 Museum digitalized their exhibits. What that has to do with colonialism, racism or sexism is what Lukas Fuchschulber will talk to us about in his talk, which in a somewhat provocative way is called, How can we prevent the digital museum or stop it? In a research compound, he is researching at the Technical University of Berlin about ethical questions of digitalization in museums and his hypothesis is that the preservation of the digital legacy becomes a farce and that the prerogative of interpretation is relevant in the digital space as well and we are welcoming him with a virtual applause. Lukas, the stream is yours. Yes, my name is Lukas Fuchschulber and I work at the Technical University of Berlin about aspects of digitalization in the museum and this talk was prepared by me for this CCC event. It is directed at the critical digital scene. So what are we going to talk about? The topic are digital museums and that is various things. For one thing, digitalized collections, objects in museums that are photographed, scanned but also the digitalized documentation. So the archive information about objects which are digitalized and that are turned into metadata and it will be about digital communication or presentation of objects and the metadata and the focus will be the scene that is listening and museum employees. So let's start with museums and lockdown. In the corona crisis, locations had to close down, including museums of course, and the focus very quickly turned to social media formats and their digital offerings and an often used hashtag was closed but open so the museums are closed but they're still open. The Austrian journalist didn't get the name, summarized it very nicely the way it felt to her and I quote, in my Instagram feed, for the first time I have a man in a suit explaining art to me. Another image of museums in lockdown that I found very telling were DJs in museums. Another popular image and we see a DJ here in front of the dinosaur skeleton in the Berlin Museum of Natural Science which was taken from Tanzania, a German colony at the time to Berlin. Back to lockdown, what was the feel during lockdown? Empty museums of course, digital formats that were often used were the Google arts and culture projects from 10 years ago when Google had 360-degree cameras which they let go through the museums and you could click through those and look at those images. So a kind of doubling of duplication of the museum you couldn't touch, you couldn't contribute, it's void of people, a very traditional image of a museum or concept. Looking back to this old project when Google was very influential about concerning digitalization in museums, a critical reminder could be that they should not be repeated in this way, we shouldn't let the large tech corporations control our museums for themselves because as we know, Google is trading in data and we shouldn't give any more data to them. The lockdown which is what I'm going to, which is my conclusion of this at the beginning, is something that gives us a new perspective on digitalization in museums. We can take stock because of that because what we see now is nothing that is newly produced, it represents what museums have done in the last few years and that includes new projects, new funding was available to support new projects. So the museum 4.0 project was recently extended, that is an alliance of museums that are trying out new projects, virtual reality, artificial intelligence perhaps and a lot there is about personalization of your digital visit. So for us that means at the end of 2020, this is a very good point in time to look at what is happening. Before we talk about the digital samples, specimens, let's talk about the debates, the controversy about museums there and the focus of a debate about remembrance culture and new museumology, how is this presented, who controls what is presented and who is excluded as well. The International Museums Council ICOM collected 250 definitions of museums from its members and then started in exchange of what museums are in the view of society these days. So from the collection and preservation and presentation aspect, we are approaching formats of participation and for some people, this definition was too political and too much a reaction to the pressure from social movements and that is true to some extent, these social movements and the progress that is made of course is due to pressure from outside. So how can we now have a critical debate about the digital formats? The first example that I'm going to point to is feminist museum critique. The popular group Guerilla Girls, for example, points to which I've included here. They point that very few female artists are exhibited and very often the models that are depicted are female. Now what does this kind of criticism lead to in museums? If we visit a museum, despite of this criticism, we keep encountering these narratives that we have male artist genius and their female muse that inspires them. One example is Paul Gauguin and his 13-year-old wife, who was married to him in Tahiti and looking at a picture of this 13-year-old wife, I asked myself how is this story told? The story behind the picture and in a cultural context, these problematic images are normally decontextualized image files. I have a file that I took from Wikimedia. It has the name of the painter in its title and the title that he gave his work and the whole problematic story is lost. Looking at the museum's website, the museum that owns this picture, you don't even find that picture in the database, so I cannot know how it is presented there. But what I'm going to say is that the file name and the presentation is not neutral, a certain contextualization would be necessary. And the next example