Spectacle and Democracy: Experience Music Project as a Post‐Museum

Bruce, Chris

doi:10.1002/9780470776230.ch5

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Burgoyne () also discusses the exhibits of the same museum while arguing in favour of their effectiveness in building a common and necessary past. Bruce (), in turn, demonstrates how the technological exhibits displayed by the Experience Music Project in Seattle (rebranded in 2016 to the Museum of Pop Culture) set out to endow democratic access to information. Mention must also be made of the literature expanding on the affordances in terms of the meaning making of exhibiting sound and/or music in museum exhibitions (Cortez ; Wiens ).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performatively Driven: A Genre for Signifying in Popular Music Exhibitions

Cortez¹

2019

Curator The Museum Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores a relatively novel field of practice, or genre, emerging in the context of museums and exhibitions of popular music and what I will refer to as performatively driven, here discussed and illustrated with examples drawn from particular international exhibitions that I have visited. This genre is comprised of a myriad of strategies used by curators to give substance to their exhibiting narratives that tends to cluster into four essential types – (i) exhibiting sound and music; (ii) dramatic strategies (for current purposes, the example of contrast is considered); (iii) enveloping strategies, and (iv) sound epistemologies – and all of which draw on combinations of multifarious exhibits (material and immaterial). In terms of their signifying potential, my analysis points to these strategies, each of them focused on imparting meaning in an experiential rather than a purely rational sense, as achieving the following ends: conveying notions of popular music as object and artifact; eliciting emotional responses and prompting engagement; valuing museumgoers’ individualities, while also locating them as part of a community (e.g., of music fans, of followers of a particular musical artist, of a particular generation); providing re‐enactment (both by reconstructing scenarios from the past or from live concerts and by activating memories offered of popular music); and conveying knowledge. As these signifying strategies dissolve into the aforementioned meanings in an experiential rather than in a more rational sense, I would suggest they are correspondingly rooted in the concept of performance and therefore propose adding this concept to the typology of concepts presented by Baker et al. (2018).

show abstract

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performatively Driven: A Genre for Signifying in Popular Music Exhibitions

Cortez¹

2019

Curator The Museum Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Many museums hope to attract visitors and stay competitive by evoking a sense of fun and pleasure with such devices (Bruce 2006). Notably, in a study of the NMAI's digital kiosks, Gwyneira Isaac (2008) found that NMAI visitors compare electronic media displays to those found in airports or shopping malls, suggesting they are accustomed to similar devices in highly commodified environments and that museumgoers conflate these different spaces.…”

Section: Telepresence Free Learning and Techniques Of The Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subjectivity Through Self-Education

Brady

2010

Television & New Media

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article looks at the use of digital kiosks and multimedia and multisensory presentation within the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C., to denaturalize assumptions about visitor and audience subject formation. Museums like the NMAI include numerous media technologies including multimedia presentations and digital kiosks as they vie for the attention of museum visitors. Proponents of digital kiosks in public spaces argue that they promote active engagement among visitors by encouraging "freechoice" learning, a process through which users make decisions about the content reviewed. This article argues that "free-choice" learning makes several assumptions regarding subject formation and that these assumptions constrain understanding of how media technologies shape meaning making potential in indigenous museums. It suggests that the existence of digital kiosks and multimedia presentations indicates disparate assumptions about visitor subjectivity and that these media are integral to the "techniques of the self" performed by the museum visitor as a multicultural citizen.Keywords digital kiosks, National Museum of the American Indian, multimedia, place-based media, audience subjectivity Bio Miranda J. Brady, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

show abstract

“…Recorded, interactive, and even live musical content is often fully integrated in music museums and exhibitions (Bruce 2008;Reising 2001;Kam 2004;Leonard 2010, 173-4). Leonard also notes examples of museums using musical performance independently of popular music exhibitions as part of social inclusion strategies (2010).…”

Section: Identifies Thismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The heritage of popular music has been surveyed in writing on dedicated museums (Reising 2001;Kam 2004;Bruce 2008;Mortenssen and Madsen 2014), exhibitions in generalist museums (Leonard 2010(Leonard , 2015, and a range of smaller scale 'DIY' spaces and archives (Baker and Huber 2013;Baker and Collins 2015;Collins 2015). Marian Leonard has described a range of music-focused exhibitions emerging from the personal practice of collecting popular music and culture artefacts (2007), addressing specific local music scenes in Liverpool (2010), Manchester, andBirmingham (2015).…”

Section: Music and Radio Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%

Alternative Radio: exhibiting radio and music heritage after the Christchurch earthquakes

Joyce

2017

International Journal of Heritage Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Spectacle and Democracy: Experience Music Project as a Post‐Museum

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Performatively Driven: A Genre for Signifying in Popular Music Exhibitions

Performatively Driven: A Genre for Signifying in Popular Music Exhibitions

Subjectivity Through Self-Education

Alternative Radio: exhibiting radio and music heritage after the Christchurch earthquakes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About