Presentations and discussion points at museum workshop in Volos 2005

The workshop was held in Volos, June 13 / 14, 2005. The following presentations were made and then followed up by discussions:

Concept and design of the Wieland Museum outside of Weimar

Prof. Jens Geelhaar, Interactive Design of Bauhaus University

The need of visual communication in European heritage studies

Trifon Trifonof, National Museum Boyana Church, Sofia

Digitalization of Cultural Heritage

Andrzej Rataj, Ethnographic Museum Krakow

Museum for the Olympiakos football club

Katerina Tsaligapoulou

The organization of Museums in Weimar and links to local development

Sebastian Schröder

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Concept and design of the Wieland Museum outside of Weimar

Presentation by Prof. Jens Geelhaar, Interactive Design of Bauhaus University

- the museum was opened on June 25, 2005

The technical information system for the Wieland museum has been designed by the Bauhaus University. It means i-podster system for obtaining and gathering information. Visitors can go through the museum and be informed, i.e. click to get additional information and collect it for a later print-out at the computer terminal in the last room.

A similar system has been installed recently at MOMA in New York. I-podster will mean visual contact mediated by virtual reality in order to make possible experiences over and beyond immediate objects. With this kind of information system the museum wishes to provide insights into the works and life of the poet Wieland. It is clear that this will be made possible without any interference of a museum guides (there will be only one person sitting at the front desk to hand out the i-podsters). People can go through the chronological ordered rooms and acquaint themselves with the poet in his own estate where he lived more than 14 years.

The system has been tested already once and was considered to be a success. But as shown by the MOMA system, there are still some technical difficulties to be resolved. For instance, the Wieland system will have for the moment no video since it would require too big a broad band for the transmission of information, especially if there are many users at the same time. Difficulties may also be in the automatic system providing information according to location but only in a sequence with the visitor going forward and not back.

From an information system point of view much depends on the data bank and how it can be accessed. There are three stereotypes of visitors conceptualized: tourist, interested visitor and expert. The original text to be read in full is always at the bottom of the hierarchy of information (some asked if it should not be the other way around: first the original, then the contextualization and finally interpretations + discussions).

Discussion points / general remarks

Burkhardt Kolbmüller: There is also the broader perspective linked to the Wieland museum, namely to be located outside of Weimar so that this will have a regional impact upon tourists and visitors seeking to find their way to the museum. Naturally it can be expected that few will unless something else is organized: scientists gathering for meetings (at ground level there is a conference room) or other kinds of study groups.

Hatto Fischer: there are several points to be made!

the Wieland museum came about due to the benefactor Jan Philipp Reetsma who has been ‘editing’ in particular the political writings of Wieland. Due to his donations it means that he has as benefactor a great deal to say on how the information system was conceived and implanted in the museum by means of the i-podster system. Somehow it shows up by the kind of information system provided.
It should be recalled what Mr. Seemann, President of the Foundation Weimar Classic said at the very beginning of the HERMES project attentive to the role of museums when it comes to preserving and promoting cultural heritage by using the new media, namely that ‘the opening of the Wieland museum means a conscious shift in cultural heritage terms based on the concept of the Classics. Until now this period has been defined by leading figures such as Goethe and Schiller. In view of European integration, there is a need to give more emphasis to the European dimension as exemplified already by Wieland whose outlooks and writing convey such a tendency.’ Naturally this shift in cultural heritage policy was made prior to the no-vote in France and Holland to the Constitutional Treaty of Europe.
Despite that direction towards Europe, the information system made available at the Wieland museum seems to suggest from a first impression to have but a very limited horizontal and vertical linkage to poetry, philosophy and political ideas in Europe.
Of interest is that there appear contemporaries of Wieland who were either house guests such as Kleist or else they were lecturing at the nearby university like Jacobi in Erfurt. The significance of Jacobi is that he was attacked by Hegel for giving the validity of truth to ‘sinnliche Gewissheit’: the certainty of the senses. To those interested in reflecting the possible validity of Hegel’s denial of Jacobi as the senses not being a source of truth, here the Wieland museum may become a new place of contemplation about the role of our senses in modern life.
Another suggestion for possible topics to be discussed at the Wieland museum is to see how through modern poetry compared with that of Wieland’s time people can face up to the new media world entering more readily and faster virtual reality. All too often the imagination linked to ‘experiences’ vanish in such management systems of information. There is a need for more poetic engagement in this world, and in particular due to over emphasis of technical solutions compared with spirited poetic encounters like Guenter Grass described in ‘Meeting in Telgte’.

