Museum Theatre on the Web 1996

This guide to museum theatre on the web is a launching pad for exploring issues raised by the course and pertinent to your projects. Please bring interesting sites to my attention and I will add them. Please provide updated URL's for links that have la psed: Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett

Readings

• The Electronic Disturbance, by Critical Art Ensemble, the required reading for this session.
• CTHEORY, an electronic journal with full texts of original articles, interviews, and translations from the pantheon--Virilio, Baudrillard, Zizek, Kroker, Acker, and others.
• World Expositions is one of several sites dealing with world's fairs and theme parks, an important component in our deliberations on the agency of display and nature of exhibition as a medium.
• Theme Park and Amusement Park Links, essays, news coverage, bibliography and other research resources.
• Citizens Against Chinese Propagandais the focal point for protesting the new Florida theme park Splendid China.
• Women and Performance, special issue on Sexuality and Cyberspace.
• StudioLab, Jon McKenzie's home page with exemplary projects and links.
• WAVA Web Archive in Visual Anthropology
Contains full text of Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory (and related essays), and Sol Worth's Studying Anthropology (and related work).

Resources

• WWW Virtual Library: Museums around the world, organized by country and searchable by subject.
• Museum Online Resource Review, includes keyword search, categorical and alphabetical listings, and electronic discussion groups.
• American Association of Museums

Sites, Installations, Projects

Artists' Projects

• Dia Center for the Arts Website featured three projects in 1996 worth exploring: Komar and Melamid, The Most Wanted Paintings; Susan Hiller, Dream Screens; and Diller+Scofidio. Dia launched an open forum to prec ede a February conference, Stars Don't Stand till in the Sky, on popular music.
  These online projects were but part of Dia's program, which featured installations in its Chelsea premises at 548 West 22nd Street (212-989-5912), Thur thru Sun, 12-6 pm. Specially recommended in connection with our 1996 course is Juan Munoz, A Place Call ed Abroad, described as a transformation of "the 7,500 square foot gallery into a streetlike environment. The residual spaces [was] inhabited by groups of newly created figures who engage[d] with each other in ways that transform[ed] the sites into highly charged arenas." Roberta Smith characterizes this site as moving among "literature, theater and painting." This installation would offer a useful counterpoint for Gilad's project on Elinor Antin.
  Hanne Darboven's Kultugeschichte 1883-1983, takes up issues pertinent to projects dealing with memory and materiality--those of Dwan, Lisa, Bekka, and Andrew, among others.
  Check out Dia publications either at the Chelsea site or in Soho, Printed Matter Bookstore at Dia, 77 Woster St., 212-925-0325. Their book on Jessica Stockholder relates to Pernille's project.
• Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. Their Art on the Web provides excellent links to online projects they commissioned as well as to ones they consider exemplary.
• Aboard the CyberClipper, A Transatlantic Technological Adventure, presented by The Contemporary (Baltimore) and The Kunsthaus (Hamburg), featuring new projects by Lee Boot and Frank Fietzek. These online works are "scheduled to coincide with the current European voyage of the tall ship, Pride of Baltimore II."
• Laurie Anderson's Green Room, to be read in conjunction with her CD- ROM Puppet Motel and Jon McKenzie's essay "Laurie Anderson for Dummies." CD-ROM available at the Avery Fisher Center in Bobst Libr ary.
• Dirty Work for Slimy Girls, women infect machines with radical thought.
• Fluxus Online
• Perry Hoberman Projects, a neo-Karaoke experiment.
• Blast Conversational Archive, a totally graphic navigational approach.

Science and Technology

• Exploratorium Home Page, pioneering museum of science and technology, located in San Francisco.
• Franklin Institute Science Museum, located in Philadelphia--de rigeur for Aviva's project on the automaton and robot shown there. Check out The Heart: An Online Exploratio n, specially for Stephanie's project.

Natural History and Zoos

• National Zoological Park, an innovative zoo that foregrounds human interaction with animals and their relationship with those conducting research on them.
• International Museum of the Horse, a well-designed straightforward site.

History and Memory

• The Mechelen Museum of Deportation and the Resistance
• Museum of Slavery
• Remembering Nagasaki, an understated and beautifully designed site, which accompanied an exhibition and programs at the Exploratorium.
• The CHAINS Doorway,, a project on Ghana.
• Interactive Memories, about Abbe Don's multimedia piece and web site based on her grandmother's stories.
• Franz Rosenzweig Exhibit, an hypertext synthesis of exhibition and catalogue.
• 1002Situations, a collaborative project to define heimat (German: homeland)

Pathetic, Vernacular, Alternative, and Meta- Museums

• The Museum of Jurassic Technology, our favorite metamuseum, probing the depths of speculative imagination, unauthorized knowledge, and their materialization in an historical museology. Relentless consistency, from mis sion statement to gift shop, membership materials to installation, make this site deliciously slippery.
• CyberBarrio, online component of installation and performance by Guillermo Gomez Pena and Roberto Sifuentes.
• Obsolete Computer Museum, "a place to stop by and reminisce about the old days of personal computing," winner of award in categories of "bizarre" and "geek" sites.
• The Museum of Bad Art , the other face of Komar and Melamed's Most Wanted Paintings and counterpoint to the "pathetic museum" discussed by Ralph Rugoff in his piece on the Ackermuseum. "The Museum of Bad Art is a community-based, private institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms and in all its glory." Established in 1993, the MOBA is located in Boston, first in the basement of private home, and no w exhibits on the WWW and CD-ROM, as well as holding "physical events" in the Boston area. Its permanent gallery is located, since November 1995, in The Dedham Community Theater. "Art too bad to be ignored" is its motto, but this museum does have standard s. Check it out.
• The International UFO Museum and Research Center, in Roswell, New Mexico, is an example of a vernacular museum and usefully explored in relation to the essay of Rugoff that we read for October 28. "Our standards are still here: The Paul Davids' Room that showcases one of the aliens from the 'Roswell' Movie....Does the truth shout? Many visitors enjoy reading all of the 'current events' articles that are literally tacked to the walls of the museum.... D ue to the large amount of donated items, we are forced to create an entire section of 'Donations' related to UFOs and the paranormal. Quite certainly, we have created the most unique collection in the world--everything from dioramas of UFO crashes to oil- paintings of the Roswell Greys....So often, visitors or members to our museum send in reports of sightings, or photos of unexplained phenomena, or transcripts of 'messages' received from extra-terrestrial beings. Instead of piling these 'works' on a table , we have decided to let them have their own exhibit space." Contact: UFO Museum

Special thanks to Brenda Danet, Tsemeret, Lucia Wright, and Jon McKenzie.

BKG/revised 1/31/96 http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/museum.html