21, 2023

What comes to mind if, instead of “going to the museum,” you were going “to museum”? By shifting the noun into a verb, what comes to my mind is less focused on the entrance to a stately building and more on one’s actions and agency within it.

As an interaction designer, a practitioner concerned with behaviors and interactions between people, objects, and technology, regarding museum visitors as transformative agents presents exciting challenges. It conjures ideas of more embodied and creative ways of engaging with museum collections—implying that working with collections is not confined to the museum backend but can be brought into action on the museum floor. This reconceptualizing of how people can “museum” is part of an urgent shift in reshaping the power dynamics between museums and their public.

Within my artistic practice, I seek subtle and sustained ways to challenge the conventions of museum engagement. This has led to ongoing experiments involving what museums typically classify as “mediation tools.” These tools encompass everything from traditional object labels and audio guides to more recent inclusions such as audience “feedback boards” and digital and virtual displays. Key to this experimental approach is a process of remediation. This process negotiates the qualities and limits of existing tools and reimagines them within the possibilities of a new medium. The reimagining aims to push forms of museum mediation to go beyond dissemination and instead spark and manifest new perspectives from visitors’ points of view.

Exploring the extent to which visitors can effectively spark change in the museum, my thoughts turn to the conventions and ritualized behavior that shape our interactions in these spaces. Using the terminology of interaction design, I am keen on discerning and opening up the unwritten “protocols” of the museum visit. Simultaneously, I seek to challenge the many “firewalls” I see in the museum that favor one-way communication, often acting as barriers to genuine reciprocal exchange. Looking from a broader perspective, what I am trying to grasp and negotiate in my practice is the ritual structure of the museum visit.

I see ritual as a potent interpretive concept to both analyze existing patterns and to project ideas. Lacking a consensus around its definition, heritage scholar Evangelos Kyriakidis’s refers to ritual as “set activities with a special (not-normal) intention-in-action, and which are specific to a group of people.”^[1] It is often projected on other cultures to study patterns of formalized behavior in rites of passage, celebrations, or spiritual practices. However, within museum studies, rituals in the museum carry an established significance.

Reflecting beyond the facades of public museums, art historian Carol Duncan has argued that museums are sites where ritualized action takes place. Museums provide the stage and the script, and through them, “it is the visitors who enact the ritual.”^[2] The concept asserts that the museum’s ritual structure reduces visitors’ actions to mere affirmations of its authoritative framework. Drawing off of Victor Turner’s theories of ritual structure, the museum visit is conceptualized as a secular ritual as it shares characteristics with ritual processes. These similarities include a “separation” from our everyday lives, a “liminal phase” where we are brought into a “different quality of experience,” and the organization of our behaviors that lay claim to a “transformation.” This transformation is described as restoring our sense of order, our feelings of societal connectedness, or a renewed sense of identity.^[3]

Yet, as Duncan points out, “Those who are best prepared to perform its ritual—those who are most able to respond to its various cues—are also those whose identities [be it] social, sexual, racial… the museum ritual most fully confirms.”^[4] In this way, the idea of the museum ritual reinforces the existing power and authoritative frame of the museum and may only truly resonate with those who already share certain social or cultural predispositions to affirm it.

Central to the museum ritual, perhaps any ritual, is that it always functions within its ideological framework.^[5] In questioning how the museum, as a ritual structure, relates to contemporary ideas of what a museum should be, I refer to the International Council of Museums’ updated definition. They state that museums are not only open to the public but are “accessible and inclusive,” “participate with communities,” and facilitate “knowledge sharing.”^[6] If we are to fully accept and employ this definition, what changes in the ingrained museum visit protocol should we see?

In reflection on what “museum-ing” as visitor action in the museum can mean, I take Duncan’s historical critique of museums as ritual structures and bring it into dialogue with my own artistic work. In doing so, I aim to argue that the design of museum mediation and visitor interaction must extend beyond the idea of transforming (individual) visitor experiences. I believe visitors have the potential to transform the museum.