The need of visual communication in European heritage studies

by Trifon Trifonof, National Museum Boyana Church, Sofia

Boyana church, Sofia

Some basic discussion points:

curriculum for the education of future workers in museums
visual communication as a more complex and comprehensive term than just being about aesthetics of signs
adaptation to the new Galileo European system beside the American system; the Galileo system is supported by leading companies
curriculum should be linked to cultural heritage and follow some standard definitions of museums i.e. ICOM when designing future courses
it will involve dealing with multi media, data banks, virtual reality, web based activities leading on to online exhibitions and interactive design studies
tools and equipment such as three dimension roaming of buildings and sites means also entering precise laser techniques to secure preservation and restoration skills as much as data about state of affairs of buildings, monuments and art works
archiving will have to be integrated in a different way to be available as work basis within any museum
in reference to some practical examples, such as ARS Electronica in Linz, here examples of modernization and positioning at international level with regards to latest developments shows how interactions between research and media based work must be encouraged at all levels

Discussion points:

Hatto Fischer: one aspect may be neglected by the conceptualization of cultural heritage according to multi media standards is that modern technology even of the most sophisticated kind cannot deal readily with complex artistic materials, ideas and concepts. As a matter of fact artists find themselves usually at the border of the technical capacity, and therefore they try to test what expressions these technical tools allow, what not.

Another aspect is the question of intangible cultural heritage – meaning, memory – which cannot be reduced to visual images so easily.

The capacity of a museum is a measure as to what it does allow to make such experiences which are not predetermined by solely interacting with the artefact within the scope of the multi media. That would reduce experience to something technically defined and constrained by technical means having been made available with not all users capable of knowing and using the full potentialities thereof.

Certainly HERMES should concern itself with a design of a modern curriculum linking cultural heritage and multi media.

Andrzej Rataj: there are many more definitions of museums but he finds a review of current curriculum for teaching future museum workers a very useful idea.

Digitalization of Cultural Heritage

Andrzej Rataj, Ethnographic Museum Krakow

the state of affairs at the museum before 1989 and afterwards: in the Communist times framework conditions were stable, the museum had to play a role in society and financial needs were met by the Ministry of Culture. It meant so many exhibitions had to be devoted to the theme of Socialist Realism but in real terms they were shown only in a small part. Everything changed since then. Nowadays the museum is comprised of many workers who do not even know each other and who do not necessarily share the same vision of what is the role of the museum in modern society.
staff: how much work and the need for rationalization – many people work at the museum for now 15 years or longer, it is difficult to throw them out; in the past everyone had a job, now the climate has changed and you supposed to rationalize but where should these people go to?
Trying to adopt to new role but in reality the museum is facing an “identity crisis”
There are different definitions of museums but certainly he is of the open that the most valuable of any museum is the communication of the values of the exhibits, to put them into a context (catalogue, description, labels) and to reconnect them with what can be said about that specific period of time and how people lived then e.g. farm tools used by Polish peasants in the nineteenth century, what bedrooms existed then, how they cooked etc.
Attempting to create now a digital data bank for that is very important especially in the case of old photographs but this is long and slow process and it does cost a lot of money which the museum does not have.
One source of revenue is the entrance fee of 1 Euro so that the Ethnographic Museum earns about 20 000 a year from its visitors (for the 650 museums in Poland it is said that there are about 19 million visitors per year); the rest of the budget is covered by governmental support but it is not enough and besides politicians do not see anymore the role of the museums the same way as they in the past. Now a museum must perform on many different levels.
In looking at other possible revenues, there are the loans of exhibits abroad e.g. Christmas crib but here only travel costs and accommodation are covered for staff going there while on the other hand the Polish crib being so famous and unusual can draw huge crowds e.g. in 2004 there came 10 000 visitors to see the exhibit in Lyon so that indicates the organization gained a lot of money but unfortunately no agreement was reached that some of that revenue would be given to the Ethnographic museum.
reconstruction of the former past: how easy it is to destroy artifacts and what time, money and efforts it takes to reconstruct them
restoration work
archives (photos, documents, exhibits) is huge in comparison to all other inventories of the museum
restoration specialization for cleaning exhibits
Day of the Museum: May 18th – Bridging Cultures – this time dance from Mali / exhibits of similar kind e.g. pillows from India, chair from Indonesia beside pillows and furniture of a typical Polish farm house / on that day alone 2000 visitors with risk of damage to exhibits due to over crowding
Link between University and workshops at the museum
18 temporary exhibitions a year in the special building across the street

Discussion points:

Vasilis Sgouris: what happens to museums if the framework conditions change? The museum must adapt, however, to what the public wants if it is to continue to survive as an institution. Obviously there is a kind of supply / demand relationship in need of being understood as basis for museum policy.

