This presentation by Susana Bautista, Adjunct Faculty, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California - explores the notion of museums and placemaking, and how digital technologies are enabling museums to mark their places in new and innovative ways. When museums think about technology today, they must also think about place. A few questions to ask are: What are the new places that museums are occupying in the digital age? How do museums act with their visitors in these new places? How do these “new” places connect with the “old” places? What new places are museum visitors occupying, and what are they doing there? How do museums “make” place, and is there a hub? Placemaking has existed from Stonehenge to the Acropolis, and to monumental buildings centrally placed within a community such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty Center; and museums historically have had branches or satellites, programs within the community, and community partners. What is new is how technology allows us to better understand the networked museum experience, to engage its global community of visitors and users, and to connect physical and online places, mobile and fixed experiences.

1. PLACEMAKING IN THE
DIGITAL AGE
Susana Smith Bautista, Ph,D.
University of Southern California
November 22, 2013

2. How digital technology enables museums to mark their places in
new and innovative ways.
Technology frees us from the burden of identifying place as
permanent, fixed, and physical to embrace a new notion of place
as mobile, intangible, experiential, and changing.
Questions
• What are the new places that museums are occupying in
the digital age?
• How do museums act with their visitors in these new
places? How do these “new” places connect with the “old”
places?
• What are the new places that museum audiences are
occupying, and what are they doing there?
• How do museums “make” place, and is there a
homebase?

4. What is Placemaking?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Marking your place
Setting boundaries
Creating destinations
Shaping public space
Creating and bonding community
Community-driven, collaborative, sociable
Context-sensitive and culturally aware
ArtPlace America
Project for Public Spaces

5. Placemaking in the Analog Age

6. Museums and Placemaking
Building museums to
create place
Chicago Art Institute, 1900
Museums creating their
own place
The Getty Center, 1997

7. There are 2 main reasons why Place has
receded for the modern museum
1) due to technology
2) due to the primacy of experience
Both are related, as new digital technologies
allow for new kinds of experiences, a
continuous cycle of dependence.
What is Museum Experience?
Participatory
Interactive
Immersive
User-generated
Collaborative
Games
Individual
Creates memory
Long lasting

8. How is PLACE different in the Digital Age?
“an itinerary…a series
of encounters and
translations”
“a space of flows”
(Manuel Castells, 2000)
(James Clifford, 1997)
“chronotope”
(Mikhail Bakhtin, 1937)
“an event”
(Edward Casey, 1996)
“practiced place”
(De Certeau,
1984)
“the experiential museum”
(Hilda Hein, 2006)
“rhythms”
(Henri Lefebvre, 1974)
“locality”
(Eric Gordon &
Adriana de Souza e
Silva, 2011)

9. TOPOS
place
ATOPIA
out of place, improper
UTOPIA
not a place, nowhere
TELETOPIA
to be telepresent
technological globalization
Teletopia is replacing atopia and utopia
(Virilio, 1997)
The “omnilocality” of place (Casey)

10. The case of the Guggenheim
in search of a place…
Venice
New York City
Las Vegas
Bilbao
Berlin
Abu Dhabi
Helsinki
Guadalajara
Rio de Janeiro
Taichung

11. The Distributed Museum
Musée imaginaire (museum without walls) – André Malraux (1967)
Deterritorialized hyperspace networks – Paul Virilio (1997)
© Balsamo and Bautista 2011

12. The Distributed Museum
Moveable Museum Program, AMNH
“Since visitors do not
make meaning from
museums solely within the
four walls of the institution,
effective digital media
experiences require
situating the experience
within the broader context
of the lives, the
community, and the
society in which visitors
live and interact.”
- Falk & Dierking (2008)
Folk and Craft Art
Museum, Los Angeles

13. Asian Art Museum at SFO Airport
Walters Museum
Off the Wall
Tate Art Maps, 2012-2014

14. Building Community
With practically every museum
today having its own website,
community now takes on a
global perspective through
the ability to reach anyone,
anywhere, and at any time
with an Internet connection.
“New communities are
continually made possible by
the innovations of new
communication technologies,
yet as these new communities
form, fears surface that they wil
undermine existing networks of
connectivity, the family and the
neighborhood”
– Marita Sturken &
Douglas Thomas (2004)

15. Mapping your Global Community
Interactive maps
Data visualization
To understand a museum in the digital age
is to understand how its online & global
community is related to the physical & local
community, and to all the points and flows
of interaction within its distributed network.

16. Social Media
Going to the
places where
your
audience is
Connecting your online
and physical places

17. Virtual Worlds
Place no longer implies physicality
Connecting back to the physical

18. Mobile Technologies
“Now that our devices are location aware, we are much
better positioned to be location aware ourselves”
- Gordon & de Souza e Silva (2011)

19. The re-emergence of Place in the
Digital Age as Experience
“People still want a sense of place, a sense of
belonging, in a physical way”
– Katie Hafner (2004), Technological Visions
The re-materialization of digital techniques
(Bruno Latour, 2011)
“The expansion of digitality has enormously increased the
material dimension of networks: The more digital, the less
virtual and the more material a given activity becomes”

20. …but still grounded in the physical and local
“It may be a revival of localism, or a
reaction against a world becoming too
global and too plugged-in. Face-to-face
and participatory experiences, especially
in unexpected places, can serve as a
counterweight to digital, virtual
experiences.”
- TrendsWatch 2012, AAM
“It is an ancient tradition of moving monoliths to
mark a place. The idea is that LACMA’s campus
really is a center for Los Angeles, a cultural
center, a multicultural center, and this rock will
mark it very physically, in a very timeless and
light manner as you walk under it.”
– Michael Govan (2011)

21. Susana Smith Bautista, Ph.D.
ssbautista@yahoo.com
www.susanasmithbautista.com