In the following, I share four practice-based works that experiment with ways visitors can exert more creative agency in the museum. The first project challenges the established script, the second creates new entries onto the museum stage, the third seeks to incorporate external perspectives into museum narratives, and the last explores ways of interacting with collections to foster ongoing renewal. These works aim to act as wedges to open up traditional visitor mediation, prompting visitors to enact a small challenge to the conventional structure of the museum and, hopefully, through iterative action, continue to challenge it more.

Structure, Anti-structure, and a Commonplace Book

Looking through the lens of the ritual, museums set up structured performances. Through the meticulous arrangement of objects and the interpretive messages on walls, museum galleries can be seen as spatial scripts that produce larger narratives for their audiences. The museum ritual suggests that the core role of the visitor is to finish these performances, reciting the set script and ideally adhering to the museum’s prescribed sequences of events. While this may sound excessively restrictive to the range of contemporary exhibition techniques, it does frame an ongoing debate on the implications of exhibition design and choices in formats for visitor interpretation.

To challenge the idea of a set exhibition script does not mean there is no need for scripting at all. In designing interactions, I view my role not as filling gaps but as dramatizing them—framing spaces where visitors can actively derive meaning from the museum as well as processes to manifest and share them explicitly. I search for performative ways to shift a “quality of experience” toward a “quality of action.” In this shift, repetition and bodily engagement are not substitutes for critical thinking. Instead, they are methods to externalize and share this thinking with others.

An example of this approach is A Commonplace Book (2018–2020), a performative installation I developed as a part of a research studio at House for Contemporary Art Z33 in Belgium.^[7] It challenged the set script in several museum and exhibition spaces by inviting visitors to reorganize their underpinning concepts, doing so through the production of personal research booklets. The installation consisted of a pile of notebooks and a series of tables equipped with cabinets and drawing machines that could perform any number of transcriptions. The booklets, composed by visitors, resulted in mixed compilations of their own notes and their self-selected article transcriptions. These articles include definitions, diagrams, quotes, and anecdotes contributed by the participating artists of each exhibition that A Commonplace Book took part in.

Figure 1. Installation view of the free notebooks in A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33. Photo: Studio Chloki.

Figure 2. Installation view of A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33. Photo: Studio Chloki.

Playing off the notion that institutions hold authority over knowledge curation, I revived a pre-Enlightenment knowledge construction method called common-placing as a method, mediator, and embodied performance. Common-placing, as a form of personal knowledge collection, involves fragmenting texts and reassembling them in new patterns within one’s notebook.^[8] I scripted the installation around John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place Books (1685), which offered guidance for visitors for entry headers on their pages and for using the bespoke expandable index on the inside cover.^[9] This index facilitated the further linking of content, regardless of the order in which the content was presented or placed.

Visitors could claim a notebook to use for their own purposes as a first action. In further interaction, they were encouraged to engage with the arrangement of tables, each offering a selection of articles for transcription that could be chosen from the table’s menu. The tables, acting as topical chapters to the overarching exhibition, collectively provided a structure to fill every space within a sixty-four-page booklet.

However, rather than adhering to a prescribed sequence, visitors were asked to transcribe only the articles that personally intrigued them, arrange them in any order they saw fit, and reflect on the new relationships these arrangements sparked. As a result, visitors created personal exhibition books that were not published in a traditional linear form but were composed in many different iterations.

Figure 3. “Making Time,” article menu in A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33. Photo: Studio Chloki.

Figures 4 - 7. Drawn articles in A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33.

Figures 4 – 7. Drawn articles in A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33.

Figure 8. “Light Speed,” article in A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33.

At each table, visitors could choose which articles to place in their book, which language they were to be transcribed, and indicate their preference for placement on the right or left side. The menus were drawn by the machines themselves, and their offerings could be dynamically redrawn as new content was brought in. This way, the installation served as a dynamic platform, manifesting the potential for continued meaning-making and knowledge production within exhibition spaces.

To speak of exhibitions as a venue for uncovering connections is easier said than done. I would argue even more so in the ritual context, where a dotted line is already set in place. A Commonplace Book provided an open-ended approach to engaging with exhibition topics and an explicit method and rehearsable choreography. The act of compiling a notebook extended the quantity of time and the quality of attention to the often-hidden frames of reference that led up to the works on display and opened creative pathways to work with these references in their pre-narrative format.