Jorgios Gangas: certainly the revenue from entry ticket is too little if only 1 Euro but as Andrej Rataj replied the Polish society is not very rich and in particular those who tend to go to museums will not have much money to spend.

Carol Becker: the museum offers a rich experience from what can be seen on the slides, therefore, it would be important not to polarize the discussion into here traditional, there modern ways of representation; clearly some management decisions will have to be taken to secure a viable basis for the museum.

Hatto Fischer: the identity crisis of the museum to which Andrej Rataj refers to is a spill over effect of the former times when under Communist rule everything had to be accessible to the worker, so the standard phrase, while culture was really a matter of the elite and still legitimized as something like an extra educational system for the masses of workers. Nowadays the worker has been replaced by the ‘citizen’ even though we know that those who go to museums for different reasons do so out of numerous reasons, curiosity being but one motivation.

Carol Becker: Interesting is if a museum succeeds in being ‘seductive’ and thereby speaks to something deeper and more unconscious than what ordinary media languages are aiming at. If the visual effect is seductive, people will wonder why they were affected by that item or this document of the past. If this motivates them to inquire further, then the museum experience will have been worthwhile.

General comment: about ICOM stipulating any museum must have at least one day entry free and the problems it creates e.g. in Zakopane as ski resort one would expect people go there to spend some money but when it comes to the museum there all crowd in on the day when entrance is free; they have even the problem of crowd control with the situation getting easily out of hand and turning nasty when people have to be turned away at the entrance.

Museum for the Olympiakos football club

by Katerina Tsaligapoulou

the colors of the club are red and white
the lay-out of the museum foresees two floors, is located directly besides the fan and gift shop, has a shaker as entry in analogy to how football players run through a tunnel into the stadium, foresees various sections (multi media interactive forms where even muscle strength can be measured when it comes to achieving things like long jump, permanent exhibits downstairs, temporary upstairs) and a floor plan which foresees at the end the ‘red wall’ depicting players, trainers, coaches and fans.
In linkage to the media, there is the possibility to go to a particular section of the stadium and after clicking there here the voice of a fan sitting in that section
There will be emphasis on members, fans, visitors (from other clubs), tourists
A lot of thought has gone into the creation of the data bank since the club has been fortunate enough that its solicitor who died 1989 kept written records of every game, player etc. so that a statistical overview is available. Current entries into the data bank foresee following services: a visitor can preplan his visit to the museum by asking already per SMS for certain information about a certain player, game, development of the club in terms of other clubs and their performances etc. Like any archive, the data bank will have three levels of access: managers of the data bank, internal users of the club (limited access) and web based access for all users.
There is an aim to link up with the museums and fan clubs of the other Greek football teams in order to share data about games, players and related events.
It is hoped that fans from other teams will come to the museum and are not turned off by being just a museum of Olympiakos; for this reason there will be included in the museum many other aspects of sport history e.g. when football was invented, how played in Japan, what sport medicine means now, how training and performance can be measured and explained etc.
Katerina explained that the aim of the museum was to bring in the fan and to create an atmosphere of a wider community sense. Traditionally speaking, Olympiakos has always been a part of Piraeus where some people live without ever going to Athens. They were also of the lower and middle class and had their roots in a working class environment.

Discussion points:

Chrysa Zarkali: Why not contribute the data bank to the Sports museum in Thessaloniki? Rather than being a museum for one football club, it would be a different approach if we would upgrade the sport museum in Thessaloniki.

Katerina Tsaligapoulou: Some of the reasons for not doing that are linked to the issue of property and copy rights. Besides we want to keep the cups we won as a club. It is a part of our identity and history. Naturally the museum will not be only about Olympiakos. We will have this general section about the history of football and also what is connected to athletic sports requiring high performances from the individual athlete.