which we are going to deal with at a bit more length is the topic of museums and colonialism. So the acquisitions that museums made in colonial times and in the colonial context and for decades, there have been demands for restitution by local actors who said that the acquisitions made in the colonial context are unjust and the work should be returned to the original places. And a demand that was very important here is the one about archive transparency. So to actually know what museums here actually hold, these lists have to be transparent and accessible because only these lists make it possible to raise demands. And digitalization in museum archives becomes very important here because that is the foundation for such demands. The question, of course, is what can we contribute? These lists are simply scans, very often, or photograph papers. So as a digital community, we could actually process these lists and enrich them and link data from various sources, and that can be a very practical political act of solidarity. So it's not enough to just wait until museums have taken action, we can contribute something ourselves. I'd like to take a step back and ask how the offerings look that we can see by now. And one example that I'm going to mention are virtual visits. This is a concept by the journalist Kwame Opoku. And in my understanding, this is an interface study. He visits museum websites and looks how easily he can reach information about cultural goods. His example are the bronze sculptures from Benin in Africa. So a large amount of bronze sculptures in the kingdom that was looted from the kingdom of Benin in the 19th century by the English, and that now is in various museums. And his approach is to go to a website of a museum that holds these bronze sculptures, and he then tries to find something out, finds information on this and documents what he finds. How easy is it to visit the museum digitally and to find the context of these sculptures. And what I'm going to do with you now is to visit the state museums of Berlin with the intention to find another perspective on the data and the way Delta is dealt with regarding those Benin bronze sculptures. You can see here on the left how I visit the website of the state museums of the Berlin State Museum, and I'm going to the database of their collection, and I use Benin as a search phrase. And I then wrote down what I've found. So I'm going to read this to you now. One of the 255 works that I can find from Benin in the collection of the Berlin Museums. This is the information I've found. We are on the website SMB-Digital Berlin State Museums Prussian Cultural Heritage online database of the collection. The address in the address part tells us that we are on the interface of e-museum plus. So that is a database on collections. What does the actual the individual objects look like or the way it is presented? We have an image on the left of the sculpture. Then we have a title, a category telling us that it is a sculpture. And we see that it was conveyed by a company, but how and where we do not know. And there is information on the original, which is unclear, and the country Nigeria and the Kingdom of Benin are mentioned. We find measures and an inventory number, which is very important. So that is the number with which the museum has registered the object and the fact that it belongs to the Berlin collection. We also have a copyright remark on the photo. In the photo metadata itself, we have a Creative Commons license, which is kind of contradictory. After these two columns, we have an area further down, which tells us something about Benin in the 16th century and the way it is interpreted visually, what is the facial expression, how that should be interpreted and the like. And if we click on other bronzes in the collection, the picture is the same. Copyright Creative Commons, Teodofranke as the mediator, and no year of acquisition. That made me curious. I wanted to know whether I can see any better documentation. Using the inventory number, I can quickly find this object in Wikipedia. And that has a date of acquisition, which is 1901, sadly without a source. But we can add the source later on because I found something else. Also, I can find the signature in the German library, the national library, the digital library. This is a database where scientific institutions feed in their data and other fields from the museum database are to be found here. We have related objects. We have a link back to the same platform on the website of the State Museum. And if we click on that, we reach a file on the acquisition. Sadly, without a scan, there is no current image that is all found on this file. This file cannot be found through the search form on the website. If I enter the inventory number, I can only find the bronze head itself. So the interface is very limited. Only using details through half the internet can we find that extra information. But politically, this is very significant difference, very much, because we find a sculpture from the 16th century that Theo de Franck conveyed in the one exhibit. And in the other place, we find that this took place a few years after the English mission, punishment mission. And that is very different information. What we can see here is that the curators of the museums are managing huge amounts of digital copies and digitized documentation. And this is full of imperial liabilities. We should look at this duplication critically and ask, did anything change about the presentation? And how is the violence history of these objects being told? The criticism that I mentioned that is coming from outside museums where war and colonialism is the context of the acquisition of the objects has to be shown alongside the