Digital Art, Story-Telling, and the Museum: Suggestions for New Forms of Audience Engagement

From Tuesday 28th through to Thursday 30^th  November, members of the DLAC network will be participating in the annual conference of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums and running events there. Claire and Ailsa will deliver a two-part intervention entitled Digital Art, Story-Telling, and the Museum: Suggestions for New Forms of Audience Engagement.

Presentation

The first part consists of a presentation that reflects on the experiences of Claire’s AHRC-funded project on Latin(o) American New Media Art, which ran a series of impact and engagement activities from 2014-15, including an exhibition of Latin American digital art entitled Cities in Dialogue, an Artist in Residence post, Twitter galleries, interactive workshops and other events. The presentation will look at the experiences of the project in selecting and working with a variety of venues for new media arts events, and on the uses of social media for curation and engagement, and then will explore in particular  how the capacity that digital art works have to reach out beyond the gallery/museum space can be an enabler in audience/visitor participation, and in encouraging the audience to take up an active role in constructing the memory of trauma and human rights abuses.

Workshop

Following on from this, the workshop then provides hands-on experience of two such artworks: Marina Zerbarini’s Memory Weave (Argentina), and the collaboratively authored Historical Memory of the Alameda (Chile). Participants in the workshop will be given a series of brief tasks to navigate the works, and will be able to try out the interactive elements for themselves. We then open up for discussion, looking particularly at how visitors could engage, what the issues and challenges might be in exhibiting works such as these, and how digital art approaches could be developed to enrich the offering in different museum settings.

Materials will be circulated to participants at the workshop; if you are unable to attend but would like a copy of the materials, please email: c.l.taylor@liv.ac.uk