Center for Museum studies

Museums for the New Millennium:

Proceedings:
New tools to help museums perform their work

MR. ALLISON: I would like to wish you a good afternoon and welcome you to the final session of the conference. I should say congratulations to everyone, because this conference has been somewhat of a marathon and we are approaching the finish line.

What a race it has been. We have grappled with major issues that museums are confronting today, and yet both in the talks and demonstrations, I know I have had an enormous sense of hope and promise for the future. I would like to convey my personal thanks to Rex and all the staff at the Center for Museum Studies that have worked so hard to organize and run this excellent conference.

It really is wonderful to have the opportunity, even though in the museum business, to step back and reflect on these things and see what other people are thinking and doing about it.

The wonderful thing for all you marathoners here is we are joined with two other experienced long distance runners, each with years of wisdom and insight into public display and exhibition. It is worth your persistence to be here and listen to them. Our first speaker, Bran Ferren, is the Executive Vice President for Creative Technology, Research and Development, of Walt Disney Imagineering.

His broad responsibilities include overseeing all R&D activities for the company on both coasts. His enormous expertise is in developing and implementing new forms of visitor experiences in many different settings, including but certainly not limited to the Disney parks.

Without further enumerating that experience, which is summarized in your program, I want to turn the podium over to Bran.

Our topic is The Future of Museums - Asking the Right Questions. Bran believes asking whether or not we should be exploring the use of this or that technology is, in fact, probably the wrong question, and he promised to help us get refocused. I, for one, am interested to know what the right questions are.

[The following is an edited transcript of proceedings from "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.]

MR. FERREN: Technology. This is always very dangerous. At any rate, thank you.

I need to give you a little background about me and some disclaimers. First of all, how many of you believe in fate? I came here, delayed four hours, on an airplane, and the captain s name was Captain Die. We were delayed four hours getting here and the in-flight movie was "Twister." I am not kidding. At any rate, I made it.

I want to warn you, because some of you may have heard me talk before, but, if not, the rest of you should brace yourselves, because this is a very advanced talk. It is nonlinear, it has no particular point or message, it will ramble on at random, and, just before we got on, I got the word that this is a pretty serious group, and boy, that brings out the worst in me.so I just warn you, by the end of this I will probably have offended all of you. If I get out of the building alive, it will probably be a good thing.

When the subject of the future of museums comes up, which it does often and the word "technology" rears its ugly head, interactive usually is near behind. Is "interactive" a word any of you have heard or discussed recently?

I think it is interesting, because when you have the buzz phrase de jour, and "interactive" still is it, there is a lot of pressure to make sure that everything you have is interactive, or else it clearly doesn't belong in an institution and clearly can't get funded. It is interesting to me, because, coming from Disney, and let me as part of the ongoing disclaimer tell you everything I am telling you today does not represent the views of Disney, it represents the views of me. Besides, he is dead.

The challenge in all of this, I am often asked, "Can you demonstrate Disney's latest interactive technology?" and, "What are you working on in your labs?" Our group Imagineering, which designs the theme parks and which does R&D work for the whole company is 2,400 people. It is a fairly big group for a design company. We have one client: Walt Disney Corporation.

But being arguably the largest design company in the world with the smallest client list, we have an interesting set of challenges. By the year 2000, we are going to have about 100 million people a year as our World Wide park attendance, and keeping them interested in coming back again is a challenge. Interactivity is part of that.

I would like today to give you a demonstration of our most sophisticated and advanced interactive technology. It is a technology that combines sensor systems such as vision, speech recognition, some multilingual capability, uses neural nets using a whole bunch of technology, affectors, sensor fusion, coordination, and it is the state of the art, and it is me. And it is important that you realize that I am the state of the art interactive technology, because I am part of your audience, as are you, and understanding that human beings are the state of the art in interactivity, always have been, and that there is no technology which jeopardizes that to this point, and that there are a set of fairly fundamental values which affect people s perceptions of things and how this interactive system finds joy or enlightenment or a number of other attributes of being alive. What I want to do is talk about those today. I will talk about technology, if you would like. One of the advantages of dealing with an interactive system here is you can throw something at me or raise your hand or make a noise, and I will be happy to send this talk in any direction you would like.

The challenge of dealing with new technology! I remember my first interactive experience, I was a consultant for the Canadian Government. I was hired in 1985 to work on a project called Expo '86. It shows you the long-term planning horizon of worlds fairs. I arrived as their interactivity consultant. They said, "We have a first big challenge for you, we're doing a Future Choice Theater."

"A future choice theater," I said, "What is that?"

"It is a place where you go and basically topics of the day will be presented to you. You will be asked to press buttons on the back of your seat at various moments, which will affect the outcome of the film and metaphorically the outcome of our civilization."

I said, "Very nice. What would you like me to do? Help conceptualize this, write the script, adopt the philosophies?"

"No, we have all of that under control. We would like you to figure out how to hook up all the push buttons."

I said "Okay, it is a living." I thought about it carefully and proposed that what they should do is install all the push buttons, don't connect any of them, ask a question every so often, flash numbers on the screen and every so often run a different ending.

They accused me of having a bad attitude. I explained to them actually that was probably the most cost effective way to get what you want done, because no one in the audience would have any idea whether the buttons were connected or not. If they got the answers they wanted, it was because it was the brotherhood of man and we are all enlightened; if it is the wrong answer, it is because the morons that they let into the theater clearly don't get it. And we hope we get on with things.

Nonetheless, that is an example of the broad class of interactivity which I call dumb interactivity. It is something which exists in most institutions that I have seen employing interactive systems technology thus far. The don't-connect-the-boxes issue is pretty fundamental.

Another disclaimer I need to give you is when you look at a person like me, I firmly believe that one word, "story," is everything. I breathe, eat and live about the notion of stories.

One of the things I need to caution you about, especially when you just saw a bunch of technology here and you are talking about these things, beware of solutions in search of problems.

Do you remember high definition television, HDTV? It was going to change our lives. Any of you who watch television and think the problem with television is the number of horizontal scanning lines rather than the lines of dialogue spoken by the actors is watching a different television than I do.

Have you ever watched TV and said that is a great show, but if it had another 427 scanning lines, it really would have changed my life? I don't think so.

The one thing that all of the technology you saw today and have seen to date has in common is it is all junk. It is all bad, it is all awful, it is all embarrassing, and, as we are waiting for this whole computer thing to blow over, I think it is important that you understand that you are dealing with awful, primitive technology.

I think it is also important for you to understand that you don't have a choice. It is as good as it gets at the moment and we need to learn how to use it. But, if for one moment you look at any of this and think it is any good, you are missing the point and by definition you will lock your mindset and point of view in a place that will prevent us from ever getting, at least for a while, to anything that is really better. With that uplifting message in mind, what I would like to do is -- and Alan Kaye teaches a course at UCLA. (Alan Kaye is one of the pioneers in computing technology, he invented the personal computer, the desktop and windows currently associated with modern computers) that the computer revolution hasn't begun yet and I think that is a great title.

You need to understand the stuff you are looking at now has nothing to do with what computers will be in a very few years, a few years, a 5 to 10 year time horizon, and what we have to do is together struggle through, figure out what these things are good for, but keep our eye on the vision of what the future is going to be and will be enabled by this and how it impacts your business, and your business is the museum business.

This asking-the-right-questions thing is pretty important to me. I found in my career as a consultant, I saw an awful lot of really dedicated, smart people blown out in flames because they provided excellent answers to the wrong questions and then acted upon them.

I think part of the challenge is when I get calls, and I have had so far this year three calls from major institutions, maybe represented by some of you in this room, saying "can you help us computerize?" And I say "why are you computerizing?" There isn't a good answer. The sense is there is just some compelling pressure to do this.

And, my God, the World Wide Web! How many of you have E-mail addresses in this room? How many of you are embarrassed that you don't? That should have been the entire audience if you added up those two groups.

How many of you feel pressure about the Web, about doing something about it and being on it, and pressure from your institution or other people, or just from life?

I would like to ask a question about that. How many of you think that the World Wide Web is a brief flash in the pants, sort of like citizens band radio, that will calm down as soon as everybody gets their computer, gets bored by it, and then moves on? How many of you believe that? About 11.2.

Anyway, how many of you believe that it is the most profound and fundamentally important invention in the history of mankind, and will make every other technological invention developed to date seem minor in comparison?

One.

That one person is right, and, in fact what I am going to talk to you a little bit about is why you ought to believe that, because it is true. The World Wide Web, broad band interactive communications, not the embarrassing junk that you are seeing now, but what it is going do evolve to in a very short period of time, I maintain is in fact the most important and profound invention of our history, period. It makes it kind of an exciting time to be alive, after coming out of the eighties, one of the most boring times to be alive, a time when people looked up to Donald Trump as an icon of almost everything. I think we are facing an extraordinary moment.