objects. And if museums would provide these links, then our role can be to create provisional links, for example, in platforms such as Wikimedia. Another example for present and the future of digitization in museums is the Humboldt Forum, of which you've probably heard. Behind the façade of the Berlin Palace, there's going to be a large museum with an ethnological collection and an exhibit on Berlin. And this Humboldt Forum contains several digital projects. This ranges from participative production of knowledge with indigenous populations all the way to gamification and personalization. Those are going to be the two examples, which I'd like to show you today. The first of these is a project which is called Sharing Knowledge. And it was created before the Humboldt Forum in a Humboldt lab, but it's still being quoted as a prime example in the Humboldt lab. And it wanted to confront existing knowledge in these collections with a new perspective. And my analysis is as follows. I was only able to analyze this website through screenshots and publications because it's been offline for a while and it is not mirrored anywhere. The project took surveys and conducted them locally with the indigenous population. Those were then digitized and presented on a website. And this website was then taken back to these places that didn't have a sufficient internet connection. Whether this knowledge made its way into the databases of the museums, I don't know. If I compare one of these surveys with the SMB digital database, I have reason to believe that these data weren't taken into the databases because you can use the signature to link it back. This external website, which isn't linked to the database where these data were presented, is unfortunately offline, but still they're advertising it quite a bit. But we can't conduct any kind of virtual visit. I wonder if this project is now more easily available on the ground without internet connection than it is here. It's a nice example of digital exclusion turned on its head. I'm really curious what's going to happen next if these new critical data are going to be merged with the old existing data. But as long as that doesn't happen, we can support it by systematically finding and supporting repository knowledge and merging and linking these various sources of knowledge critically. The Humboldt Forum had to postpone its opening. And a while ago it conducted a digital opening via stream. And at this digital opening, they presented various other digital formats, which I'd like to present to you now. These digital formats are usually conceived of as returning to the physical space through screens, for example. And one of the examples they showed was this interactive skull of fish, which is supposed to represent scientific research, but also social interaction. And the project that was presented contained two central layers of presentation. One of these is gamification and personalization, and the other is a digital storytelling. You can, by the way, watch this opening online. Digital storytelling is quick to explain. The Humboldt Forum is conducting media work, and young and old people are supposed to produce videos for digital empowerment. The next example is a bit more interesting. In an exhibit at the Humboldt Forum, which is called Berlin Global, you get a bracelet, which contains a chip. And as you walk through the exhibition, it stores certain decisions that you make. The topic of the exhibit is Berlin Global, and it tells of freedoms and borders. And if you walk through this exhibit and then if you've allowed them to track you, then at the end of the exhibit you'll get a print out of your personal profile, and you're then supposed to meet other people outside the exhibition and discuss your results and give them to the archives. And in the way it was made, it reminds me of a different project in the same context of the Humboldt Forum, which was part of the Museum 4.0 program, which is about the digital strategies for the Museum of the Future. And one of the projects here was the Humboldt Cosmos in digital space. The Museum 4.0 is a very interesting example, and it's recently been extended. And this app, the Humboldt Cosmos in digital space, wants you to find your very own object in physical space, and it has an app which lets you find your object. It looks a bit like a dating app, and you have to swipe through artworks and tell it if you like them or not, and once the app has collected enough data on you, it sends you to your work of art, and in this video the developer presents it as a kind of blind date in a museum. What they have in common, these two projects, is a playful visit to a museum that you're supposed to let them track you and get a personalized museum experience. And this way of visiting, of playfully visiting a museum, a museum with an app, it redefines the participation in the museum and the social interaction in the museum. Participation turns into a kind of tinder or grinder that you can walk through, and we see a very strong influence of certain trends in the digital economy of the past decade, tracking, personalization, gamification, and to me it's important to have a critical perspective on this or to provide a critical perspective on the politics of digital presentation. And one reading suggestion is the text in the Facebook Ecrarium by the Epilita Collective where they describe how gamification and personalization technologies lead to a certain way of social interaction. If I were to speculate, I would say that the history of these projects is the cultural influence of such as Facebook, such as Facebook and Google with YouTube over the past decade, and we can see that social media departments in museums are more strongly involved in presentation