Hatto Fischer: It is interesting to note that Katerina mentioned they are going to seek recognition as a museum. In my presentation I will present some of the ‘ethical’ issues connected with if a corporate museum, that is when not the contents of the museum are meant to be promoted, but the image of the company that owns the museum. I suppose the same issue will arise in the case of the Industrial Heritage Museum in Tsalapatas, Volos for it will be managed by the Piraeus Bank. Are these then cases of corporate museums seeking recognition by ICOM as museum? Naturally there is another role of the museum worthwhile mentioning. It can contribute towards avoiding violence and football hooliganism by replacing fanaticism amongst the followers with a more cultivated and civil approach to the game as such.

Jorgios Gangas: Is it an overestimation that a museum can contribute to a non violent atmosphere amongst fans of football games or help to resolve the problem of Hooliganism, for how can the museum contribute to making football more of a cultural event?

Hatto Fischer: Peter Higgins from landdesignstudio in the UK has created a football museum in which this effort is made: to reduce violence by also drawing attention to outbreaks of violence amongst football fans. There is a definite way to draw attention to what was even a plea by Otto Rehagel and the Greek football team after they had won the European cup 2004, namely that now football in Greece should become again fun so that parents would want to take their kids to the stadium. It would mean not to take these events as something fanatically to be defended but to enjoy the athletics of the sports, if that is possible.

Peter Higgins pointed out that the football museum in which he was involved in doing there is a unique story by a man who studied football stadiums from the point of view what lighting they use. As we know from theatre and the language of deception, lighting has a lot to do with how we see things. Again this underlines the key thesis that museums narrate things and they can be judged by what stories they tell (or suppress).

Conclusion:

To those listening to Katerina’s story about the museums which will safeguard also all the cups the Olympiacos team has won and who were not fans of the team, it was to some of the people present at the workshop agonizing to realize how many they had won already. Of course, it meant they were fans of other clubs.

The organization of Museums in Weimar and links to local development

Presentation by Sebastian Schröder

Castle in Weimar - seat of Classical Foundation of Weimar

Sebastian did not develop any full fledged ‘theory’ but developed instead a set of questions for each of the three key terms: museums, cultural heritage, regional development. As set of questions he connected them by means of some observations e.g. how Effie Pappas had defined museums in her presentation she gave in January 2005. In his opinion once museums go beyond mere collecting and preserving cultural heritage of the region and thereby contribute towards the identity of that region, it can be seen already as a contribution to regional development.

Note: in the READER made available for the workshop, there is included a note by Miriana Iordanova about various definitions of cultural heritage within the European Spatial Development Perspective – the official document for Interreg financed projects which have to deal with spatial questions and therefore regional development perspectives.

Burkhard Kolbmüller: Weimar is actually a bad example. After the Cultural Capital City concept was completed in 1999, tourism receded and now people stay in Weimar perhaps only 1.4 days. They no longer visit the area surrounding Weimar. This is bad for everyone. Especially many museums had to be closed, in particular the Museum of the City. It explains also that the city of Weimar is not really involved in the HERMES project since they have many financial problems at local level.

Vasilis Sgouris: But the Foundation Classic Weimar is financed not so much from the local community but receives federal funds and is really a bit of a strange body outside the consciousness of the local population.

Burkhardt Kolbmüller: well, that is true to some extent but it changed last September when unfortunately the Amalia library burned down and the people of Weimar suddenly realized what treasures in cultural heritage the city has thanks to the Foundation but not only, and what was lost in that fire. Since then there is a qualitative improved relationship between citizens and the cultural heritage of Weimar.

Hatto Fischer: Yet the Foundation is itself in a crisis. There had not been made any internal evaluation since 1989 so that it sparked criticism and even a review by the highest council of Science. Proposals were made to reform the foundation while people were fired. As far as information reached members of the HERMES project, out of 320 people 40 were made unemployed. Then, in a historical perspective, the overall composition of the population changed. Before the Second World War, there lived the enlightened citizen. After 1945 and the separation of the two Germany’s many moved in while those who moved in were not enlightened in the same way. After 1989 the population drain from the East to the West affected also the overall economic and social base of Thuringia. Of interest is here that HERMES is practically the first Interreg project in the region.

Burkhardt Kolbmüller: we have started now a new project in collaboration with the Tolstoy Centre in Russia. It is a centre that employs even more people than the Foundation Classical Weimar and has many more facilities. It will be interesting to see what impact this cooperation project will have on the Foundation in Weimar but it certainly revives historical linkages.

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