What I guess I would like to do is tell you a little bit from a background perspective of why I believe that, and I really do believe this about the Web, I don't think it is citizens band radio. And I think one of the things which is pretty important is to start understanding some of the common issues that you have to be prepared to deal with in order to make appropriate decisions for technology for your institution.

These belief systems about the future, how many of you think the future is important? Is it relevant? How many of you in your institutions have a person whose job it is, one or more, to think about the future? That is their job? It doesn't seem like the rest of you think it is all that important. Or do you think you can do it in your spare time? Is that the general sense: if everyone says we will think about the future, we will get there?

Let me tell you about some of this, because one of the challenges in looking into the future is to have some set of metrics to be able to gauge how important an invention is. I find history a pretty useful tool in this regard.

If you look into the past at what was relevant and profound and what did change the world, it can give you some idea of what might do that in the future. People are pretty consistent.

I think part of the challenge in all of this is what will succeed in this world, and whether that is financially or as an institution, are the things that basically add value to people s lives. What you are doing in the museum business is competing with the entertainment business, with every other business that competes for the two things that people find most valuable in their lives. And to be overly crude and western about this, I would say those two things tend to be, for most people, money, when you are a kid, meaning will you fork over money for something. That is a good way to determine if it is valuable to you. And when you are a kid, money seems like the big kahuna. And time. Can you compete for the pretty limited resource you have of time.

While when you are a kid money is pretty important, about 10 minutes before you drop dead, time takes on a whole new meaning. And there is this continuum of perspective about these relevant values. If you can't effectively compete for people s time and money, you, odds are, in the long-term, will cease to exist.

This notion of the Web, let s go back to inventions that permanently changed the course of society. What would you say is the first invention, or technology, I use the terms interchangeably, the first technology that fundamentally had an irreversible and radical change on the course of human events?

VOICE: Writing?

VOICE: Language?

MR. FERREN: I would agree with language.

VOICE: Gunpowder?

MR. FERREN: You have to go much earlier than gunpowder. Before language, we were a bunch of people sort of rattling around, reproducing at random. Grunts and groans are pretty effective to communicate a certain range of the human experience, but after a while you need a more complex series of tools. Language did that.

While people will evolve their own method of interoperating and communicating, if you have two kids that grow up together, they will develop a common language, usually one which is quite complex and sophisticated, but they cannot interoperate with two other people that grew up independently. Language was critical. What was the next one?

VOICE: The wheel?

MR. FERREN: You don't think anything before the wheel?

VOICE: Fire?

MR. FERREN: Fire was not an invention, it was a discovery, and there is a difference, you know.

I would argue that the next one was probably story telling. The fact is language as an abstract notion is not a terribly effective way of communicating rich ideas. In fact, the human brain does not tend to remember things well unless they are in a story telling form. It doesn't matter if we call it myth or fable or the Bible or any number of other things. The story telling form is a way of organizing facts in a way that human beings can remember them and deal with them and communicate them to others to give it permanence.

One can argue language may actually come after story telling as a fundamental skill, but the two of them are probably pretty close.

What is next? A big change, just changed everything.

VOICE: Writing?

MR. FERREN: I would agree with writing, because it got a little old that every time someone dropped dead, the recipe for fire disappeared, and you have to wait another 300 years for someone to notice a bush burning.

I think that pictures and pictograms is a form of writing, meaning the fact we are dealing with conventional alphabets, or not, is secondary. In fact, many of the written languages are pictographic in form. It is an idea of making permanent an idea in a way that is readable, decipherable, decodable by other people. What after writing?

VOICE: Printing?

MR. FERREN: Would we agree with printing? Printing was pretty big. Printing was the sort of thing that, again, the idea, rather than just writing it in one spot where someone could see it or give it to someone, it was an idea of broadcasting ideas.

Incidentally, since story telling was developed, it was an ideal way of telling stories to a broader number of people, communicating ideas. Who invented printing? Gutenberg didn't invent printing. The Chinese. The idea of movable type, yes. If you look at a lot of our textbooks, you find Gutenberg credited with it. He probably developed interchangeable parts, but this idea of printing and the printing press was clearly Chinese. Unfortunately, if historically you are not white and male and European, it is hard to be remembered for inventing anything.

VOICE: How about the plow and other agricultural implements?

MR. FERREN: I don't have time to go through every invention in the history of mankind, so, yes, there were a lot of things that were important. But the fact is that the plow and all of that was only necessary when enough civilization came together at a time so that things growing at random in the ecosystem was not adequate, meaning the idea of being able to farm areas which could not otherwise be farmed only happened after people moved into the areas, because before that they did not live there because they died because they didn't have food.

We can talk about this later, but you find in the migration of things, that something like the plow and the wheel and all that, those were nice, but they didn't have the sort of profound impacts that some of these other things did.

When you go back and look at, for example, Gutenberg s impact, what was Gutenberg doing? Gutenberg was looking for the killer application. Gutenberg was trying to clean up. He was in the publishing business and figured it out: Everybody has got to have a Bible! Interchangeable type! We are going to change the world!

It turns out he did change the world. He died penniless. He had terrible union problems, the monks were all up in arms, it was the work of the devil, and the quality is not as good and it will never catch on, and so on and so forth. It did change the world, in fact, and Gutenberg was pretty clueless about what the impact of that technology was.

If you move forward in time, look at other big, profound things that, again, just changed the whole way societies and cultures moved. Evolution, the evolution of societies or of species is not linear. It happens in steps. There are big step functions along the way.

You will find every time technologies, for instance the telephone and telegraph, were invented, that the inventors, and who invented the telephone?

VOICE: Bell?

VOICE: Elijah Gray?

MR. FERREN: While Bell got the patent for it, clearly Gray s work predated it. Patent filings, you know, he [Gray] missed the boat. But for different forms. And the fact is all of these inventions of the telephone didn't seem terribly important to people initially. Why didn't it seem important? Interestingly enough, Bell, if we want to talk about him, was being funded by an institute that was tasked to help the hard of hearing, and in fact he invented the single most alienating invention to people hard of hearing to date, meaning the telephone basically created a new way for society to work, but excluded people who could not hear well.

The challenge of growing out the telephone, being the first on your block with a telephone was not a terribly valuable thing. It is like having one tube of epoxy, it has novelty value, but is not useful. Ultimately you had to train people how to use it. It was a very complicated invention for people to use. The typical scenario: it would ring in people s houses, they would pick it up, hear nothing, and hang up, because the protocol of "hello" had not been developed and taught to the public. There is notthing intrinsically obvious about picking up the telephone and saying "hello" in it. Most of the early transactions stopped abd there was a major education program to teach people to say "hello."

If you look at other like inventions, and the one path I am taking through these inventions are inventions that helped story telling, enabled people to tell stories more effectively and dramatically to other people. It doesn't matter if it is the radio, television, if it is motion pictures. I can go on, newspapers and such. Any time a technology was invented that enabled a person to communicate with another or tell stories to a large number of people, any time a significant improvement in technology took place, it completely changed the evolution of our society. You can argue for the better or not, but the fact is it had that sort of impact.

If you believe that, and I believe that, this notion of starting with narrow band, like the World Wide Web is now, migrating into wide band, networks that cover the globe, interconnect peoples together, enable them to tell stories with each other, especially after the technologies enable simultaneous transliteration and other forms which have been elusive in other communications media to date, when this happens it will be the most powerful story telling technology ever developed.

By definition, it is why I believe that it is going to have a staggering effect on the future. It is the most profoundly important story telling technology that has ever been proposed.

So, if you believe this, and if you also look back in history and realize that virtually every single one of the people involved in the invention and development of these technologies was fundamentally clueless as to what the real impact was, I feel pretty good, because I am clueless about where this is all going anyway.

Evangelizing about this is like talking about to the Wright Brothers about the advantage of the mileage program and why it would be a sensible strategy for their business planning and such. Are these technologies going to change society in simple ways? Will it replace books? Do we think the World Wide Web will replace books? How many yes? A few yesses. All the yesses sit together, why is that?

I don't think it is going to replace books. I think books are joyful objects. They are a very mature technology. They are high resolution, random access, portable, you can cut and paste, you may get yelled at, but you can do it. It is a pretty compelling technology.

