The Museum Studies Program is pleased to present the WN25 Visiting Scholar keynote address by Seb Chan, director and CEO of the Australian Center for the Moving Image, on Wednesday, March 19 at 6:30 pm. The event will be held in the Helmut Stern Auditorium at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Chan's lecture, "Museums, Technologies, and Civic Transformations," will address issues of trust, attention, digital memory, ephemerality, and the fragility of new cultural artefacts, and conversely, maintenance, longevity, and the need for bold pan-institutional and sector-wide initiatives, new skills, and literacies.
Predictably, the first quarter of the 21st century has seen museums significantly transformed by media technology and networked society, yet often this has been viewed as institutions reacting to, rather than leading, change. Institutions are now deeply enmeshed in complex technological systems, platforms, and services across all parts of a museum’s operations and practices. Today, the nature of collections themselves is implicated as they are increasingly "born digital." These shifts all require highly skilled labor, new strategies, policies, and debate to ensure that the transformations serve the museum’s community and long-term interests.