Figure 9. Installation view of the drawing machines in A Commonplace Book (2018) at House for Contemporary Art, Z33. Photo: Studio Chloki.

There is no evidence whether the making of A Commonplace Book actually affected the interpretive strategies visitors used in the remainder of the exhibitions. I can only attest to my anecdotal observations of visitors coming together for extended periods, engaging in lively conversations, and sharing their personal associations, stories, and both common and uncommon knowledge related to what they included in their books.

I suspect that this social interaction was not solely driven by the specificity of the content discussed but rather by the method of common-placing. While the wall texts in the larger exhibitions densely wove together similar information, the bodily engagement and personalized form of the book empowered individuals to take ownership of its contents. This engagement gave them agency to place, discuss, and negotiate their own interpretations.

In framing this visitor action as a creative act of “museum-ing,” the challenge for the museum is not in scripting the optimal reading but rather the active exchange of many personal ones.

From Rhetorical Questions to Soliciting Answers

To align with contemporary museum definitions, the museum’s fostering of visitor stories and interpretations should not be seen as just hospitable, but essential to justify the museum’s existence. Opposed to other cultural spaces, most museums hold heritage collections in the public trust, implying that the public has a right to access and engage with these collections. Thus, rethinking the role of collections should extend beyond the museum’s backend and involve more active engagement of visitors on the museum floor. Heritage, in its essence, is something that arises through negotiation and debate, yet historically the museum visitor has only been invited to experience the end result.^{^[10]}

One example of a museum’s push to bring negotiation and debate to its central stage is the exhibition Heimaten at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. The exhibition brought together historical and contemporary exhibits to map out and discuss the changing uses of the word Heimat, a deep-rooted and emotionally charged term closely translating to home, homeland, and belonging. The curatorial staging grouped its exhibits around seven possible definitions of the term, concluding each section title with a question mark to encourage visitor reflection on these interpretations.

Commissioned to make a work for the exhibition, I sought to further challenge the convention that the exhibition stage is for the museum to project and for its visitors to solely introspect. I designed an interactive installation called Frequently Answered Questions (2021) that encouraged visitor commentary as a vital aspect of the display.^[11] It incorporated an offline, locally operated wireless network, an interactive questionnaire, and a network of projectors spanning the entire exhibition space.

Figure 10. Exhibition view of Heimaten at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Photo: Henning Rogge.

Figure 11. Exhibition view of Heimaten at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Photo: Henning Rogge.

Figure 12. Exhibition view of Heimaten at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Photo: Henning Rogge.

Figures 10–12. Exhibition view of Heimaten at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Photo: Henning Rogge.

Figure 13. FAQ network home screen of Frequently Answered Questions (2021) at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg.

Fostering spontaneous conversations in a museum is challenging. The expansive spaces and theatrical lighting, which museum ritual argues only bolster its authoritative frame, are not particularly welcoming for interacting out loud. My approach was to mediate an experience of textual whisperings and to make the voices visually comparable in their hierarchy to the curated exhibits of the show. Orchestrating along the walls, visitor voices would appear and disappear in an animated form of writing, introducing evolving interpretations of Heimat within the fixed curatorial display.

Visitors were invited to share their own perspectives on the exhibition’s questions by joining the FAQ wireless network. Upon pinpointing their position on a pop-up exhibition map, visitors were linked to the section’s corresponding question. To ease on-the-spot responses, multiple-choice prompts generated a half-constructed sentence for visitors to meaningfully complete, edit, or erase to formulate from scratch. On submission, each visitor’s contribution was displayed in real-time, unmoderated, for everyone in the exhibition space to see. These live interjections integrated with past responses accumulated throughout the exhibition.

The questions and their answers started as relatively straightforward. Further in the exhibition, the topics became more complex and included key interchanges: something that made one visitor feel at “home” and the next “out of place,” or sharing an experience of a homeland that was “lost” and another “built.” Through the organization of the database and the order of appearance in the exhibition space, I attempted to stimulate a dialogue between people inside the exhibition as well as reconstruct one with visitors they had never met. This way, the potential for “transformation” that the museum ritual claims, extends beyond the individual experience and toward a more socially interconnected one.