Periodicals, on the other hand, will probably be outlawed in this country within 20 years. Basically the ecosystem, the environment can't stand the impact of cutting down 75,000 trees to do the sunday paper, which is what currently happens now. I would argue that the majority of distribution of media and messages and stories intended to be read once and then disposed of will migrate to electronic form. What it will need is electronic paper. It will need something that looks like this, has the same contrast, is tactically pleasant, and yet is a networked device and lets you function in that way. That is 10 years away. That technology is necessary. Display technology is awful at the moment, as with most other computer technologies, but it will get better.

Ultimately you are probably going to find implants being a pretty effective way of communicating ideas to people. How many of you believe that? Eleven implant people.

I think implants are something that I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about, but I would ask you to consider the rate at which people accommodate to new technologies that seem horrific initially is pretty rapid.

If 30 or 35 years ago you went into your doctor s office and the doctor said, "I have some good news and bad news."

"What is the bad news?"

"You are going to die."

"How am I going to die?"

"You have cardial arrythmia. Your heart beeps irratically at random and if I am not there near you, you will be dead in five minutes because it doesnt pump blood effectively."

At which point you say, "So, what is the good news?"

"We have a new technology that will help keep you alive."

"What is that?"

"We are going to saw your chest open. We are going to put in a computer." Now, keep in mind, 30 years ago this meant "mainframe."

"We are going to put in a stethoscope and listen to your heart. We are going to put in a cattle prod, so if it stops, we will give it a little zotz and get it going again. We have to power this, and because it is hard to pass connectors through the skin, we will probably put a little nuclear power plant in, a little plutonium, but you should live a long healthy life."

You would get some strange looks to what is now a routine check mark, implanting a pacemaker. It's something you don't think twice about as a procedure.

Somebody is not going to come to you and say,"By the way, do you want the World Wide Web implant?" What they are going to do is, statistically, about seven of you in this room will suffer a near fatal accident in your life, will be in a car crash.

You will be blind, for example, and the doctor is going to say, "Well, I have some good news and some bad news."

You say, "I understand the bad news. What is the good news?"

He says, "We have a new technology we are working on, it fits in your glasses, a little thing which goes inside your cerebral cortex with a power plant or such. It is basically like bad television. It will not be great, but you will be able to see. Do you want it?"

How many of you would say yes to that? That would be a pretty high percentage.

Three or four years later you are in for about your fifth upgrade, and now it is the HDTV version of it, and as it is going in, he asks a question, filling out the form. He says, "By the way, would you like the fax option?" Basically, once you have the display system in place and the processing power of all of that, doing something like porting it to other data systems is trivial.

The way these things happen is like that. You get used to it for other reasons. We go through extraordinary changes. The idea that people could do birth control by subcutaneous implants, there is a whole range of things if you asked someone 25 or 50 years ago, they would have considered inconceivable.

People get used to these things very quickly. While I will not say it is inevitable, I think you are going to find that a whole lot of technologies you are not considering now, such as implants, speech, non-traditional ways that employ the broad spectrum of human senses, are how you are going to be interacting with these systems.

I think I should talk about museums for a bit. I was thinking about this, thinking what do museums do? What do museums do? And I may have kind of a different view of this. This is looking from outside your community.

Let me tell you what I think great museums do. I think the first thing they do is manage their brand. If it is Smithsonian, if it is the Exploratorium, you name it, they manage the brand that the public, the audience, associates with that institution, one of quality, one of depth, one of a great collection, but they manage that brand effectively.

I got the best lesson of my life in brand management two years ago in Death Valley. I was there about in August or so, it was 130 degrees, and I now know why they call it Death Valley, and I was searching for the two essential fluids necessary for life in the desert, water and gasoline. In this day and age you need both.

It turns out they sell them in the same places. I went to a little gas station in Stove Pipe Wells, fueled up, bought water. I bought a brand that will remain nameless, Evian, and I paid five times as much per fluid measure for the water than I did for gasoline, which I thought was interesting.

Why is that? It is because people, you people and me, have been convinced that the branding of bottled water adds sufficient value to your life that you will pay five times as much for it as you will for gasoline and not even complain. The price of gasoline goes up 10 cents a gallon, you are all in a panic and it is on the evening news. The price of water goes up 50 cents a gallon, nobody notices. I guess it is because you don't really need water.

Part of the challenge with all of this is again understanding what other things? I made some notes here.

Establishing context. What a great institution does is create context with the person coming there. They come there because of the brand. The context lets them know what they are going to experience.

I mean context in two different senses of the word. Experiential visual context, the sort of context that if you drove here today along the road, you probably passed a million trees, and your memory of those trees was "I passed a bunch of trees." If one of those trees were upside down, a pine tree standing on its point with the roots in the air, odds are you would remember that for the rest of your life. All that happened, technically, was a 180 degree geometric rotation of one out of a million objects, but because the context was shifted, all of a sudden it becomes fundamentally significant and relevant to you.

If I show you a piece of wood, a rotting piece of wood, and I say "This is an old rotting piece of wood," you will say "Yes, please get it off my desk." If I tell you with some degree of authority that it is a piece of the original cross, it takes on a different meaning.

The ability to effectively establish and understand context, both sensory context as well as historical contexts, is what any great institution does well.

Displaying artifacts and all of that is fine. You do that, you maintain a collection, it has to be great stuff. That is a given. Extending relationships is a critical part of what you do. You basically, whether it is a museum shop selling something to remember, a program they take home, a presence on the Web, an ad, or something else, the idea is you want to bring them back, and in order to bring them back you have to create and establish a relationship with them. That is pretty fundamental. And if you can't find an effective way of doing that, in the long run you will fail, because people forget about you. They went there and said, "Gee, it was great." "Do you want to go back?" "No."

Why do people go back? It is because through the primary process, which you would say is probably about the collection, the quality of the collection and presentation, and I would say has nothing to do with that. I would say it is about content.

What great institutions do is create content.some of it may be artifactual, some of it may be contextual, but people go there because they are taking something valuable away with them.

That experience, the message, a bunch of other things, this is changing. We are going to have to start dealing with the notion of what digital artifacts are like. The time is here and now that works of art or works of theater or works of any other form are being created entirely in the digital domain.

The last nine animated films that Walt Disney made are 100 percent digital films. Every frame is a digital frame. That film has never existed in a way that other films existed, by part of the conventional photographic process and such.

At some point as museums we are going to have to learn what digital artifacts are, how do we display them, and as a society we have to exchange value to them.

Walt Disney would argue that the bits that make up "Aladdin," or "Lion King" are pretty valuable bits. Nicholas Negroponte talks about this in his book. But this notion of the migration into a digital world, where works of art and objects, artifacts do not exist in reality, are going to have to be accommodated or else someone else is going to find a way to accommodate them. I think that is an interesting challenge.

survival is obviously an important part. What any institution does is continue perpetually if it does its job well. It reinvents itself periodically.

I think the saying "if it isn't broken, break it," probably applies to this more than almost any other area. How did really smart companies like General Motors or IBM or Digital Equipment Corp.or Apple Computer get themselves in such trouble? It wasn't because they weren't paying attention. It was because they had a different mind set. They had a different perception of what their job was and what their role was. This is a huge danger to institutions.

If you start talking about technology and what technology you can use in your institution, I think the first thing you have to do is understand what do you do? And you have to build a list like this. I am not saying to use my list.

Again, I think another great thing about institutions, museums, is it provides an opportunity for pilgrimage. It provides an opportunity for a communal experience. You leave your home, you go somewhere. Once you are there, you experience new things with other people.

But. the definition of community is changing. The Internet is changing how a community can exist. The idea of distributed and remote communities is something which never existed before in the same way and is now starting to happen. Understanding MUDDS and chat rooms and all of these things, which are very primitive now because the band width is so low, when it goes up - and it will approach infinity pretty quickly, anything based upon the human experience will be shareable in these new communities. How does that affect the sense of community and the role of the institution?

I am going to spend a couple minutes and talk about some real stuff. When I say real stuff, what are the kind of early winds in technologies that could be relevant? Do you want to hear about any of this? I could talk about this other stuff forever. I like it more.

Let me tell you what I think some of the big winds are. From the pedestrian stuff, from an operational point of view, there is a huge wind. I wish you would all go as paying guests and visit your institution some day and see the experience that many of you put people through, waiting on lines in the heat. You are in a museum, which is three-quarters empty, and you wait outside on line for 45 minutes to get in. I had that happen to me only about three times in the past two months going to institutions. This is embarrassing.

Let me go to Disney for a moment. We call the patrons of Walt Disney company guests, and we call the people who work there cast members. There is a reason for this. It establishes a mind set of the relationship between people, between the employees of our company and the guests that come to visit.

You would never have your guests stand outside in the heat for 45 minutes before coming into your home, yet you do it at your institutions. It is inexcusable. That is not the way you treat people. It is a horrible thing. It gets them mad and angry and pissed off, and they are not going to have a good experience unless you get them back to zero again. You have plummeted them into negative from the moment they step through the door.

