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Peter Sloterdijk sees our digitalized world in a "growing spatial crisis", accompanied by the danger of a "general virtuality of all relationships". Others view the digitalization of the world as opening up a grassroots democratic space that allows everyone access to culture. Against this backdrop, this anthology examines the spatial characteristics of the museum – between physical place and virtual space. The chapters collected here approach the museum space from various disciplinary perspectives, such as philosophy, history, art history, architecture, scenography, museum education and curatorial studies. At the same time, the contributions by international museum experts are assigned to different literary genres – fundamental considerations alternate with think pieces, case studies and interviews.
The Covid-19 lockdowns caused people worldwide to be confined to their homes for longer and on a greater scale than ever before. This forced many unprecedented changes to the way we treat domestic space – as relationships shifted between the public and the private worlds, and homes were rapidly adapted to accommodate the additional roles of schools, offices, gyms, restaurants, making-spaces and more. Above all, our understanding of the home as a site to support and enhance the well-being of its inhabitants changed in a variety of novel ways. Interiors in the Era of Covid is a collection of essays which explore the complex ways in which our inside spaces (contemporary and historical) have r...
Exploring how design can be used for good—prompting self-reflection, igniting the imagination, and affecting positive social change. Good design provides solutions to problems. It improves our buildings, medical equipment, clothing, and kitchen utensils, among other objects. But what if design could also improve societal problems by prompting positive ideological change? In this book, Bruce and Stephanie Tharp survey recent critical design practices and propose a new, more inclusive field of socially minded practice: discursive design. While many consider good design to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible, and undemanding intellectually, discursive design instead targets the intellect, pr...
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object ...
Museum Exhibitions and Suspense takes insights from screenwriting to revolutionise our understanding of exhibition curating. Despite all genuine efforts to reach broader audiences, museums persistently fear riskingtheir credibility by becoming ‘too popular’. Thus, the enormous potential to learn from other storytelling forms more experienced in the field of entertainment remains essentially unexploited. Museum Exhibitions and Suspense unlocks this creative potential. A comparative in-depth analysis of three classical Hollywood films and three cultural historical exhibitions demonstrates how dramatic suspense techniques can be applied to exhibitions. These techniques must be adapted to th...
A critical overview of contemporary design and its place within the broader context of art history A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 introduces readers to a collection of specially commissioned essays exploring the complex areas of design that emerged through the latter half of the twentieth century, design history, design methods, design studies and more recently, design thinking. The book delivers a thoughtful overview of all design disciplines and also strives to stimulate inter-disciplinary debate and examine unconsidered convergences among design applications in different fields. By offering a new perspective on design, the articles assembled here present a challenging accou...
Today more than ever before, the historical witness is now a “museum objectâ€_x009d_ in the form of video interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance. Such video testimonies now not only are part of the collections and research activities of museums, but become deeply intertwined with narrative and exhibit design. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time this new global process of “musealisationâ€_x009d_ of testimony, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.
This special issue of the journal “zeitgeschichte” presents the results of the doctoral theses written within the framework of the “Doctoral College European Historical Dictatorship and Transformation Research” (2009–2012) as selected scholarly essays. The contributions are devoted to authoritarian regimes of the 20th century in Austria, Belarus, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the Soviet Union. Using various methods from the humanities and social sciences, diff erent aspects of mainly “small” dictatorships are examined: conditions of emergence, structures, continuities, as well as preceding and subsequent processes of political and social transformation.
In Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century the question of what it meant to be modern was a heated topic of debate. Focusing on interior design, fashion and photography, as well as on painting and architecture, this study casts fresh light on the vital role of the arts in these debates. The 'new' art and literature was crucial in defining a distinctive Viennese modernity while at the same time challenging preconceptions about modern urban life. Many artists and writers produced work that questioned and undermined oppositions between city and country, interior spaces and panoramic views, masculinity and femininity. Issues of gender and the representation of the body were particularly impo...
As spaces of knowledge, the national museums and galleries of nineteenth-century Europe played an important role both in the shaping of nation-states and the education of their populations. In this context, such institutions sought to convey the history of the people, for example by displaying pictorial cycles of important scenes from their history, exhibiting objects associated with certain formative events, or arraying period rooms to promote a specific impression of the past. The contributions to this volume examine the purposes and educational strategies of national museums and national galleries via case studies from Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.