Figure 14. FAQ response #19: “Ich bin gerne heimatlos, weil ich mich nicht an einen Ort binden will. WS, irgendwo.” (I am happy to be heimatlos [without heimat], because I don’t want to tie myself to one place. WS, somewhere). Photo: Henning Rogge.

Figure 15. FAQ response #128: “My passport makes me feel at home because it doesn’t change no matter where I am, the US or the Netherlands. Marleen, Amsterdam.” Photo: Henning Rogge.

Yet, to open the museum stage as a form of collective negotiation, the real-time affirmation that every visitor is welcome and that their input is welcomed was absolutely crucial. For the museum, this posed a challenge. The challenge was not in the intent but in terms of the liability around privacy, General Data Protection Regulation, and, most importantly, fears that by giving the visitors this power, the museum could be forced to reproduce and affirm speech that might be considered offensive or insincere. Addressing the museum’s resistance and negotiating workarounds is the crucial element that defines this type of work.

The final design of Frequently Asked Questions empowered any individual in the room to initiate and activate new speech as part of the exhibition itself, forcing the museum to cede some measure of control to its visitors. The further reproduction of these responses was made possible through a moderation tool accessible to the exhibition team. This tool was designed to focus on care rather than control, allowing for minor spelling corrections, language detection for non-German or English texts, and, importantly, elevating underrepresented opinions while balancing the prevalence of repetitive ones. Although, on a very small scale, this empowered visitors as active agents in reshaping the museum and shifted the museum’s role from fixing stories on their collection to fostering them.

Figure 16. Backend database of FAQ with response #3703: “Mein Pass erzeugt in mir ein Gefühl der Entfremdung, weil er mir meine Privilegien und gleichzeitig das Fehlen der Möglichkeiten anderer klarmacht.” (My passport makes me feel out of place because I realize my privileges and at the same time the lack of opportunities for others).

From jovial descriptions of the particular scents of one’s home to deep-hearted stories of anxiety and loss, the over 11,000 visitors who reciprocated stories to Heimaten reflected and further complemented the staged exhibits. Many visitors shared how problematic the term Heimat is for them or how particular objects induce feelings of unease or alienation, which offers examples of what can be shared on a more open museum stage. I believe further research is needed for how museums can meaningfully work with visitor input.

In my analysis of the FAQ database, I have noticed an increasing specificity in visitor responses. It seems reasonable to speculate that visitors had been inspired by what others wrote before them, prompting them to bring more creative and personal nuances into the discussion. When visitors become sources of inspiration in the museum, and creative exchange is built up within an enlarged social context, promising ways to imagine “museum-ing” start to arise.

Yet, in keeping the critical lens that the museum ritual provides, these traces of visitor perspectives disappear at the moment the exhibition ends. There is still a need to explore how visitor perspectives can further penetrate and become incorporated into the institutional perspectives carried by the museum, which I touch on in the following project.

Pulling New Perspectives in a Museum of No-Fixed Narratives

Labels serve as pillars of the museum ritual experience, shaping visitor behavior and understanding of the art or heritage on display. The problem with labels is that they often adhere to a traditional format of static and anonymous captions that can inadvertently normalize a particular viewpoint. There is an ongoing debate within museums on how to deal with labeling, and even some debate if museum visitors actually read them. Museum researchers Falk and Dierking have established that visitors who can read labels do indeed read them.^[12] A more pertinent question is which labels a visitor opts to read and whether the information is passively accepted, as per the museum ritual, or more actively and critically engaged with.

An example of this issue emerged in a behind-the-scenes discussion organized by the Amsterdam Museum. A group gathered to discuss the painting Waterland Sugar Plantation on the Suriname River (ca. 1708) and its accompanying art historical description that inadequately acknowledged its colonial history.^[13] Following the transcripts of the meeting, many exciting approaches were shared on how to challenge the current label: the use of different historical sources, the telling of its contemporary traces, the hanging of proxy artworks to juxtapose perspectives, and even encouraging visitors to write their own interpretations. Toward the end of the meeting, a concern was raised about the potential overload of information and how this might be at odds with an initial step of making clear to visitors that multi-perspectivity exists. ^[14]

These reflections inspired my self-initiated project, Fresh Perspectives (2020), in collaboration with the Amsterdam Museum.^[15] The aim of this joint conceptual and technical exploration was not on what stories to fix, but rather how to incorporate a plurality of stories and enable visitors’ active engagement with them on the museum floor. As a result, two interconnected tools were developed: a networked e-paper display to publish and activate interpretative stories around museum objects and a collaborative story archive to collect and transfer stories to displays in the museum.