There have to be better ways of taking money from people, of selling them tickets. There have to be better ways of preparing them for the experience. World Wide Web and other technologies like this are good ways to think of doing that,so people can preregister, get together. But, again, think of them as guests.

Why do we call employees cast members? Because cast members understand they have a higher obligation, and the obligation is relative to story, and relative to understanding the role they are playing in that experience.

Five more minutes. I need this. It is critical, because I will just go on.

Anyway, I think that is going to be critical. I think the ability to basically do data base management, so that all of a sudden you understand the history of people visiting you, rather than just who they might be; so that you know what they saw last time they were there, you know what they have seen at other institutions. You can customize and personalize the experience for them. You know who they are within the space. There are technologies now that will add a few pennies to the cost of producing a ticket, that can let you know where everybody in a building is at a time, what their history has been there, what they have done before, and such. These things are possible.

Customized catalogues. The catalogues are electronic things you carry around with you or things printed on demand for you. This is trivial at this point. If not trivial, the software tools are available to do it, but it is trivial from the conceptual point of view and you can make it happen.

How many of you deal with software? Anyone in this room who doesn't have a chill run up and down your spine when the word "software" is mentioned isn't paying attention.software is a disaster. You have to admit to yourself you don't understand what it is and how it works, and that it is going to be fundamental to your success.

If you believe the role of computers is going to be there, that becomes part of your business. Just like when you are building your collection, you probably wouldn't farm out the acquisitions job, you are not going to be able to farm out other things like software. Hardware, that is the cheapest part of computers. It changes all the time.software and understanding how it works and understanding the impact of these technologies is something that must be brought into the institutions. And, by and large, I don't see it happening except from a maintenance or IS perspective. From a creative and artistic perspective, it is critical.

Your biggest and most extraordinary set of opportunities I think exists in creating experiences that are hybrid experience between cyber space and the physical world of the museum, where an experience can start in a person's home or office, continue into their pocket computing environment, continue into the museum and the institution, where you know who they are all the way along, and then continue back to their home; continues in a cycle.

The ability to extend the experience to every place that a person is at, to capture more of their time and add value, the ability to contextualize dynamically, to take artifacts and be able to assign greater meaning to them, but meaning that is individualized for the individual guest. An extraordinary opportunity. It can make transformational experiences out of things that if you do it in a traditional presentation form, no one will look twice.

Telepresences, big on that. This idea again of producing documents customized for the person on the way, the next generation multimedia, which means it is transparent. If you are doing multimedia and you see computer terminals, you are missing the boat. If you have a multimedia installation and this installation doesn't know that you are there, meaning you, the person, who has come up, interacted with it, you walk away, it keeps on going, would you do that if you were a human being, talking to someone? I was saying hello to you, and you got up and left, would I just continue with the pitch? How many of you have museums that do that? That have things you start and they keep going on. Learn from the most advanced interactive technique we have: us.

I want to conclude with one thing, because I can go on about this, or two things. One, what is the most valuable thing you think you have as a museum or an institution?

VOICE: People.

MR. FERREN: I think that is the right answer. I too often hear "collections." I too often hear so many other things. People and talent, and I think "talent" is a better word, are ultimately what are going to determine your long-term success and your ability to impactsociety and change people s lives.

An investment in that, understanding that as you move into two technologies that you can't afford anything but the very best talent there is, and there isn't much of it out there and you have to work hard at finding it and seducing them in, that is essential.

For the Walt Disney Company, it is the thing that limits our growth, the ability to bring talented people into the company, people that have the ability to tell stories in a compelling way to people and effect their lives. That is more important than anything you else you can put together, except an idea. I see a lot of people design exhibitions for museum centers. It doesn't matter how much money you have or how hard you work, if you don't start with a good idea, you are in trouble.

What keeps me going with these things, it is one word, and it is a word which I think means more to me than almost anything else, and that is education. I don't think you can take one key problem in our society at the moment that doesn't in some way have its roots in education.

The fact is if you go to an inner-cityschool, and I have been to about a dozen of them over the past two years, the most sophisticated technology I have seen in inner city schools is the metal detector that frisks kids for weapons when they go into the building. That is fundamentally unacceptable.

As we redefine community, the idea of not just location-based entertainment, but location-based education where, through institutions such as yours, which are really one of the jewels of our culture, museums, institutions that house them, we have a set of tools that can take the power of story telling to open people s minds and touch their hearts, and we can combine that with some of the new technologies that are emerging. But, more to the point, the people that understand them, I think we have an extraordinary set of tools. We are not going to replace museums, nor replace teachers. Anyone who thinks a computer is about replacing teachers doesn't know what a teacher does. What this technology can provide is power steering for individuals. It can take the teacher and extend their capability to a larger number of people.

These sorts of tools I think will have a profoundly important role in the future, but in order to make it work, we have to ask the right questions, we have to pay attention, we have to realize that why we all do this is about changing the world. It is touching people s hearts, opening their minds, and making this a better place in which to live.

Thanks for listening.

MR. ALLISON: I thought we might take a couple of questions now before we have our second speaker.

VOICE: Do you have anything to say about the future of the concept of the self-contained museum, the possibility of a future distributed museum versus a collection of very self-contained institutions with hard-edged boundaries?

MR. FERREN: I think it is a new thing and it will have a very important role. It will provide access to an abstract of a collection or ideas that institutions don't effectively do now. But I think, like most new technologies, theater, when it went indoors and proscenia were inventede, didn't rule out the possibilities or the viability of street theater or open air theater. Motion pictures were predicted to make theater obsolete. They didn't. Television was predicted to make motion pictures obsolete. It didn't.

In fact, if you have a compelling story telling medium, I would maintain that is what a museum is, new media will be invented. Now, whether you have control over it or not is the question. The question is, will the keeper of the new museums be the existing museums, or will they be new people that rise to the occasion and understand better these new communications?

But I think that what is extraordinary about it is, what rate is your audience growing every year, your potential audience? Do you know? It strikes me as something that might be relevant to you. I can tell you the World Wide Web is doubling in size at the moment every nine months, or thereabouts, and some predictions are by the year 2000 there will be one billion people on line.

As new technologies hit, such as low cost Internet appliances, and you will see within the year $200 to $300 ways of getting on the World Wide Web, as satellite systems get in place, you will be able to have computers the size of this that cost a few hundred dollars. Initially the few hundred dollar ones will be bigger. They will be solar powered and don't require any physical connection to anything because they will talk to the Web or the networks via satellite. These will cost $300 to $500. It will open up another half billion people World Wide to this community, this interconnected community.

There are extraordinary opportunities. I think understanding the positioning of these virtual experiences, cyber experiences, they are not going to be a replacement. At the same time, you have a vastly greater potential audience for that outreach, just because of the rate of people which are coming into that community, and they are, incidentally, desperate for real content because most of the stuff on the Web at the moment is complete junk. Most of the stuff on any new publishing medium is junk. This publishing medium is being driven by the same primary thing that drove other ones, which is pornography. The fact is that porn is the significant traffic, along with E-mail which is people talking to each other. That is how paperback books got there, it is how videotape got there. It is apparently something that is a pretty fundamental need of human beings, at least some percentage.

I think we have all of the indications that, as a new way of outreach, the power of this will be extraordinary. But in order to learn about it, you have to get out there and work with it, to experiment, and basically understand that you don't know how to make it work, and that by the time someone tells you how, it is too late. You have to get out there into the sea foam and sort of roll around in the surf trying to figure this out with the rest of us.

VOICE: May I ask you a question? Are we under a misconception that when we go to Disney, a lot of people feel that what they are getting is a kind of excitement, adventure, some kind of just low wave experience, namely some kind of an effect that they are not likely to get at museums. You have I think in California the Indiana Jones exhibition. I understand people line up for two hours.

MR. FERREN: No, six.

VISITOR: Six hours and the effect lasts for about 50 seconds?

MR. FERREN: It is about four minutes.

VISITOR: How do you square this with education? Are we misinformed about what people are going to Disney for and are taking away from Disney? Is it the affect, or is there something else?

MR. FERREN: I think there is a lot more than affect, and, incidentally, a lot of museums I go to depend upon affect as a significant part of their experience, and I don't think that is necessarily bad. When I am talking to you about education and my commitment to it, that is my personal commitment to it, I work at an entertainment company. A lot of people in the company are also committed to education as well, and we are gearing up efforts to do that.

