by Brooke Kellaway -

The Future of Permanent Collection Catalogues

A guest post by Brooke Kellaway, Getty Fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.

In the Walker Art Center’s library there are shelves of collection catalogues from museums around the world, dating from the mid 1900s. Since museums have the means to publish these books only once every several years (or decade), the care put into each is sometimes so intensive that the books themselves seem as special as the art written about inside of them. They capture events—cultural moments based on the stories told, works featured, design decisions made, and contributing writers selected.

What will become of collection catalogues in print when collection catalogue websites become increasingly prevalent? I’d like to think of the latter not as replacements for the book (long live it!) or upgrades of database-driven websites, but as the result of the best of both formats remade into something new and great…

The Walker Art Center’s next collection catalogue will launch on collections.walkerart.org later this year. We’ve radically expanded the book model and are completely revamping the collection website to create a dynamic media-rich space for vast (and free) information on works of art in the Walker’s collection.

The online catalogue entries will provide interested art historians, professionals, students, and the general public with updated material and a range of critical perspectives on the works. For example, the online entry for Yves Klein’s Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud) (1961), will provide multiple high-resolution images of the painting with close-ups of the International Klein Blue pigment on the gauze fabric, several videos about the work’s conservation treatment and the process of installing it in the gallery, and an on-camera interview with the curator who researched the work before its acquisition. Scholarly essays will be included, as well as a detailed presentation history with floor plans and checklists, a bibliography with cited texts hyperlinked or embedded, and the work’s provenance.

Yves Klein's Suaire de Mondo Cane (Mondo Cane Shroud), 1961. Pigment, synthetic resin on gauze. 108 x 118.5 inches.

This new collection catalogue will be perpetually in production, featuring new entries with every new acquisition. It’s a sensible step for the Walker, being that in the past several years the generation and storage of information on artworks has been primarily through electronic systems (from typed wall labels to digital photography and video to artist correspondence). It’s the same at other museums, as evidenced in the collection pages of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and these online catalogues by the Corcoran and Rijksmuseum. With ever more sophisticated collection management databases, digital asset management systems, web publishing software, and interactive technologies, the documentation and interpretation of collection works is happening in the virtual world much more frequently.

The Walker’s catalogue is being built with the support of the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) grant. The nine participating museums have considered the elements that make their printed books excellent resources (from thoroughly researched essays to useful glossaries and maps) and are incorporating these aspects into their collection websites with content that is current, searchable, and links out to a wider spectrum of both the museum’s activities and scholarship originating from elsewhere.  Some of them emulate the look and feel of a book, while others explore alternative interfaces.  For more information on their progress, the Getty just released its OSCI report that gathers the museum grantees’ experiences in publishing these new multifaceted collection catalogues.

I recently read the New York Times article, A Vast Museum That You Can Carry, reviewing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new 449-page guidebook. Ken Johnson wrote, “How useful the new guide will be when anything you want to know about the Met and its holdings can be quickly accessed on the museum’s world-class Web site is an interesting question.” It’s an interesting question indeed, and one that we at the Walker look forward to investigating as we work on melding the best of the book with the amazing possibilities offered by digital publishing.

by amaranth -

“Ceci tuera cela”: Narrative Games and the Future of Books

Today’s post comes courtesy of MIT GAMBIT researcher, game author, and Shakespeare scholar Clara Fernandez-Vara:

Fourteen years ago, Umberto Eco already wrote an essay on the future of the book in which he invoked Victor Hugo’s passage in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame:

“As you no doubt remember, in Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo, comparing a book with his old cathedral, says: “Ceci tuera cela” (The book will kill the cathedral, the alphabet will kill images). McLuhan, comparing a Manhattan discotheque to the Gutenberg Galaxy, said “Ceci tuera cela.” One of the main concerns of this symposium has certainly been that ceci (the computer) tuera cela (the book).”

The future of Eco’s book is now. His concept of the computer is somewhat reductionist; rather, we have to talk about digital media. Computers are everywhere, from phones, to rice makers or fridges. The print book industry is revolutionized by the widespread use of e-book readers and tablets, which allow us not only to have instant access to a lot of books, but also carry around more books than we could read in a lifetime. Books will not be killed by computers, rather, it turns out that computers are giving a new life to books by finding a new technology to access them. It turns out that books are pretty resilient to technological change.

Talking about media and killing, the media form that may threaten books is videogames, which are routinely accused of doing horrible things to people. The threat digital games pose is (supposedly) that they absorb you in their worlds and make you dumb, making you forget about other people and having a life. Literature already prefigured this supposed media effect long ago–chivalry novels dried to Don Quijote’s brains out and so that he couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy.

Even today, people still think of digital games as a frivolous pastime, discounting their narrative possibilities. Playing videogames requires specialized literacy–in the same way that novels require not only knowing how to read, but understanding genre conventions and intertextual references. videogames require being able to navigate a virtual space, and being familiar the rules of different game genres, amongst other things. Games and books may have more to do with each other than one would think, because they both absorb the reader / player into their worlds, trapped in their narratives, and require specialize knowledge.

A media form is not going to kill another, in spite of what Frollo said, but it can certainly transform it. Videogames can change how and why we read books. We can read books in games, where we find bestiaries of the creatures that haunt the dungeons that we traverse as the heroes of games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Books can open gates to new worlds, as in the Myst series, where we read diaries of the previous inhabitants of the world we explore, and we can jump into them literally in order to enter other parts of the world. Videogames are another medium that novels and short stories can be adapted to–we can become the protagonist of The Great Gatsby, avoid drunk partygoers and fight the disembodied eyes in glasses that seem to watch the action of the movie. We can also become Moby Dick itself and decimate the merciless whalers, earning our reputation as the killer whale.

Videogames and books will never be at odds; they are already part of the media ecology, along with movies, websites, magazines, or television. They are all gates to worlds that we participate and experience. One can lead us to another–the Myst games were complemented by a series of novels that expanded on the story of the world of the game. Dante’s Inferno can lead players to read the poem it is allegedly based on; then players can be horrified at the distorted notion of what adaptation means. Games and books as media forms are already in dialogue: we have books about games, not only fiction (Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash), but also hint books to help players know everything about their favourite videogames, or biographies of people’s playing experience (Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld, or Bissel’s Extra Lives). The challenge remaining is making more games about books, not only adaptations, but also games about reading (Gregory Weir’s Silent Conversation). In the same way we have books to help us become better at games, we could make games that help us be better at reading books.

Videogames will not kill books, although there may be a bit of a friendly scuffle. The day when we read games and we play books is not far.