an Imaginary Museum
So there I was (see last post) and here I still am, sitting in a body of not knowing, literally and figuratively, and excited about further articulating a fundamental particle of not knowing for my creative practice. I want my work to be about crafting experiences that carefully hold people in a state of not knowing - so that it feels exciting rather than scary, and so that audiences and participants in experiences feel their presence has an active value, an agency in engaging with ideas that are in motion.
I have also always wanted audiences to leave an experience feeling uplifted somehow, with a memory of a moment out of the everyday. Something to wonder about, and maybe even sometimes, something to smile or laugh about - just for a minute alongside the hard stuff. (And there is so much hard stuff right now - horrific and unimaginable - so do we stop, or do we, at the same time as finding out how we can help, protest or advocate, also choose to continue to find and create moments of lightness for each other. It seems that we always choose to keep telling stories.)
‘The careful carrying of uncertainty’ is a phrase that has stuck with me from discussions that I had with Applied Magician Stuart Nolan a few years ago, who helped us design an exhibit exploring the embodied feeling of invisibility at We the Curious. And in many ways the development of my creative practice is building on what I began there, where we built clusters of exhibits in a 360 multidisciplinary exploration of a central question, putting people’s curiosity at the centre of what a cultural space can be. It also placed different approaches to a question on an equal plane with each other - and was particularly exciting to design for, when the questions were truly unGoogleable : “Can science see your soul?”
Onwards from there to here, and the next bit of not knowing in my development process was to find a way of more tangibly exploring the notion of ‘not knowing’ while I wasn’t able to do what I’d been hoping to do in the wider world in the last year. I did know a few things :
I’d originally hoped for some online conversations I was having, to be thought experiments, and that had turned out to be not quite the right shape for them.
I still needed a space to imagine in, with others - and I couldn’t shake the notion of a thought experiment, after being further inspired by Prof Peter Weibel’s description of his Critical Zones exhibition as a thought experiment at ZKM, (see previous post).
Whenever I’ve been working on something new, particularly with teams of people in a change process, there comes a point where we have to move on from talking and thinking about it, and just try something out without pressure of so called failure.
I needed to be able to bring a space of not knowing into being, to see what it felt like, and notice what came up that needed attending to in terms of a careful invitation to people to enter it.
So I made an online thought experiment. A website for an Imaginary Museum. Written as though it really exists. That was important, as it was almost like what a physical rapid prototyping process does for the mind - it brings new ideas into being that wouldn’t have happened if you were only intellectually thinking and talking about them. It forces you to test out what it feels like, and usually, the Thing tells you what it needs and what it wants to be through the doing of it - and if you share your prototypes, audiences will tell you want it needs to be too.
Side note, but connected - while I was physically limited in what I could do last year, I took an online hybrid writing course led by Tania Hershman. It did exactly what I hoped it would, challenging me to try different ways of writing, encouraging me out of set patterns of working. For one of the exercises, we were asked to collide two different forms and contexts of writing - the list was brilliant, things like: a wedding speech, a station announcement, a shopping list. I chose to collide ‘footnotes’ with ‘an object label in a museum.’ And out popped a teapot from the Horniman Museum talking in the 1st person, giving the footnotes to its own label. There was something about the object having a voice, talking directly to the reader that I found interesting to play with. So when I was starting to write the website for the Imaginary Museum I found myself using the 1st person voice again. It seemed to come up naturally as I was thinking about questions of trust, of making a generous invitation. What if the museum spoke for itself on its own site…?
This thinking has all been part of my Arts Council England developing creative practice grant - and I’d originally written the application saying that this was all working towards an Un-Museum of ideas. But luckily I’d put a mental question mark at the end of this, if not a real typed one. Because I now realise that Un-Museum doesn’t work. I love museums. I am not really trying to Un-them. I would like to change the way they work, but not replace them. Museums need to continue doing what they do brilliantly while working on the stuff that needs to shift.
This is something else - about a hybrid practice leading towards hybrid spaces that don’t have the language assigned to describe them yet. I had a conversation with artist Bryony Benge-Abbott about how we describe hybrid practices, and how the language we choose might change. And with Amy Rose, Creative Director and co-founder of Anagram, we talked, amongst many things anarchic and joyful, about the invitation to audiences to participate in work that leaves space for personal experience and interpretation. Prof Peter Weibel, CEO of the hybrid space ZKM also generously challenged my framing of the Un-Museum, and propelled me towards some philosophical context for the trust that is needed to be designed into these spaces.
I am most interested in working in the almost impossible zone, opening up ideas that are under construction, exploration and experimentation for wider audiences. Sometimes that makes it almost impossible to describe something without referring to existing things that are known already. When you pick a new word or phrase to name and communicate the values of what your hybrid work or space is, it needs a little time to be trusted and understood. I wonder if in the interim transforming phase, using a word that anchors people, even if only to give a context for what it’s not, can still be helpful.
So for now, this online documentation of my thinking is called the Imaginary Museum, as that’s what it is. If it were to become not-imaginary, it would need a new name, one that suggests the values and the why of it, but is neither museum nor art gallery nor science centre. I always have a long list of ideas for names for this type of hybrid space, but that’s not the most important part of this process right now.
You are very much invited to have a look around. It’s deliberately lo-fi in the sense that it is largely text and images as a rapid prototype, and it is also avoiding the perceptions and expectations that come with a 3D virtual space mimicking ‘standard’ gallery spaces.
Its collection will be building over the next few weeks and months, thanks to the generous people I’ve been connecting with and accepting the invitation to contribute something. Crucially I want to invite a diversity of individuals, groups and communities to contribute thoughts to what they’d like to see or do in an Imaginary Museum.
If you have thoughts and provocations for the Imaginary Museum, please let it know!