At the same time, we are a story telling company, and what is interesting to me about being at a story telling company is finding as many different forms and frame as many types of messages as possible. What I find exciting about using what has been learned in entertainment to teach is very simple, and that is we have channels open to a large number of people that have closed down all of their other communications channels.so the opportunity to take someone, and incidentally, entertain them, and by the way, when they are not paying attention, teach them something, is probably one of the most dramatic and effective ways of learning that I know about.

What I remember from school, the lectures that really captured my imagination, it is because I was caught up in the experience of hearing a great story teller relate an idea to me. In effect, in physics, when I listened to a lecture by Richard Feynman, I always ended up thinking that Richard Feynman made everything seem very simple. In fact, it was extraordinarily simple, until you tried to explain it to someone else, and then realized that you actually had no clue and the guy was probably pretty smart.

But I think that the challenge is blurring the lines, because I think the era of compartmentalization between where education starts and stops, education is largely failing in this country to a very broad mission, and I think that by combining the power of these two forums, of the story telling entertainment forum and traditional education, there are new opportunities that present themselves.

Will it become one? No. Will one replace the other? No. But I think there is a power combining the two together that I am personally interested in exploring, and our company is as well.

MR. ALLISON: Let's stop there and get the second speaker. Thank you very much.

Our second speaker today is Betsy Broun, the Director of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. I have had a lot of pleasure watching the excellence of her leadership at that museum. She joined the museum in 1983 as chief curator and assumed the directorship in 1989. Her research interests include nineteenth century art, contemporary art, and the graphic arts.

I must say what amazed me as somebody watching her work there and lead the institution is the bold way she has taken what could have been a very traditional institution and moved it into the new electronic media and shown many of us how to communicate electronically and still hold a very high quality of sharing of information and sharing of experience. So itseems to me she clearly knows a lot about the right questions to ask of her staff and institution, and, this afternoon, Betsy will be addressing Museums for the Year 2000.

Betsy.

Museums 2000

[The following is an edited transcript of proceedings from "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.]

DR. BROUN: Thanks, David. Thanks for your kind words about our program. Any success we have had only proves Bran's point about buying in the best talent you can find. We have been very fortunate to have terrific people on staff who understand the media in very insightful ways. I have learned a lot from them, for someone whose head used to be back in the 19th century.

I have the misfortune to follow Walt Disney Imagineering on the program today. Now that you've heard Bran Ferren's vision of the future, I am going to give you the reality of the present, from what I will call Smithsonian Implementeering---an entirely different kind of reality.

One anxiety we confront when we look at the future of museums and how we are going to use the new technology is the increasing questioning of the relevance of museums. What will be our role in the future; what will these objects that we house and treasure mean in a world full of exciting new media? Well, I think we can all relax, because museums have an incredible stable core, a stability built in to the physical nature of our collections. Here in the Nation's attic, we know that no one will ever figure out where to put all this weird stuff if we go out of business! So on that most fundamental level---the object as an anchor or weight---we have a leg up on survivability.

(I notice that Wilcomb Washburn is in the audience. He turned the museum field upside down a few years ago by proposing that museums should make all their objects into holograms and then dispose of the objects, thereby dispensing with the need for collections storage and management. That didn't happen, so here we are, still with millions of objects.)

But there are deeper reasons too why I think museums will continue to have a special place in society, rooted in what gets collected in our museums and why. We have a lot of objects that somebody somewhere decided were rare or priceless or had some special association to make them meaningful. Viewed from this fundamental perspective, we know that certain objects at the Smithsonian---the Hope Diamond or Lincoln's hat---are cherished because they are very rare, have high monetary equivalents, or are associated with famous people or events. They have a story to tell, but it is not a particularly complex narrative, taken at face value.

The most rudimentary approach to those objects is to simply put them on view so people can stand in front of them and say, "Oh, look, it is the Hope Diamond." I know you could weave a more complex narrative around such an object, but the encounter starts with a basic act of recognition---that this object is special in some obvious way like fame or monetary value.

But beyond this traditional "warehouse of treasures" role, museums also have an incredible ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Museums are good at learning to colonize any new medium that threatens to overwhelm them. They develop a symbiotic relationship with society, just as certain small animals adapt to living in a changed environment, or even on a larger host animal. Movies and TV didn't displace the role of museums in society, and it's unlikely that the new media arriving today will render them obsolete either.

Consider for instance the Smithsonian's 150th anniversary exhibition circulating around the country now. What is the single most open popular object in the entire show? Maybe Judy Garland's red slippers from the Wizard of Oz. One of the most popular objects in the American History Museum is Archer Bunker's chair, followed by Fonzie's leather jacket. So some objects actually take their meaning from the movies or on TV. This ability to adapt and reflect any current reality is the dynamic part of our institutions.

What excites me most about the future, however, lies beyond this basic act of recognition. We now have the ability and technology to unpack the various layered meanings of cultural objects, to surface multiple and even conflicting meanings. We're learning now to tell their complex narratives in a manner that engages our various publics.

While listening to Bran Ferren talk about story telling, I was admiring the simplicity of that term, the way it focuses everything so clearly---just as he admired Richard Feynman s clarity of purpose. Storytelling is a very transparent and reassuring way of talking about objects.

But when you work in a museum, you know the challenge is to find the right story to tell, one that illuminates without oversimplifying. In the art museum we are always distressed when people look at a painting and say, "Tell me what it means." We get uncomfortable and say "It means so many different things that you could write a book about this painting. It depends on which of several levels you want to start." Then the visitor says,"I know all that. But tell me what it REALLY means."

If we could sift out one idea and find that simple story line, our jobs would be easy. But as anyone knows from looking at the Apollo space capsule, or the Burgess shale fossils, or Thomas Moran's western landscapes, or the Enola Gay, these objects embody very complex stories that interweave in circuitous ways. They don't always move in parallel, and sometimes the several stories even seem in conflict.

So if Disney is a story-telling company, so is the Smithsonian, but the stories that we tell are complex in the way that people and events are complex. It is our challenge---and one way we are different from entertainment industries---that we want to surface that complexity even while developing a narrative.

I was interested to read in a Washington Post editorial in August an article about the Banneker artifacts, associated with Benjamin Banneker, a free black man in colonial America, a self educated scientist, famous around here as the man who surveyed the boundaries of the District of Columbia. He had lots of interesting pursuits and corresponded with Jefferson. In general his life and the objects associated with it had meaning in his own day, but they have new and revived meanings for us today in the context of our society. Many people want the objects that remain from his life to go to a museum where they can again bear witness to their stories. The owners want to auction them for the obvious reason, money.

The Post wrote about why they belong in a museum, saying "History and the emotion that gives it life, the sense of actual contact with lives and sensibilities long past, are dependent at least partly on the presence of real objects that those long gone people are known have to have touched and used. We feel very strongly that these are treasures that belong to the world."

It is that sense of personal contact, that sense that these objects connect to the lives and experiences of others, given concrete form, that we in museums must learn to develop more specifically.

How do ideas speak to us through objects? The first challenge is to get specific in understanding how objects embody complex narratives about history and our world. We need to understand better the powerful effect of standing before these objects---what Walter Benjamin called the "aura" of the object--- before we can begin to differentiate that experience from what is possible in a virtual world.

Another Post article this morning by Benjamin Forgey discussed plans for the new World War II memorial to be built on the Washington Mall. He discussed the distinction between a memorial and a museum; Washington, D.C. is full of both. A memorial, he said, is an icon or a symbol---a physical structure that stands for something. The Washington Monument, a very simple structure, is not a museum that tells you the full story of the life and times of George Washington. It is an abstract sculptural object that gives us a patriotic feeling, a memorial.

This is different from another structure that was being built about the same time as the Washington Monument, which is the Smithsonian Institution Castle. A museum rather than a memorial, the Smithsonian Institution evolved through an attempt to weave complex stories that define arenas of human endeavor, to use art and science and history to trace the outlines of all human endeavor through narratives woven around specimens, artifacts, and artworks.

Then there are hybrids, like the Vietnam Memorial. It functions more or less like a memorial, without telling a narrative in linear fashion, yet it does in a sense imply a tragic story through the names on the wall. And through the experience of people leaving mementos while visiting the Vietnam Memorial, it has spawned its own universe of artifacts, now housed in a museum.

But as we play with these ideas about how an object functions as a memorial or in a museum, and what kind of narrative is involved, we begin to learn how to develop a more nuanced understanding of our collections.

The objects are a bridge to meaning, but this meaning is different in subtle ways from just being "educational." The old "educational" function of museums suggested that we could call on the authority of a curator to lecture us about the REAL meaning of the work. This easy transfer of authority to the curator disappeared along with modernism.