Figure 17. Networked e-paper label with pull string in Fresh Perspectives (2020).

Figure 18. Networked e-paper label with pull string in Fresh Perspectives (2020).

Figures 17, 18. Networked e-paper label with pull string in Fresh Perspectives (2020).

The e-paper label was designed to maintain the original format and material qualities of traditional labels. Its notable addition is a pull string that dynamically framed a new interpretation each time it is pulled. This transformative action not only prompts a shift in perspective for the individual engaging with it but also shapes the experience for subsequent visitors. In this way, the soft power that a museum visitor holds to choose which objects to pay more attention to translates into an action that chips away at the museum’s control of what stories are on view at any given time.

Remediating museum labels to incorporate multiple stories revealed a larger systemic challenge: how stories are collected, edited, and shared within museums. To recognize museum visitors as active participants and provide them with the opportunity not only to activate existing stories but also to contribute their own, a semantic wiki was developed as a collaborative story archive. By utilizing wikis, which are community-based writing spaces, and enhancing them with structured data and resources, the collaborative story archive aimed to create an inclusive platform where a broader community could contribute new perspectives or provide feedback on existing ones.

The story archive also provided me a space to experiment with further challenging the traditional label format. To generate and publish a label for any of the museum displays, each interpretation needed an author, a date, and an identified perspective in which it was written, or it had to be visibly stated as unknown. In importing existing stories from the museum, the predominantly art historical perspectives were clearly labeled as such, giving some sense of transparency and awareness of what kind of stories and storytellers are missing in the museum.

Figure 19. Story Archive of Fresh Perspectives (2020), collecting and publishing stories in the Amsterdam Museum collection.

Figure 19. Story Archive of Fresh Perspectives (2020), collecting and publishing stories in the Amsterdam Museum collection.

Using the Waterland Sugar Plantation case study, a poignant story incorporated into the Fresh Perspectives experiment is artist Iris Kensmil’s public comment made during an opening at the Amsterdam Museum. Kensmil observed the idyllic nature of the painting and stated, “That’s why I immediately think of what you don’t see: the slave quarters, the cruel punishments, and the runaways who were chased.”^[16] In just half the word count of a traditional museum label, this powerful perspective challenges visitors and museums to consider the unseen or unspoken aspects of many objects on display.

Curator and writer Clementine Deliss describes remediation as both an action that brings a shift in a medium “to experiment with alternative ways of describing, interpreting and displaying the objects in the collection” and as a remedy for a “deficient situation.”^[17] Experimenting with the remediation of museum labels is less about offering solutions and more a way of thinking about redress. The active incorporation of alternative perspectives in the museum is needed to address the communities they connect to and increase the agency of the museum collections.

From the simple action of pulling a string to more committed acts of narrative construction, Fresh Perspectives demonstrates that visitor action in museums can be built in for all visitors and can eventually build up to more transformational change.

The Potential of the Collection that Lies Within Its Search

I have demonstrated that the agency to create meaning with objects in museum collections is not solely dependent on the interpretations of backend experts. Yet there is a dependency that the objects can be found, and their relationships can be uncovered or otherwise sparked alive. This brings me to my most recent challenge regarding the ritual structure of museums: the role museums play in determining which works from their collections are deemed display-worthy and which receive no visibility at all.

In my current, self-initiated and collaborative project, Searcher (2023–2024), I am exploring the networked potential of digital collections as dynamic forms of participatory curation within museum galleries.^[18] Experimenting with the collection data of the Design Museum Ghent, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, and the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, the project examines how underrepresented objects and newly found relationships within the collection can be made visible and discussable by means of collection search.

Figures 20. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Figures 21. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Figures 22. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Figures 23–24. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Consisting of a series of hybrid e-paper image atlases, Searcher facilitates the explicit, associative, and regenerative searching of collections and the framing and saving of new object constellations as narrative readings. Conceptualized as a shared curatorial space stationed in between the fixed objects in permanent displays, Searcher’s atlases empower museum professionals to intermittently publish ongoing research in the form of digital collection assemblages and call them up. Moreover, the installation encourages museum visitors to search and construct their own.

