Nana Twumasi: Digitization a Design in the Museum World of Art

 

Digitization is the process of converting information to computer readable format. The human life in the 21^st century has impact on the use of technology and how these have shaped our lives impressively in the museum world of arts. Digital transformation in computers and computing and other advancement in social, political and cultural environment cannot be underestimated in museum experience.

Bryan Shelmon argued that, “digitization is when a museum takes it collections and renders them to post online. The museums also try to digitize actual sculpture with 3-D renderings to capture the detail of every angle of the art piece.” (Shelmon, 2018). 

However, museum play crucial roles in preserving the culture of a people. Through documentation and artifact preservation, culture is recorded and remembered for the future including its history and social evolution. This is because people live together in groups and societies, associated with bodies that can be expressed through museum digitization.

 

According to Emmanuel Arinze in his book the role of museums in society, the museum is an institution that tells the story of man, the world and how humanity has survived in its environment over the years. It houses things created by nature, man and the modern society that houses the cultural soul of a nation. (Arinze,1999). A place that holds heritage value where information is passed on to one generation to another in the representation of an object, image sound or signal to describe information in the symbolic environment.  

 Lord G. Dexter, states that, “the purpose of museum exhibition is to transform some aspect of the visitors’ interests, attitudes or values effectively, due to the visitors’ discovery or some level of communication in meanings to the objects displayed or where a discovery that is stimulated and sustained by the visitor’s confidence is perceived in the authenticity of those objects.” (Dexter, 2001).  Museums through the digital age based on virtualization has brought so much freedom as a way to attract, educate and entertain the youth.  This as a way helps provide additional information, insight, and freedom to people in the world of museum art. It has also helped museums reach wider audiences and increase the accessibility of their collections.

Moreover, digitization of a design in the museum world of art is based on the understanding in which the visitor’s museums exhibitions are created online without the effort of the visitors going there in person. Through the digital process collections are posted online depending on the type of medium used as communication channel. Thus, its helps with self-guided tours and the possibility to select exhibits within the environment they live in.

The digital museum becomes an effective medium of extending the life of most cultures and their accompanying knowledge where more online traffic is dedicated to collections and the stories they share.

Digital means enable the co-production of exhibitions, oral histories, and other forms of display and archives based on personal remembrance, recollection, and interactivity (Adair et al. 2011).

To conclude, museums embracing the digital technology is an important tool to innovate in all areas of the museum institution. This aspect of work and social change comes with an advocacy of thinking around engagement and participatory experiences.

 

References

Arinze, Emmanuel N. “The Role of the Museum in Society,” 1999, 4.

Gail Dexter Lord. “The Manual of Museums Exhibition,” Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001.

Bryan Shelmon. “Digitizing the museum: A New kind of Interaction,” 2018.

Adair, Bill, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski (editors) 2011 Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Left Coast, Philadelphia. [Google Scholar]

Ch.1: Overview of a soon-to-be ex-ruin

i.e. The dusting off of a rather large artefact of recent history...or of a rather small house. 

That is, of a rural house in western Romania, in a small village tucked between the foothills in Mureș valley. A fairly compact rural site, its bulk a regularised grid on the northern side of the floodplain, with some streets snaking their way along the hills and between them, the dirt tracks continuing and disappearing in the forests that cover most of the hills.

The village, known in all the languages of the area as Odvoș (at least phonetically; otherwise, DE: Odwosch, HU: Odvos), is a typical western-Transylvanian one, with a multiethnic past, a mono-ethnic present and a reduced, aged demographic. It has an arguable number of streets – 7, perhaps 10 – three churches (a Romanian Orthodox one, a Baptist one and a deserted and half collapsed Roman Catholic one), its many homesteads and an abandoned aristocratic house.  

For the area, it presents most of the typical signs of decay of rural communities. As such, most of the youth have left the community for school; those of working age have long left for work, or commute. Most of the remaining population is aged and many homes lie abandoned – shall we say in conservation? – and disrepair. While a significant proportion of the homesteads seem to have been rich farms – with beautifully ornamented houses and large brick-built barns – many of them now seem or indeed are empty, slowly returning their substance into the ground. When hopelessly weathered, the roof tiles are taken for re-use, with wood slowly rotting away and mudbrick melting after years of rain, the image being dignified as much as it is sad.

Fig.1: The façade – facing the East – and street view of the house at nr.235, Odvos Taken by author.

This, for better or for worse, is the image that greets the traveller passing through the E68/DN7 road which traverses the length of the valley. And, in all earnesty, the house in this “tale” fares no better; its redeeming qualities can be seen by the more optimistic folk at best. That is, by those aware of the (literal) flexibility of such a building, so long as one uses clay and straw rather than cement and nylon, sandstone rather than brick and oak beams rather than I-beams.

Fig.2: The Southern side of the house, with its distinct longitudinal porch and most rural colonnade. Taken by author.

Its basic structure is typical of more archaic houses of peasants from the area: 2 main rooms (plus a pantry), with a side porch running along the length of the house. Interestingly, many such houses in the village have a porch in the middle of the porch, with the wooden pillars often covered in brickwork. It is not unimaginable that inspiration for this less than usual architectural artifice was found in the local abandoned mansion – a ubiquitous notion in the Mures valley. 

While size-wise and organisationally the house fits well in the register of Romanian peasant houses of the region, and excluding the dash of vernacular adaptation of an already provincialised baroque, the visual aspect – volumes, roof angles, windows and doorways, remind one of the houses of the Banat Germans, who used to inhabit a great many of the neighbouring villages and have, as such, left a very distinct mark in the cultural landscape.

Fig.3: a more typical Banat Schwaben house, with its aspect preserving quite ideally the late 1800’s architectural standard of the German villages in the Banat. Taken by author.

The house, then, manages to be several distinct things: firstly, a rather organised pile of roof tiles, wattle and daub, oak beams, mud brick and sandstone. 

Secondly, it can act as a symbol for the beautiful cultural mixture that is the Banat and Partium region. 

Thirdly, the house may become, for the duration of its restoration, a site for experimenting and recreating building practices which have been lost in the region – a summer school, perhaps.

Fourthly and hopefully, it will once again be a beloved home – aspects which will be the theme of the next posts.

By Bogdan Sorinca