Modernism stood for the idea that the object "speaks for itself." (Or through the curator as surrogate for the artist). It implied that the object functions like a memorial, not wanting to be translated into a narrative about its relationship to subject matter, society, or issues. The universe of modernism, rooted in the 19th century and dominant in the 1950s-70s, is no longer very useful for us. Instead, today there is a desire to have the object be a bridge to a meaning that is inherently personal. In the virtual world this is called a user-defined or user-driven experience. "Users" are the people who are our guests or visitors, and the objects are conceived as narratives or stories related to these people in concrete, physical form.

This summer there was lots of discussion on television and in the newspapers about the personalizing of public policy issues through guest "citizen" speakers at the Republican and Democratic conventions. At the Atlanta Olympics, too, there was little about statistics and sports techniques, but a lot about the personal struggles of the athletes. some commentators disparaged this personalizing, relating it to soap operas. I would equate it instead to the experience that scholars have when working in an archive, when you actually hold in your hand a piece of paper from another age that contains some precious piece of wisdom. Or now, in the digital age, when you access the Library of Congress' "American Memory" web site and see Walt Whitman's handwriting and see just what he crossed out, what words he substituted, in his poems. Ken Burns' TV series on the Civil War told a highly complex story through diaries and letters, not as "straight" history. By exploring and developing such personal connections to other people and other times, we can translate objects into useful meanings for our audiences.

There are challenges for museums in figuring out how to use technology to do this. (It has always been possible in a limited way through print technologies, but prohibitively expensive on a large scale.) The first challenge is to get past what I think of as the false promise of content richness. I don't mean that lots of data is not valuable. A rich content source, great databases of information and digital images can be extremely useful. But by itself data is not sufficient and indeed is easily overwhelming. Already you can go to any library or pick up an encyclopedia or browse the web and find dense information, but it's not really useful if you don't have the tools to search through it effectively.

Here at the Smithsonian I've been told that our big task is to get money to digitize all the objects and records in the several museums, so we can load them on the net---then we really will have outreach! But just preparing that content in a way that is genuinely accessible raises larger issues.

Without a pretty sophisticated search engine and without tags and protocols that allow you to scan databanks to find what really interests you, "big" content is basically inert. It's pretty hard to link objects to users through meaningful personal relationships with the primitive tools generally available with online databases today.

We have to invest in the long term, which means coding data, devising standards and protocols, figuring out how the content is best searched and how it will have meaning. Devising the proper tags means understanding better how the users feel connected to it. So we've doubled back to the first challenge---to grasp on a much deeper level the ways our treasured objects contain meaning and embody complex narratives.

The next big issue is how are we going to buy in the talent we need? How are curators and educators going to transform scholarly expertise into a point of view useful to multiple audiences? Even searchable data lacks that most precious value added ---an informed point of view to illuminate how it works.

In the 1960s and 70s there was great pride among museum professionals that they had professionalized their work so well, with higher standards for advanced academic degrees and better published scholarship. Yet George Bernard shaw said it best when he said all professions are conspiracies against the laity. We need to get in close touch with the laity if we are going to know how to offer a point of view that is useful.

The last challenge is to come to grips with understanding the technology on its own terms. This gets said all the time. It is really a cliche. But to me it mostly means giving up a lot of preconceptions that bind us to past ways. It s hard to find what the technology means in its own right, because we feel so apprehensive about the shifts in the paradigms that it implies.

One big mental shift involves ownership of intellectual property. All of the lawyers and patent and copyright folks are wrestling with this, drafting guidelines, and holding conferences. It is clear that not everybody in the digital universe has the same interest. Whether you are an artist, a telecommunications company, a content provider like a museum or library, you will have very different interests at stake in this discussion.

But regardless of where your interest lies, and whether you are on the winning or losing side of the discussion, or even what is ethically right or desirable, it s hard to see how we are going to protect the kinds of intellectual property rights that have been standard in our legal system in the past.

You just start with the fundamental fact that our national laws are very out of sync with other nations' laws, and the Web is an international phenomenon. No matter what we decide to do here, it is hard to see how we can get the international cooperation to enforce our standards abroad. Esther Dyson s ideas about how value is transferred from intellectual property to other kinds of value assets is a good place to start.

Another shift that flows from the new technology is that museums and cultural organizations will need a different approach to brand loyalty. If you put a great Edward Hopper painting on the Web, it doesn't matter really what building it hangs in. Currently we are building web sites as if they are promotional offshoots of our buildings---a little corner of the web with lots of content that we try to make interactive and zippy, and then we hope to keep people ricochetting around our site through hyperlinks, the goal being to keep people in your site and make them see everything you have, but don't let them escape in anybody else's site! This "protectionist" approach misses one of the best opportunities on the Web, which is to intersect with all the online resources that will help make the story you want to tell richer and better.

In the Museum of American Art we have great artworks illuminating the history and development of the nation. We have colonial portraits that show early settlers ambitions to identify with English ways, and early Hispanic artworks from our Spanish colonial history. We have Catlin's great Indian Gallery of almost 500 portraits and scenes of Plains Indian life from the 1830's. We have Bierstadt and Moran landscapes showing the lure of the West which attracted so many entrepreneurs, settlers, and land speculators. We have Remington constructing a national mythology and Currier and Ives prints detailing the cultural aspirations of new towns sprouting around the country. There are images of steamships and bridges and railroads and everything else that document industrial progress. What stories will we tell about all this? What is our purpose in loading our "content" on the Web?

Are we going to keep it isolated in our own web-corner or link it meaningfully to American Memory at the Library of Congress, to census records at the National Archives, to other museum resources that make these stories more meaningful? We' ll need to know more about other collections of all types, because the Internet is a place where we can begin to make the connections that are so valuable.

This will require each institution to know itself better, to have a more focused purpose. It doesn't make much sense for 100 different museums to load a capsule biography of Picasso. We can be very specific about how each museum can tend to its specific purpose, it's "local" interests, though not necessarily a geographic region. We need to know which stories are ours to tell and how are they different from everyone else's stories. And we need to feature our stories more effectively. We can learn from Disney or the other entertainment industries, without forgetting our own special role; maybe Bran will help us tell the stories with more flair, using graphics and interactivity better.

The reality of our daily "implementeering" is that we spend most of our time coping with training people, getting computer hardware and infrastructure in place, conniving to pay for it, and doing the real nuts and bolts of scanning and digitizing and getting databases integrated.somehow in the midst of this detail we also need to learn to "think around the corner" about goals, to keep the " imagineering" in place too.

Thank you very much.

MR. ALLISON: Any questions?

VOICE: Betsy, I have one question. I hope you didn't mean to say when you alluded that objects, that actual physical location of objects was conceptually not terribly important in using electronic ways of accessing. But I trust you didn't mean that the existence of the object in a specific place where it could be experienced was not important?

DR. BROUN: Not at all. I would like to see us get sharper about the distinctions between the actual experience in the museum, encountering the object in its real form. I think we don't understand that clearly enough.

We think what we are doing on the Web is an exact mirror of what we do in the museum. We want to understand both experiences better and capitalize on what is special about each.

We also have to confront the fact that on the Web, no one much cares what building a painting is in, when they are looking at it on the Web. The classic case of that is the Web museum that was formerly called the Louvre Museum, until the Louvre made them change the name online. But this fellow in France loads up great masterpieces on to his own personal site and presents them as his own museum. So he has things from the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Washington, the Louvre, and everywhere else. People visit it all the time because it is full of rich, wonderful things. He doesn't even have a building, he just has digitized images.

MR. FERREN: Yes, but I think what he is doing is creating a new brand on the Web, meaning he is coming with his professional point of view, irrespective of his background, and he is creating an institution. The reason you go there is because he has taste. And he may annoy the Louvre, but he is a new Louvre. He is a place, because of his point of view.

I agree with 99.97 percent of everything you say. I think it is compelling and important. But I think that the one thing which I strongly disagree with is I think you will find on the Web that people will actually care a great deal about where they are connected and where it is coming from, because a picture at random which happens to be a good reproduction is only as good as that.

But at the same time, the fact that you go to this guy's site because he has a point of view, which is a new point of view: that is a brand. He is creating that.

For instance, if you dial up the CIA, you may get to "Jeffrey s basement" web site where he has the logo of the CIA and information on it. It feels different than when you connect to the official CIA Web site, which is CIA.GOV, or whatever it is.

I think that what you are going to find is the Web is very new, but as it matures, people will actually assign significant value to where they are connected and the source of authority of that connection.

DR. BROUN: I agree with that. There is clearly going to be a new and different kind of authority on the Web that is going to attract the same kind of brand loyalty that museums do when they have a visitor experience that people enjoy and like. But I think it is going to be different.

