Author: Douglas McLennan

How Local Museum Audiences Are Different From The Tourists

“The local audience is really the central audience. It’s an audience that has grown up with the institution and comes to you again and again. They have a much closer connection because they enjoy and notice constant changes within the institution. Their level of expectation is higher,” than, for example, a tourist who comes once every few years. – Artnet

How To Understand Beliefs In Fake News? How About The Physics Of Phase Transitions

Those holding odd beliefs are not typically less intelligent. An answer may be found in the way modern communication media have restructured society, leading to the process of opinion-formation no longer chiefly taking place at the individual, but at the collective level, largely unmoored from concerns of factuality and appropriateness. This is best understood by studying the physics of phase transitions. – 3 Quarks Daily

Congolese Activist Steals Artifacts From Museums To Protest Colonialism

Mwazulu Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-African movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums. – The New York Times

Audience Shuts Down Madrid Opera Performance Protesting Lack Of Social Distancing

A performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Teatro Real was canceled after spectators spent more than an hour shouting and clapping to protest against what they said were insufficient social distancing measures in the opera house’s mezzanine levels. Photos and videos shared on social media showed filled rows in the upper sections of the house, in contrast to the orchestra level of the auditorium, where spectators were separated by vacant seats. – The New York Times

Luxembourg’s National Library Uses a Cool Scrabble-Type Signage System

Individual letters or parts of letters are printed on each face of a cube, so cubes can be placed in rows to form words, or cubes with letter fragments can be stacked to create letters at a large scale. They’re then placed on blank wayfinding infrastructure that has a small lip to hold them up. The resulting system is similar to a beautifully considered mega game of Scrabble, and can easily be adapted to meet the needs of the community it serves. – Fast Company

2020 Has Taken A Turn Back To The Existentialist

“One reason we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, is to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history. But this control is illusory and deceptive, existentialists insisted. It might be an alluring distraction from our own fragility but it eventually yields a pseudo-power that corrodes our ability to live well.” – Boston Review

World’s First Immersive Virtual Museum

The result is a 360-degree, fully immersive experience that lets museumgoers get as close as they want to, say, Manet’s Olympia or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Using a computer’s arrow buttons, a visitor can virtually “walk” around the museum, zooming in on different works of art. The user-friendly setup feels much like a computer game. – Smithsonian