Through Searcher, visitors can select objects of interest or send search questions directly to the installation. Custom-built algorithms then interject interrelated collection items into the atlas composition. The objective is to challenge the notion of finite boundaries within collection search and instead embrace the concept of serendipitous encounters—finding something you were not initially searching for. This concept is integral to the installation’s performative function, where any chosen set of objects, semantic queries, or final recontextualization of one’s findings is considered a new avenue for inquiry. As a result, new search queries are triggered and relationships that were not initially visible start to emerge and change over time.

Figures 25. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Figures 26. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Figures 27. Prototype of Searcher presenting ever-changing relational maps of the MAO collection. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

The project takes inspiration from the image atlases of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), a project in the 1920s that mapped out recurring visual themes across time through “alliances of attraction.” In discussing the shift in perceiving collection presentations as discursive agents that are not just disseminated but evoked, curator Christel Vesters borrows Warburg’s concept of a Denkraum, or “thinking spaces,” where various modes of research are performed in situ.^[19] Vester’s curatorial paradigm argues that no thought unfolds in one straight line. In another phrasing, linking explicitly back to the search and display of collections, no set findings should ever be considered the endpoint of a search.

Searcher’s current research centers around developing innovative methods to enhance relationships between collection items, transcending conventional metadata organization. In the structured data of digital collections, there is a need to generalize descriptors for it to be useful, but this often conflicts with the idiosyncratic specificity—the diverse signs, symbols, and interpretive knowledge that make these relationships meaningful.

Figures 28. Searcher’s backend experimentation with neighborhoods in collection data: Semantic Embeddings, Knowledge Graph, and Visual Embeddings of MAO Collection Data.

Figures 29. Searcher’s backend experimentation with neighborhoods in collection data: Semantic Embeddings, Knowledge Graph, and Visual Embeddings of MAO Collection Data.

Figures 28, 29, 30. Searcher’s backend experimentation with neighborhoods in collection data: Semantic Embeddings, Knowledge Graph, and Visual Embeddings of MAO Collection Data.

To address this challenge, the project uses computational methods to leverage relationships within the “unstructured” data of the collection, including interpretative descriptions, curatorial notes, and extra-linguistic data from collection images. By bringing together a plurality of ways to locate relationships within collection holdings, this approach “softens” the borders between them, bringing together items that may not have otherwise met and bringing people together in a more dynamic discussion of heritage.

Figure 31. Visual redactions of collection data in Searcher prototype. MAO collection © 2023 Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

While opening up the visibility of museum holdings may initially appear straightforward, it is crucial to recognize the existing barriers that hinder these efforts. A case in point is a recent decision at the Museum of Architecture and Design to exclude object descriptions in the Searcher prototype. Instead of merely omitting this information, my approach is to render these restrictions transparent by visibly redacting them. Similarly, negotiations with the Design Museum Ghent and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg concern public display of collection images due to copyright uncertainties. In this way, searching the collection also brings to light structural issues within the museum that require more open negotiation and creative workarounds.

Given that the museum’s frontend offers access to only a tiny fraction of its holdings through its fixed displays and long-embedded narratives, more circulations of searching, stories, and their sharing are needed in the museum. To align with contemporary definitions, engaging visitors in this process is essential.

Museum-ing

Whether compiling stories in an alternate order, answering questions that had previously been rhetorical effect, switching up perspectives that lingered for too long, or sharing findings without suspending an enduring search, the pivotal question remains: What collective impact do these projects hold? These works and reflections attempt to demonstrate how the interactions on the frontend, not only debates on the backend, can stimulate perspectives on ways museums need to change. At the core of my perspective is that in order to take steps toward redefining museums, fostering the creative agency of visitors in the museum should, in tandem, aim to expose the museum structures that hinder it. The goal is not solely to enchant individual “museum experiences” but to encourage discussions about lived experiences that have the potential to transform the conventional methods museums use to gather, shape, and share their knowledge.