MR. FERREN: I couldn't agree more.

MR. ALLISON: I wanted to ask a question to maybe both of you. One of the things we haven't heard too much about at this conference, but we should think more about, is that interactive technology is putting us in connection with users who are in a different environment than when they come to our museum.

The thing that excites me most about that is many of our users have the opportunity to actually study in a quiet environment. They have time, there is not necessarily a lot of competing interests, and they may actually spend some time on an individual level, much more so than when they come to visit our museums. That will increase rather than decrease as we move from Internet surfers to users who are there to not look around, but actually make active use of this technology for examining their interests.

I am wondering if you have thoughts about the new context of the audience? Not just the context of our work related to the technology, but the context of the user and how they relate to what we provide and how that should affect how we use this technology to reach them.

MR. FERREN: To me, I think there is a more fundamental issue, and that is appreciating the difference between what is an abstraction to the person in this new place, meaning where you are basically taking a digital reproduction of something and putting it there, which has some good news, because it is available to them, which has some bad news because the color is wrong and the geometry is wrong.

I guess for me where the whole notion of these new environments become much more exciting is when we get smart enough to figure out how to create fundamentally new content that only exists in your home. Whenever you are setting it up as competition, the idea that the in-home environment is competing with the museum environment, seems like a futile battle. They each do different things better.

In your home there is the luxury [of going] from one museum to another, as you were saying, in seconds, rather than having to get on a plane and fly somewhere; that you can do comparative analysis in a way that you can't do any other way, and, in fact, hopefully in a way that triggers the urge for you to make the pilgrimage to the original object.

Again, this changes when virtual objects start taking on fundamental intrinsic value, where basically the idea that a digital object, something which has nothing other than a physical representation which is the simulation, which is an abstraction, that is going to be a very interesting turn of events. We haven't really seen that effectively yet in a way that affects people.

DR. BROUN: We had a retreat to figure out our goals and had a wonderful sense of process. We identified five goals---the most important one was that everybody should have a machine on their desktop that actually worked! But one of the most interesting things was to figure out how new technologies and new audiences intersect. If you draw it as a box, you have old technology, new technology, old audience and new audience. There is that fourth quadrant, where the new technology intersects with the new audience. We don't really know that yet.

That is more or less what you are describing also, yet to be sketched. But we know that that is probably where the future is. That is ultimately going to be more interesting.

MR. FERREN: People have always resisted technology. We don't think of it now, but a roof is technology, glass is technology, artificial lighting is technology. I am sure along the evolution of the history of museums, each of these were greeted with skepticism, what is the role of it, are roofs going to catch on, or is it just a flash in the pan? I think it is important to realize that this question of how to or whether to use new technology has always been with us and [has always] been uncomfortable.

VISITOR: Just a comment. One way to look at what you are all getting at is we are dealing with a new medium. A book is a medium, a nation is a medium. This is a new medium. Often what is interesting is to look at the benefit you get from that new medium. I think that is just something you ought to look at. What does it bring to us? Things along those lines that are just different than what we have now.

MR. FERREN: And it isn't just one new medium, that is what is more confusing. It is a few dozen media which are all having their own independent impact.

VISITOR: Another question. You alluded to needing to get the curators more involved at the ground level, reading the comment books, things like that. How do we change some of the higher echelon museum culture to put that as value for curators to be doing that?sort of the same problem that is faced in universities: "publish or perish, so what do we care if they teach well?" How do we change the museum culture to value that for our curators?

DR. BROUN: I think that is already changing a lot. It is an historical dynamic. Maybe it stems from the decline of modernism, but you could pick other equally relevant constructs to explain why experts are getting closer to audiences. The attitude toward authority is rapidly transforming.

There is not the same willingness on the part of the public to respond to any authority---whether the traffic cop or the classroom teacher or the museum curator--- with the same deference that was there in the 1950's, when expert opinion was valued more.

Curators know this. They may resist it a little because it was fun being an expert, but inevitably as people ask to have a dialogue with a museum curator, you are going to end up in a dialogue---either willingly or with resistance.

VISITOR: I am not worried about the curator [working] with the public. It is more when museum administrations are making hiring decisions based on how many publications you have on scholarly things, or tenure decisions or things like that; not on how well you communicate to the public .

DR. BROUN: I can't speak about tenure, but in museums there is increasingly a high premium on the ability to communicate with the public, plan an exhibit that is conceived for a general audience rather than to simply demonstrate expert authority.

In the past five or six years many museums have not been hiring curators but are hiring educators. Now you might demand the exact same academic qualifications in hiring an educator, but the fact you call them "educators" rather than "curators" signals that their goal is to intersect with the public.

VISITOR: I hope you are right.

MR. FERREN: It is also largely self-correcting. If it isn't, the institution will just fade away. If you have senior management in any organization that isn't responsive at that level, eventually what happens is either the elders die off, in which case you have a new crowd and you have to try again, or else their mission becomes replaced or obsolete by someone else.

I agree with you. I think it is happening. I would just urge people to take it on a more fundamental level. If you are interested in how your museum is doing, go stay in a hotel in the city you are in. Ask a cab to go to the museum or where the exhibit is. Wait in the line, do the whole experience. Because what people remember is the entire experience, not just the part that you were responsible for designing.

VISITOR: I want to talk about the object and the senses and, really, the shrinking of the senses. I saw an exhibition a floor away from here, called Puja, [see "Puja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion at Continuing Exhibitions at the sackler Gallery] which [means] prayer. There was a mask and lots of kids looking at it. It is a goddess that has the face of a bull. It looks a bit like Ms. Piggy.

You know, you never see this. No photographs of this object are ever allowed. And this object lies in the inner-sanctum. There is innocence there, and you get a rare glimpse of it [in the exhibit.] Indeed, looking at this object, there is so much quickening of the senses, there is so much appreciation [for] this object that you have been talking about. Today, [though] when you decontextualize and put it in a museum, you try to dress it up and explain its context. Why is it so necessary?

I want to go back into the shrinking of the senses, the capacity to be able to hear, to touch, to see through the back of the head practically, to breathe, to smell these things I think we tend to lose out with the most.

I think that an emotional awakening that requires sensory perceptions beyond buttons and mouses is what the real critical need is more and more. I think that we branch so wide in this whole thing that we miss the trees for the woods, and computers and multimedia can only be really a shorthand of culture. In fact, virtual reality can sometimes prevent imagination. The real world can become virtually limited.

I want to explain. There is a Bulgarian novelist in a totally different context, perhaps in a very philosophical term, who said a tormenting thought: At a certain point history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality. Everything happening since then was supposedly not true. We supposedly did not notice.

DR. BROUN: It is a big issue, because, of course, we all want to believe that the object on some level speaks through our senses to us, and that was the sort of fundamental tenet of modernism.

But what we also know is we bring so much to these objects before the senses begin to work that we are not tabulas rasas in which the senses pick out what the object is emanating and allow it to speak in a clear way. I went last weekend to see the Olmec show at the National Gallery, which is an incredibly powerful experience. Among the great objects are massive multi-ton sculptures, but they also have two tiny humming birds carved in shell with very long beaks. The label says these are "perforators." While I was looking at them, two women came up and said, "Aren't they darling? Look at those lovely humming birds." Indeed, they are beautifully crafted objects. What we weren' t told is they are part of a ritual sacrifice culture in which a perforator is really a bloodletter. So the objects are culturally misconceived, because they were only being dealt with through sensory response, which is filtered through the intellectual constructs that we bring to these objects.

Scholar Leo Steinberg wrote a great article called "The Eye is a Part of the Mind." The eye is not a naive organ. It is an organ that is mediated by the mind. This is true of all of the senses. We aspire to the lofty idea that art speaks to us directly through the senses, but a more sophisticated judgment is that only the objects that are closest to us in our own society can do that, and in a limited way. The more distant they are, the more they come from another culture, place or time, the more out of sync we are with what our senses are telling us about them.

MR. FERREN: I agree. The object you described has a great sense of theater about it, speaking from a story telling perspective. The fact it is dimly lit and never allowed to be photographed, this process of revealing something to a person gives weight, gives meaning, can gave weight, can give meaning, and that is using the technology of theater.

But I think there is a question of appropriate use, because people lose their minds when it come comes to technology. They assume because there is a computer and network, they can do everything.

You don't assume the toaster can do everything. You assume the toaster is particularly good at making toast. If someone presented the toaster as an item with which you can build things: build walls, which is in fact true if you put them together, and you can heat the room if you get enough toasters. I can give you 100 uses for toasters, you would say that is pretty silly.

At the same time, when people propose inappropriate uses for new technologies such as computers, people say, "that is sensible." You can build a castle out of toasters.