these days, and so participation in museums is being redefined as social media interaction. This became very obvious during the lockdown where guided tours were conducted through Instagram or YouTube, and the data servers of these large data trade companies were being used. They have a monopoly, but what we saw in the next step is that this logic of personalization and tracking which was established by this corporation is now going back into the museums and being turned into concepts of presentation. What can we do and what can the online community do? I think it's most important that we talk about the social internet instead of social media. It's about technological sovereignty about digital networking and the defense of open standards, so cultural data and objects online need to be linked. We can't simply take what we have and then replicate it online, scan it, digitize it in some way, but we also have to link, critically link, certain resources. This is not just about colonialism, but also about art and the history of violence and injustice, and one strategy for us could be to support more sustainable interfaces such as Wikimedia or Wikipedia. The example of the Hamburg Forum was only meant to show that concrete drafts of the museum of the future exist now and I would plead to look for counter perspective in existing criticism of museum and our contribution could be to link that to ethical questions and open standards because otherwise we must be afraid that the digital museum simply overtakes these debates that we should have. Thank you. We have one question about the context of digitized objects. Can metadata be any an approach to improve these these objects? Are they simply not presented on the website? Yes, and that would be a good question to those museums. How much of what they know about the objects do they actually communicate to the outside? The provenance research in the last few decades has of course gained importance in museums and I believe that my perspective on this question would be that different places create different kinds of knowledge about objects in the various databases in the center for cultural loss or other centers in different places, countries, up to the knowledge that exists in the original places where these objects come from and it's not about asking for mandatory fields but more to say if we don't have these mandatory fields, couldn't we create places for that same information elsewhere? For example in Wikipedia, in Wikimedia, could we collect this information there which is scattered across the net? So let's not wait for the museums or the perfect technology but rather get active and act in solidarity, practice solidarity and would such a digital museum not be a place for an experiment for curate curating an exhibition completely by swarm intelligence and see what comes out of that? Well, maybe the question is what does to curate mean these days? Who has control about that? There are many formats for participation and many exhibitions that are conducted using participation which you could call swarm intelligence but ultimately it is about the social interaction that the museum enables, the exchange that it allows and it's about all parts of a museum not about just curating but also documenting, it's about the knowledge that is connected to the museum's collections and what they do in an exhibition and in the digital area the thing is that their activity there affects all the other areas much, much more. Databases were curated as well and that they are so full of liabilities which could make it an exhibition of its own. So to work with that would be very an effective way for the critical public to get interfered, okay? Who is the next question? Who drives the digitization forward? There are funding for research and there are funds for digitization. In the past decade a lot has happened and a lot of money was provided and a lot of prototypes were created but as to who drives digitization that's not really answerable for all museums because there are so many of them so that's why I took these large examples in my presentation where several museums cooperate and say that they're developing the presentation of their future or the Hamburg Forum which is experimenting with a lot of digital formats until it's opening next year so I would like to advertise for being a critical voice in this exchange. The pad tells about the about a national infrastructure for research data which wants to define common metadata for objects and somebody says The this is very much for Greek sculptures. There is a tradition of copying objects in Rome where many copies were made of Greek sculptures. There's a question, where is the money coming from? Well there's a lot of money, yes. There are lots of projects that want to support digitization. I'm not worried about that at all but the question is what are the politics behind this, what programs are behind it? There's a lot of money involved though and as for the national database of research infrastructure a lot of discussions are happening in this area at the moment but if we're going to have common standards of metadata then I want to know where they come from so I'm a these data standards that exist in cultural history have a vocabulary from a past of lots of decades ago well these the terms are partly very racist and very problematic and I'd be very careful about establishing standards before we've been able to critically analyze them but if I otherwise I think that's a great idea to create standards and if we establish a culture of questioning these old standards. Yes the internet and thanks you for this beautiful talk which I would like to add myself my own thanks to so there is some covered applause. Thank you for the questions too.