Twitter, Museums, and the "Unthinking Television" conference

In my Museums and Public Memory class this morning, we talked over why our class experiments with YouTube this semester have been running kind of stale. ( See some of the student class postings at:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MuseumsPublicMemory&view=favorites

Students mentioned that producing YouTube is labor intensive and demands access to technology, which is a hassle, especially to make the work look good. Bryce was a little skeptical about this; he noted that some of the most successful vlogging is done in a very informal mode with decidely low production values. Looking at some recent popular YouTube posts, we wondered why it has been hard for students to "punch up" their YouTube postings with humor? Are museums and exhibitions as cultural sites particularly resistant to humor, perhaps? Or is it that the whole campus has been so exhausted by our ongoing financial crisis and the Rose controversy that a sense of humor has been hard to muster?

In any event, the students expressed a great deal more energetic excitment over the possibilities of Twitter, for rapidfire communication and exchange of ideas (each text message limited to 140 characters). So we decided that I would, right there in class, create a Twitter account (the students patiently walked me through how to do this) and that the students would 'follow' my brand new Twitter micro-blog, "MuseumMark" which is at:

http://twitter.com/MuseumMark

I promised to twitter from the "Unthinking Television" conference on Thursday at George Mason University, at which Bryce and I are presenting on our class experiment with YouTube. The students will twitter back to us, so we can at least all be linked together, in effect, during the conference. I'm curious what kind of conversation will ensue.

In class, we noticed the rather dynamic twitter sites for MOMA

http://twitter.com/MuseumModernArt

and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://twitter.com/metmuseum

and speculated about what kind of cultural (and economic) work these micro-blogs are doing. The consensus was that they probably aren't attracting first time visitors to the museums. Perhaps they getting infrequent visitors to return to the museum more often, by letting them know about interesting exhibitions, highlighted 'art works of the day' and lectures. And perhaps the twitter links help to build a kind of personal relationship with the institution, which might translates into a greater likelihood of membership.

We speculated as well about the interactive possibilities of Twitter in museum and gallery contexts. Is Twitter only a good way to push content out to museum patrons, as a form of "outreach." Alternately, could twitter afford a good way for museum-goers to 'talk back' to the curators, to artists, and to one another about their reflections on art installations, as they roam through art spaces? Is this sort of thing already going on at some museums, I wonder?

Art and Evolution: Kiki Smith's Lucy's Daughters

I've just posted a video essay on Kiki Smith's wonderful silk screened art work, "Lucy's Daughters" (1990), which I first saw in a show curated by Margarite Evangeline at the Rose Art Museum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AJY0twpKIc&feature=channel_page

I'm especially struck by how the piece contrasts with the standard graphic framing of evolution in the popular imagination, typified by the unlinear "parade of man" visual trope, of the sort ridiculed by Stephen Jay Gould in his book "Wonderful Life.

Our hope is to get a kind of video dialogue going in advance of the symposium on art and evolution we're planning for "Darwin Day", the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12, 2009. I'd love to view some specific video responses to my video essay, as well as other commentaries about: (1)how artists have responded to evolutionary ideas, and (2) how, in turn, visual and other representational genres have helped to shape popular (and scientific) understandings of evolutionary processes.

I'm excited about YouTube's potentional for promoting stimulating video dialogues about problems in cultural theory and the interpretation of art, now that it is so easy for so many people to post video responses to videos that they encounter on line. I'm wondering how this kind of visual correspondence might itself evolve of over time. To be sure, quick video responses and counter-responses many not always encourage thoughtful reflection, but the medium does seem to have interesting "affordances" for the building of communities devoted to collaborative cultural analysis outside the bounds of the academy in a formal, institutional sense.

Beyond the general educational value of video essays themselves, I'm intrigued by the pedagogic possibilities of YouTube in the courses that I teach. Would it be a good idea to encourage or require students to post video responses to one another, perhaps pondering a specfic image, work of art, or other cultural phenomena? In small classes at least, one could initially limit the video dialogues to a closed group (the YouTube upper limit for closed access is 25 viewers) and then later go public with the video dialogue, I suppose, once we decided as a class that the video threads were ready to be shared with the wider universe. I still would want students to post carefully thought out written responses on line, but it does seem to me that the discipline of composing video essays (in which image, text and voice are thoughfully integrated) is a very useful one, especially if students were responsible to one another for crafting videos that responded to their peers' videos.