In their exploration of visitor-centered museums, Samis and Michaelson argue that embracing visitor-centered approaches can drive structural changes within the museum.^[20] Today, many museums are transforming, partly driven by a re-evaluation of traditional approaches to knowledge dissemination and methods that push toward dynamic, multivocal, and open exchanges with the public. Yet, as institutions with legacies and still-lingering traces in modernity, there are still many problems to confront and workarounds to devise.

In this contribution, I have used the museum ritual as a framework to identify some of these problems and engaged in interaction design to challenge them. Looking at ritual through a critical lens offers a way to expose existing behaviors, patterns, and power relations. Looking from a speculative lens, ritual provides a way to imagine how small gestures can build up to more symbolic and transformative action. The difference between these two ways of framing ritual is whether it is seen as confirmatory, as in reproducing a status quo, or as a creative force for enacting social change.^[21] In my work, I choose to work off the former and build toward the latter.

My modest experiments enter the museum through alternative routes than the traditional exhibition design devised after the research is done and the narratives are set. I see it as a form of critical iterative prototyping. A prototyping practice that aims not to reduce risk but to purposefully and incrementally increase it. The point is to continue to test the willingness of the museum to give up some control and build up the potential for the public, as owners of museum collections, to more dynamically enact, revise, and renegotiate the social and material relationships that can be found in museum collections.

While my approach to being with the museum creatively is in rethinking its tools, I prefer to reserve the term “museum-ing” to describe the acts where the visitor takes the role of challenger, engaging in a more meaningful, creative exchange with the museum.

About the Author

Jon Stam is an Amsterdam-based artist and interaction designer practicing under the name of Commonplace Studio. He is also a PhD student in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts – KU Leuven. His current research explores the use of dynamic and participatory mediation in museum spaces with the aim of making the “frontend” of the museum a more active, accessible, and reciprocal space of exchange.

This article is tagged with:

[1] Evangelos Kyriakidis, ed., The Archaeology of Ritual, Cotsen Advanced Seminars 3 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 294.

[2] Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, 1st ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005), Kindle edition, 32.

[3] Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 94–95. Duncan uses van Gennep’s term of liminality, further developed by Turner, to describe the ritual structure of the museum.

[4] Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 25.

[5] Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 18.

[6] ICOM, “Museum Definition,” International Council of Museums, accessed April 26, 2023.

[7] Commonplace Studio (Jon Stam), Tim Knapen, and Jesse Howard, A Commonplace Book, 2018.

^[8] Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces | Robert Darnton,” accessed April 12, 2023.

^[9] John Locke, Jean Le Clerc, and John Wallis, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (London: Printed for J. Greenwood, bookseller, at the end of Cornhil, next Stocks-Market, 1706).

^[10] Rodney Harrison, ed., Understanding the Politics of Heritage, Understanding Global Heritage 3 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, in association with the Open University, 2010).

[11] Commonplace Studio (Jon Stam), Tim Knapen, and Victor Díaz, Frequently Asked Questions, 2021.

[12] John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited (New York: Routledge, 2016).

^[13] “De andere verhalen rond Plantage Waterlant,” Hart Amsterdammuseum, December 2018.

^[14] Internal transcript of the New Collection Narratives meeting at the Amsterdam Museum, November 22, 2018.

[15] Commonplace Studio (Jon Stam), Fresh Perspectives, 2020.

^[16] “Plantage Waterlant,” Hart Amsterdammuseum, 2020. “Het ziet er zo lieflijk uit, maar juist daarom denk ik meteen aan wat je níet ziet: de slavenverblijven, de wrede straffen en de weglopers die achtervolgd werden” (translation mine).

[17] “L’Internationale – Collecting Life’s Unknowns.”

[18] Commonplace Studio (Jon Stam) et al., Searcher, 2023. A collaborative project with Maja Kolar, Thomas Hügin, Valentin Vogelmann, and Boris Smeenk. In partnership with Culture Center Delavski dom Trbovlje. Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

^[19] Christel Vesters, “A Thought Never Unfolds in One Straight Line,” Stedelijk Studies Journal 4 (Spring 2016).

[20] Peter S. Samis and Mimi Michaelson, Creating the Visitor-Centered Museum (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017).

[21] Barry Stephenson, Ritual: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Pres, 2015).