Monthly Archives: April 2015

Museums inspiring makers

Science Gallery, Dublin – Ireland on Thursday April 16 2015

Museums are often viewed as dead spaces. Yet museums contain incredible collections and inspire creativity, learning and curiosity. What is in store for the future of museums as they face numerous challenges? Can they work creatively outside the box? Makers are one such community who can inspire and collaborate with museums; both have the potential to co-create and co-curate new programmes for diverse audiences.

 

Museomix in France is the first international cultural makeathon and gathers mediators, tinkerers, designers, developers, artists and scientists to create, invent, prototype and test innovative museum installations with new technologies.

 

The Festival of Curiosity is Dublin’s annual festival of science and culture, and transforms the city into a play space of experiment, exploration, debate and interaction.
Hosted by Don Undeen, Senior Manager MediaLab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Ellen Byrne of Festival of Curiosity, and featuring Ian Brunswick (Science Gallery Dublin), Mark Nagurski (Culture Tech in Northern Ireland), Jasper Visser (Inspired by Coffee in the Netherlands), Deborah Hustic (Radiona Hackerspace in Croatia), Laura Tobin (Dublin Maker) and Juliette Giraud (Museomix in France).

 

Watch the video of the event

 

Organised by The #CreativeMuseum EU Project and the Chester Beatty Library, in association with Science Gallery Dublin.

Activities

To collect & analyse

The Creative Museum project is based on the reflections of several museum professionals who identified creative practices as a tool to develop public engagement in museums. The compared analysis of creative practices in Europe is aimed to provide partner organisations and museum professionals with state-of-the-art creative practices in Europe. A set of recommendation for the implementation of such practices will be produced based on the compared analysis.

To discover & learn

The learning activities in the Creative Museum project consist of peer-to-peer training programmes for museum professionals.
Museum professionals will be invited to put into practice during the Making Museomix training programme the recommandations previously producted.
They will explore ways to bridge the gap between participatory webculture and institutional webculture.The purpose of the programme is to encourage audiences imagine a cultural space that allows them to become engaged users.

To experiment

Beyond simply looking at objects, visitors seek diverse experiences in museums: photography, drawing, writing, learning, meeting, playing etc. Experiences they like to share.
The maker in residence programme will be an opportunity to connect makers and digital talents with host museums to explore ways of cooperation, experiment making and share ideas and outputs.
This programme is inspired by numerous formal and informal creative projects found across the globe as a result of globalization.
It adheres to the development of new tools for creative production and the rise of the culture of Maker, a Do-it-Yourself ethos that believes it is more fun to create than to consume.

To evaluate & share

Maker culture and Do-it-Yourself approaches are based on the idea of sharing with everyone and transferring knowledge to new generations. It aligns with the traditions and mission of museums in many ways, as it is their interest to share information as freely as possible; objects have long served as inspiration for artists working in various media; education department offer art-making programmes for people of all ages. In this environment, digital tools make it possible for more people to participate and get involved.