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swinburne JUne 2009 Digital dust-off for history’s watch-houses story by Julian Cribb Digital revolution 20 One of society’s most cherished and once unchanging of institutions, the museum, is embarking on a vast transformation: glass cabinets are being replaced by photons, static displays by lively memories and experiences from the public itself, the locked-away vaults of knowledge by a new openness and a vivid discourse with society. The evolution of the very institution that for centuries has been our window to all other evolutions is an inventive response to a changing audience; an audience that needs new stimuli to satiate a human thirst that has not diminished – curiosity. “Curiosity drives the museum: it is why we created them,” says Swinburne University of Technology’s Associate Professor Angelina Russo of the Faculty of Design, who is examining how the digital revolution is sweeping a new freshness and meaning into bricks-and-mortar institutions with a somewhat dusty public image. “Curiosity drives their audiences; drives our need to find out about who we are and about the world we inhabit,” she says. However, the museum audience is changing. The ways people engage with the museum and what they expect of it are changing, quite radically, thanks to the new social media. Digital technology has heightened people’s expectations of engaging with other people; of a two-way flow of ideas, images and knowledge; of being able to gain immediate access to the information they want. ,, Museums are no longer only about exhibitions and entertainment. They are both the memory and the conscience of society, actively participating in and informing the public discourse on where we are going.” Associate Professor Angelina Russo These expectations of the digital generation are now reshaping the museum in ways as radical in the 21st century as were museums’ origins as a public display of previously inaccessible scientific knowledge in the 19th century. But they go further still. “Humanity faces enormous challenges – the climate, water, energy, food security – and people are looking for answers to these challenges,” Associate Professor Russo says. “Museums are trusted institutions for the imparting of knowledge, often historical but increasingly about our present and our future, and the great issues that concern us. They are no longer only about exhibitions and entertainment. They are both the memory and the conscience of society, actively participating in and informing the public discourse on where we are going.” Associate Professor Russo’s research at Swinburne is exploring how four museums – the Melbourne Museum, the Powerhouse Museum, the Australian Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution – are meeting the challenges of the digital age, and how they are using the new social media to learn and network as well to share and teach. The social media, she adds, are a good deal more than merely social. “People are using them to get new knowledge, make new contacts, share professional information and expertise, engage in interesting discussions, post forthcoming events and debate future practices with many, many participants.” illustration: sonia Kretschmar As a result, she says, museums are having to emerge from the ‘glass case’ era. “To remain relevant these great institutions have realised they have to change, to acknowledge that their audiences have changed fundamentally in what they expect and how they are relating to other people and groups through social media.” Increasingly she predicts that museum ‘exhibits’ will consist of photons in cyberspace rather than specimens on fixed display. They will be living, with museums presenting their science and the public contributing its own knowledge and views. “You can see this happening right now on Flickr’s ‘The Commons’ project, where people upload a historical image and others, from all over the place, add their understanding or special knowledge to build a much more detailed and interesting story. Museums can contribute to this process by sharing the treasures hidden in their collections and archives – and input from the audience can make the display vibrant, interactive, much richer and more dynamic even than the best exhibit.” Museum workers too are networking online and around the world to share ideas on how to get the best from the digital age, she adds (see http://museum30.ning.com). How museums do their business may, at first glance, seem of lesser significance when contrasted with the weighty issues of the day. However, museums are also the guardians and definers of a nation’s culture and heritage and of how it sees and understands itself, both physically and as a society; they oversee something far more permanent than the crisis of the moment. Increasingly, Associate Professor Russo believes, they are a vital birthing suite for the future, a place where science and society come together, whether in a monumental building or in cyberspace. As such, the social media are helping to transform one of our greatest cultural institutions and thus further transform the society and nation that they serve. •• Contact. . Swinburne University of Technology 1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946) magazine@swinburne.edu.au www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine
June 2009 swinburne Will the ferryman come for climate refugees? story by Robin Taylor Tufitu Lotee has experienced the terror of huge ocean waves flooding her home. Tufitu and her family live on the islet of Fongafale on Funafuti atoll, the capital of Tuvalu, midway between Hawaii and Australia. Their house is on a 100-metre-wide strip of land between the Pacific Ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. Two years ago, in the early hours of an April morning, giant waves crashed over a levee bank of dead coral, flooding Tufitu’s house, and those of her neighbours, as she slept. Tuvaluans fear that the wave surge experienced that morning is just a frightening sign of things to come as global warming causes an inexorable rise in sea levels. The islands of Tuvalu are flat and extremely lowlying, only five metres above sea level at their highest point. The nation is expected to be one of the first to be drowned by rising seas. In 2008 David Corlett, adjunct research fellow in the Institute of Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology, spent three weeks in Tuvalu, speaking to people – including Tufitu Lotee – about their experiences and the possibility of being forced to leave their homes. The visit is recounted in his new book, Stormy Weather*, in which he looks at climate change through the Tuvaluans’ eyes, calling on the international community to act on the issue of climate change displacement. Already, Tuvaluans are experiencing the impact of rising sea levels on their staple food crop, a sweet-potato-like root vegetable known as pulaka. Families are having to raise the pit levels where they grow pulaka because incoming sea water is rotting the crop’s roots. Dr Corlett says that despite a global focus on climate change, the issue of protecting people directly affected by its consequences is largely being neglected. He says the 11,000 Tuvaluans represent just a small part of a broader displacement of potentially hundreds of millions of people because of changes to the Earth’s climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates a rise in average sea levels of 0.18 to 0.59 metres over the coming century. This is a conservative forecast compared with some studies that predict sea level rises of one metre every 20 years. This means it is not only people living on low-lying atolls who are at risk from rising sea levels. A sea level rise of one metre would leave almost 120 million people across Asia exposed. Australia too will have its challenges. Leader of CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship Dr Andrew Ash says a “planned retreat” will be the only option for some Australian coastal communities. Of course, Dr Corlett points out, for many Pacific Island communities retreat is not an option. Dr Corlett has a background in refugee protection and while he does not like the term ‘climate refugees’, which he says is legally meaningless, he believes the world needs to adopt a coordinated response to the issue of climate change displacement. “People fleeing environmental factors are different from refugees in that they are not facing persecution and normally do not cross international borders, but they are similar to refugees in that they are ‘forcibly’ displaced,” he says. Dr Corlett believes an international legal agreement is needed to ensure that people who are displaced by climate change can be protected. “With projections that tens or even hundreds of millions of people will be displaced due to climate change, the international community needs to establish an agreement that defines who might be entitled to protection as a result of climaterelated factors and what that protection might be,” he says. The UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines the need for protection from persecution but, for people displaced by climate change, at what point are they owed protection? When does an environment become uninhabitable? “These questions are complicated,” Dr Corlett says. “An environment that may be uninhabitable for one community may provide material sustenance or social and spiritual values to another.” Dr Corlett has seen first-hand what is at stake for people whose entire homelands could be submerged. He argues passionately for the international community to get behind mitigation and adaptation strategies. photo: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images * Stormy Weather: the Challenge of Climate Change and Displacement (2008) by David Corlett is published by University of New South Wales Press. Aside from trying to reduce the global consumption of greenhouse gases, he says the type of direct response is likely to be a need for technical interventions, such as sea walls, as well as building the capacity of governments and communities to respond to different levels of impact depending on their particular circumstances. While the Australian Government has committed $150 million over three years to help countries in the region adapt to climate change, Dr Corlett suggests that migration is another way for the global community to adapt to the dislocation consequences of climate change. Meanwhile the Tuvaluans are trying to adapt to rising sea levels now by replanting mangroves to curb coastal erosion and by establishing a marine sanctuary to protect coral and other marine resources. Tragically, Dr Corlett feels such efforts are likely to ultimately be futile. •• Contact. . Swinburne University of Technology 1300 MY SWIN (1300 697 946) magazine@swinburne.edu.au www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine environment 21
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