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The Material of the Digital

The Material of the Digital talk that I gave at the Oxford Internet Institute is now up on their webcast. The talk looks at the development of the new computing gallery at the Science Museum and the need to display the material culture of computing alongside the ephemeral world of software and applications. If you have any thoughts of displays of computing culture in museums and galleries you can add them to the comments part of Bill Dutton's blog.

George Oates at NMM

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Originally uploaded by TechStyle.

George Oates' talk on Tags at the National Maritime Museum on 19th April 2007 was a real joy. When you've been involved in creating something as great as Flickr its a real achievement not to come across as if you are bragging about the project, but George's presentation barely registered that she was pleased with the outcomes so far. Considered and insightful, her talk made you feel as if it must be really easy to go away and create something that simply reflects and supports human networks, yet if it were we'd all be doing it as well as Flickr.

Woz at the Science Museum

Steve Wozniak was at the Science Museum today for the launch of GameOn history of computer games exhibition. You can hear his trip down computer nostalgia lane from the BBC here.

KINETICA

Last weekend I went to the new Kinetica Museum in Spitalfields, which focuses in kinetic electronic and experimental art. Set to be one of the new spaces for new media art in London the opening display is The Amorphic Robot Works.

Walking round the display of hydraudic, pneumatic and computer automata as the warmed up for their musical interlude I was fascinated at how little mechanical art/toys/robots had come on from the 18th century mechanical chess playing Turk to Charles Babbage's dancing Silver Lady. Why do people continue to be so  intrigued by these relatively low-tech machines when technological ability has advanced so far? Or perhaps are we intrigued precisely because of the playful and rudimentary technology?

Look out for the next exhibition by Jasia Reichardt: 'From the Common Room to Cybernetic Serendipity' from the 17th October. Jasia curated the seminal 1968 ICA exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity which put computer arts on the map and brought Norbert Wiener's concept of cybernetics into the gallery.

Displaying chips

How do you display a microchip in a museum in a way that is meaningful? And how do you explain the workings of something as ephemeral as data transfer? The Science Museum's latest MacRobert Award display explains the Bluecore chip (the technology behind Bluetooth) from the Cambridge company CSR. It is a great display with retro graphics developed by Dom Robson at BlinkDesign that makes something as unengaging as a chip both eye-catching and informative. And best of all the small window of light with the button and the chip is at the perfect eye level for kids.

Cragside

A highlight of our summer was staying  in a cottage on Lord Armstrong's Cragside estate in Northumberland. Tucked away in the rugged hillside above Rothbury, Cragside brings together landscaped pine trees with Victorian technology.

The house was the first in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity and Amstrong installed many innovative machines to help his staff with the domestic chores. Cragside boasts the first hydraulic lift, used by Armstrong's domestic staff to carry coal and heavy pans between floors, a hydraulic spit, a Turkish steam room for the men, and was one of the earliest installations of Joseph Swan's  'incandescent lamp'.

Armstrong's money initally came from the invention of a hydraulic crane, and then from the foundation of the Elswick Works in the West End of Newcastle. Later he developed the breech-loading gun and moved into armament production and shipbuilding. The firm merged withJoseph Whitworth & Co, later becoming Vickers Armstrong.

Pier pressure

After much pressure during a weekend in Suffolk we headed down for our annual visit to Southwold Pier. I've written about the joys of Hunkins games before, but this year the kids imaginations went really wild. SO wild that we couldn't go into the the 'deep sea experience' which introduces you to the wilds of the North Sea and radioactive waste. We didn't even get a s far as going under when the girls leapt out of the box crying. We did manage Hunkin's quick holiday from your armchair, where you go on a sustainable and environmentally sound virtual holiday experience and the Expressive Photobooth. None of it is to be missed if you have a lot of one pound coins and some time to kill in East Anglia.

Two exhibitions at the V&A

Last week I went to two events at the V&A. The first was a launch of their Culture Online project Every Object Tells a Story developed with Channel 4 and Ultralab. The project is a good example of where the push for User Generated Content relating to museum objects was coming from back in 2002 when Culture Online was just a small Charlie Leadbetter vision for the DCMS. At that time there seemed to be two strands of thinking about what 'culture' and 'audiences' needed online - truly broadband cultural content (some of which can be seen with Stagework but more of which we'd hope to see with the development of a PSP) and User Generated Content (some which has developed elsewhere under the guise of Social Software and the BBC, but there is still very little evidence of this in the cultural sector). Its amazing how these are still the things we bleat on about.

This project goes some of the way in addressing the issues of UGC, and has explored all those critical concerns about factual accuracy, authority of museum sites, IP rights of work submitted and community creation. Its not been live long enough to develop a real sense of a growing community, and hopefully the sense of editorial control will soon be subsumed by user enthusiasm. But at the end of the day what projects such as these really have the opportunity to do is influence institutional perception about what the web is for and the strength of community collaboration.

I also popped in to the Touch Me exhibition. An exhibition about this neglected sense was nice, but some of the objects in it seemed misguided. Despite what I originally thought, the SoMo prototype mobile phones were not my cup of tea, making me laugh out loud rather than giving any sense of serious interaction design. But maybe that was there purpose - to get users to think about the way that phone are  used appropriately and inappropriately in social space. Still, electrocuting the loud user didn't seem quite fair.

Its easy to pick on small things in a exhibition, but one thing is clear. Better to be doing things, testing the water, trying things out, than not doing anything. Both of these exhibitions make me wonder at what a live and active place the V&A is at the moment, with constantly changing small, compelling and attractive exhibitions. I'm sure the Shhhh... exhibition was only last week...

Computer History in the New Scientist

The New Scientist ran an article this week about the new enthusiasm for digital history and our work at the Science Museum on computer conservation and digital preservation. The journalist Will Knight came on one of my magnificent tours of the computing collection stores and was so inspired that he took it upon himself to write a short piece on the history of computing. Shame he only quoted me as saying I was an eighties girl, and failed to attribute any of the great intellectual and historical insights I passed on to him!

Hunkin's Objects

Is it just me or are our objects, and in turn Collections, coming back in to fashion? Mark Jones' piece in June's Museums Journal points out there is no point having rare objects and important collections if we don't have the knowledge to talk about them. Tessa Jowell stresses the importance of Collections being' at the heart of all museums do' in Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life.

Then a piece in this month's Museum Practice on Tim Hunkin nicely reminds us that museums don't need to revolutionise their spaces to refresh and rejuvinate them. He focuses on entertainment and what people actually look at - the objects. He reminds us that objects inspire people to tell their friends they've seen.

Hunkin might be Old Skool but approach to never fails to be refreshing. And he has a realistic method of ensuring interactives stay working - design them with the maintence people and make the moving parts easy to access.

Two summers ago I took the kids down to Southwold pier and we happily threw our pounds into the coin-op machines. It was only when we took a trip in a submarine under the sea to meet the pollution of the North Sea and a shark that the kids became so freeked out we had to leave quickly.