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MUSEUMS


Jake Barton (left), of Local Projects, and Timescape, an algorithmic exhibit


JAKE BARTON Principal, Local Projects


What was your role in the 9/11 Memorial Musuem? I was half of the team, with Thinc Design, that won the international competition to masterplan the museum and design its exhibits and media. Local Projects produced all of the 100 media pieces.


How did you approach the project? We spent an enormous amount of time looking for authentic narratives about the event to use in a way that would make the museum a platform for visitor self- expression. This would allow the museum to change and respond to every visitor’s


story, meeting them where they were, which allows the museum to evolve over time.


How did you use media in the exhibition? We used media to execute the concept that the museum was a platform for collective memory. Visitors can record memories, hear others’ stories, share messages which are then projected onto the slurry wall. This is all in the midst of the massive artefacts that make the museum epic. The interactive media makes it an approachable experience, and each visitor can add to it.


What was the most challenging decision? The decision to stop trying to design experiences in the abstract and jump into prototyping, to make the designs real as


fast as possible. It was critical to move the project forward as for a while it wasn’t making much progress. It was all too abstract. This approach – we now call it “prototype first” – lets us and the client see what’s successful or not, enabling progress on even the most challenging project.


Which digital exhibit stands out for you? Timescape is an algorithmic exhibit that culls meaning from the 3 million-plus articles from 11 September 2001 to today. We authored an experience that creates links and meanings between these different articles. It’s updated daily. The timelines that it creates link today’s events back to the date of 9/11 and illustrate some of the causal roots of our post-9/11 world.


tell, stories that celebrate lives and remember people for the best of who they were,” she says. “The stories are not about how they died but about how they lived.” It’s debatable whether the commemo-


rative nature of parts of the museum corresponds to the typical definitions of what a museum is and should be. Hennes refers to an article in the New Yorker, pub- lished in July 2014, that questioned the case for the museum, saying “nothing is really taught .. [the designers] are in con- stant peril from the enormous American readiness to be mortally offended by some small misstep of word or tone. They can be felt navigating the requirements of interested parties at every turn.” Perhaps it’s because this event belongs


to everybody. For whatever reasons, everybody has a claim on this piece of history and, as Greenwald said, their own 9/11 story. So, isn’t it right to build a museum that can be something to


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everybody? The design teams see the museum as organic, evolving as years pass, as fresh audiences come, as the event moves out of memory – into a place more securely in the past than it is now. “To say a memorial museum is a


contradiction in terms is missing a fundamental point about the potential of a memorial museum, which is that it’s there to help society wrap a story around a traumatic event so it can come to terms with it. It’s a way of turning it into history,” Hennes says. “It’s about maintaining an alive awareness of the meaning of 9/11. It isn’t over. The events of 9/11 are a symbol of a larger and much more significant unfolding story. A museum which purely historicises would be out of place here.” “The museum should help visitors put their experiences into a more fully realised context; help them be more engaged in the complex post-9/11 world. That’s a radically different mission for a museum.”


Read Attractions Management online attractionsmanagement.com/digital


Without its human voices, faces and names, it would be a dissonant experience. And, it’s hard to imagine that a cold, hard, faceless version would be well received by the visitors who arrives from all over the world, people who have been there, as Hennes points out, in some way, before. The repercussions of 9/11 reach beyond Manhattan, after all. For Greenwald, that humanity is central.


“These were people just like you and me, who got up in the morning and went to work or boarded an aeroplane, and got caught in the vortex of a global event,” she says. “Over 90 nationalities were killed. They were from two to 85 years old, from every sector of the economy, every faith, every ethnicity. They were us.”


n For more on the 9/11 Memorial Museum see the Editor’s letter on page 7


AM 1 2015 ©Cybertrek 2015


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