Experimental Geography by Nato Thompson

Author:Nato Thompson [Thompson, Nato]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-399-1
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2015-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (image and text panels depicting the programs and projects of CLUI, 2007. Inkjet prints. 16 × 24 in. (40.6 × 61 cm) each

THE BUS TOUR AS INVERTED VITRINE:

ENGAGING WITH THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF THE MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN LAND

MATTHEW COOLIDGE

The tour bus is a mobile theater—a captive audience, in a room of chairs, facing forward, with anticipation. The world lies ahead. Anything could be ahead. At the front is the narrator, off to the side of the big picture window of where we are going. The narrator’s job is to be the matrix that holds the parts together, providing continuity, thematic structure, and consistency to the experience. The narrator must set people at ease so that their defenses are down and they are ready to absorb, and to prepare fertile ground that allows for the growth of new ideas. But the narrator is not the subject, only a medium, a shaman. The point is the thing pointed out, not the pointer. And people shouldn’t be too comfortable, as the purpose of the journey is not recreation, but inspiration. To keep things exciting, we have to all be in the same experimental boat of possibility, and people should be on the edge, ready to jump. It is research.

A valuable resource on the bus is the video monitors, where supporting material for the tour, such as film clips, documentaries, slideshows, and live tracking maps, can be presented. Using the monitors, a video camera can zoom in to make distant objects in the land visible. Time and space can be folded, shrinking long distances between things with engaging and relevant video material, or making figurative allusions to places and spaces you are passing through. The possibilities for phenomenological frisson between multimedia and physical place are untapped, exciting, and nearly endless. But it is important to default to the primacy of place, since there you are. It’s outside the frame of the windows. Get off the bus.

The most important part of the bus tour is the destinations. Anyone in the museum profession can tell you about the importance of the visitor’s proximity to the physical artifacts of the museum. This connection with “material culture” is the whole point of the museum. But in the museum of the American Land, the material artifacts are places and spaces, and they cannot be housed in a vitrine. The answer is the bus tour; creating a museum atmosphere inside the bus bubble, and taking it out to the land. The bus is the vitrine (and the tourists are part of the subject, too).

Unlike most museums though, where the artifacts are insulated from direct contact by glass cases, or the established safe-distance for people from pictures on the wall is monitored by watchful guards, the museum of land allows for full contact and immersion with the subject. In the American Land Museum, not only can you touch the artifacts, you can be in them and on them. You can be surrounded by them, enter their spaces, ingest their dander and odor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.