I think that it is also important to realize that the paths to the human sensory experience are complex and subtle in a way that, clearly to me, one word can be worth 1,000 pictures. A word can have so much information coded into it. And the assemblages of words are such that without pictures, you use a person s imagination, if you are good at crafting words. You can create a much more sensorially rich experience than if you put it on a television set or if you put it in the theater.

I think it is understanding the tools and windows into the human experience and, as a designer, being able to effectively balance the available technologies [and] the appropriateness of your message. You could put those same objects in a show with the birds, and without the explanation: yes, "cute little birds." But part of what your job is as the designer, part of the team putting it together, is again to understand what is the appropriate technology, the way to present it, and the way to have the most dramatic impact.

The challenge becomes that different audiences require often different combinations of tools, approaches, mechanisms and spirituality to communicate effectively.

VOICE: Just one comment. I think museums have to look carefully, as Betsy said, at what their expectations are of what the medium is going to do. Is it going to educate? Fine. But it is not realistically, perhaps, going to provide those sensory experiences that Betsy has been talking about, that this gentleman was talking about.

We can't expect the digitalized images to do that for us. But they can educate us, and they can tell us what we might expect when we see the real objects. I think we have to be realistic. It is not going to replace, in my view, the real objects, or the sensory experience of seeing that show.

We might see it on our computers at home, but it is not going to give us that same experience. But it will be educational. What you are talking about, to educate the public, is wonderful, but it is, in my view, not going to replace that experience I have when I walk in a museum and see the real object.

VISITOR: So how is it educational then, if it diminishes the process of education?

DR. BROUN: Could I suggest that this is also not a new argument. If we say one of the earlier technology revolutions was printing, when engraving was invented, one of the very first things done with it was to reproduce paintings. Raphael happened to be at the right place at the right time. His paintings were reproduced and spread all over Europe by very slick engravings. Marcantonio Raimondi reproduced Raphael's paintings to small linear matrixes in black and white. Rembrandt knew Raphael that way, through Marcantonio's engravings. An entire artistic tradition absorbed Raphael through small black and white hack engravings. It was very useful information, in some ways more useful because it was easily digestible, not totally intimidating. It was an easy way to understand Raphael. That is how Reynolds first came to know Raphael. There are all sorts of uses of technology that are not a direct mirror of the original experience, but still very important in other ways.

The same was true when photography was invented. The first art book published with photographic reproductions in France was a book dedicated to reproducing the engravings of Marcantonio after Raphael!

so these are generational kinds of information, and I think we have to understand they are useful, quite apart from just mirroring the original. The original is not the only useful thing in the world.

MR. FERREN: A trap you have to be careful of is not to look at the dawn of a new technology and evaluate its impact at that point. When film was introduced, people paid to go to the movie theater to watch people get a haircut or watch them walk. People were sitting around and saying this is not going to have the same impact on people s lives as going to the theater and watching an actor do that.

I can give you examples in every technology you can go to. If you got to it at the stage we are at with computers, and [asked] what effect [it would] have on any mature understood discipline, the reaction always was, "I don't see how it is going to have the impact," and often it didn't. The ones that did were just as obscure at that early stage.

That is the thing I would urge people to take away with them: understanding [that] we are just at the dawn of a fundamentally new set of insights of communications with human beings, and the rate at which we are learning is geometric. The only way to stay involved in it is to just take some chances, be ready to fail, be ready to explore with the rest of us. But, again, I would just watch the mindset that says "I don't see how it will replace something," because, again, no one ever does at this stage.

MR. ALLISON: I think that is a great place to wrap up. Let us thank our panelists.

DR. ELLIS: Let's give them another hand, ladies and gentlemen, please. We are going to ask you all to move down into the audience, because we are going to be moving some tables back. While they are making this change, I would like to do one thing, and that is to acknowledge, we have about 20 members from the international community who are here. I would simply like to acknowledge their presence.some of them have spoken and some have not, but I would like to acknowledge their presence.

Hector Borrell, who is the Director of the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City, raise your hand.

Geza Buzinkay, Director of the Budapest History Museum in Hungary.

Alissandra Cummins, the Director of the Barbados Museum & Historical society in st. Michael, Barbados.

Anita Ebanks, the Director of the Cayman Islands National Museum.

Maarten Frankenhuis, the Director of the Natura Artis Magistra, Amsterdam Zoo Amsterdam.

Saroj Ghose, the Director General of the National Council of sSience Museums in Calcutta, India. I saw him earlier. You have seen him as well. He is president of the International Council of Museums.

Tom Hill, Woodland Cultural Center, Ontario, Canada.

Maria de Lourdes Horta, the Director of the Museo Imperial, Petropolis, Brazil.

Nancy Hushion, who is the Principal of Hushion & Associates in Toronto, Canada.

Bob Janes, Glenbow Museum, from Calgary, Alberta.

Bernice Murphy, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Contemporary Art, Sidney, Australia.

Matthew Nickson, Manager of the Multimedia Museum of Victoria, Australia, Melbourne.

Nikolay Nickishin, head of the Museum Planning and Design Center, Moscow, Russia.

Lykke Pederson, National Museum of Denmark, from Lyngby, Denmark. There she is.

John Perkins, Executive Director, Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information, from Nova scotia, Canada. There he is.

Sarah Phipps, Oxford University Museum, Oxford, England.

Carmen T. Ruiz-Fischler, Executive Director of Museo De Arte De Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico. She is up there.

Rajeev Sethi from New Delhi, India. There is Rajeev.

Lyn Sherwood, Director General of CHIN of Canada, from Quebec, Canada. There she is in the rear.

Have I completely massacred your names and professions? Forgive me, my heart was in the right place.

Richard Kurin is going to end the session for us, Director of the Smithsonian Institution s Center for Folklife Programs & Cultural studies, where he oversees the Festival of American Folklife and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. They have won Academy and Emmy and Grammy awards.

Dr. Kurin was responsible for the 150th birthday party on the mall a month ago. If you missed that, you missed a big production. He has developed programs for presidential inaugurals and the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta in the Centennial Olympic Park. He holds a Ph.D. From the University of Chicago.

He is the curator of a number of festivals, holds a professorship at the Johns Hopkins University school of Advanced International studies, and is the author of numerous publications on the role of museums, including the forthcoming book, Brokering Culture, to be published in 1997. He has been around all weekend and he is going to wrap it all up and make all of this meaningful.

DR. KURIN: Well, thinking about what to do when you are summarizing, especially when this thing is being put on the Web instantaneously. When I summarize, all the words are already there. In fact, over 120,000 words are there.so if you are summarizing, what do you do? Do you kind of give back half the words? That would be about 60,000.

I told Rex I would try to do this in about 10 minutes. I thought maybe one out of every 10 words and just skip the nine in between, that would leave me 12,000 words.

Then I started looking at the doodles on my piece of paper and said maybe that is the wrong genre to summarize. Maybe it was the images I was doodling as I was taking notes.

Last night I was thinking about maybe music as an alternative genre for summarizing this, listening to Ellsworth Brown. I thought at the beginning of this symposium the music would have been the blues. But yesterday with Ellsworth Brown, it was jazz. It had some blues in it, just like jazz does. Of course, with our international panel today, it looked much more like world beat.so I came back to words again, and came up with less than 100.

So, let's see my 100 word summary. That is the pine tree, upside down. Okay. Straighten that out. It is time for the list.

DR. ELLIS: Who but Richard? Thank you, sir, for that wonderful wrap-up.

I would like to thank everybody who has participated, who has added to, who has been a part of this very significant weekend.

I would like to leave you with my words, the "unorganizing" words. Six human beings by happenstance were trapped in the bitter dark cold. Each had in his hands a piece of wood, so the story goes.

The dying fire was in need of wood, but a woman held hers back, for as she gazed at the faces around the fire she noticed one was black.

A second man searched the gathering and found none from his church, so he could not bring himself to give the fire his piece of birch.

A third man sat in ragged clothes and gave his coat a hitch. "Why," he said, "should I give my log, to warm the idle rich?"

The rich man sat thinking of his money and how he wanted more, and he decided to keep his log, rather than give free warmth to the poor.

The black man s face was full of revenge as the fire was fading from sight. He kept his log to punish them all, the rich, the poor, the white.

The last man of this forlorn group did nothing except for gain. He gave only to those who gave to him, that is how he played the game.

So the logs were found in death-still hands as a testament to human sin; they did not die from the cold without, they died from the cold within.

The hardest part of all of this change is looking in the mirror and realizing that change must begin with you.

I thank you all so much for participating, and for being a part of this weekend.

(updated December 4, 1996)

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