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The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant.

The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence.

The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences.

Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Post-War Germany and the GDR's Vision
• 00:59 The Planned City of Eisenhüttenstadt
• 3:00 Andrea Wieloch
• 03:15 The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life
• 03:56 Daily Life in the GDR
• 07:35 GDR History in modern Germany
• 14:43 Future Plans for the Museum
• 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

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Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsener. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started.

After World War II, all of Germany was in ruins. Almost nothing was left standing after 12 years of Nazi rule and 6 years of war. Mass migration, hunger, and homelessness defined the immediate post-war period as millions of displaced people sought to rebuild their lives among the rubble.

For the newly formed German Democratic Republic or GDR, the chance to start over – and demonstrate the utopia of the socialist system – took on a great importance. The East German government saw urban planning as a way to both solve the housing crisis and showcase socialist ideals through modern, centrally planned cities built from scratch. I visited one of these planned cities about an hour and a half east of Berlin.

Andrea Wieloch: Where we are sitting now was basically forest 75 years ago, and then they decided to plant a steel factory and a city around it. It was back in the days where there was really everything destroyed by war. An island of a real utopia with nice housing and facilities for everyone. So people from all over GDR came here and when the city was first founded, it was called Stalinstadt. So, “city of Stalin”.

Stalinstadt, which started being built in 1951, is now called Eisenhüttenstadt, which literally means Iron Hat City for the steel plant. Planning and building a new city and a steel factory in a place that was just a forest during the Nazi regime was a sharp break with the past – the planned city reminds me of parts of Bulgarian cities also built in the socialist times, and unlike most places I’ve visited in Germany, I’m not immediately on the lookout for dark signs of the Nazi past. I can imagine the relief of this place for the first people who moved here. Maybe, for a moment, it did feel like utopia.

Of course, this utopia didn't actually happen, no utopia has. But the GDR lasted about 40 years and those 40 years covered a lot of daily life. I'm here to visit a museum that puts the tension of utopia right in the name: the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.

Andrea Wieloch: I do like the space in between utopia and daily life. That is my focus, that tension or ambivalence. And I'm frankly not really interested in utopia, I think, because it's a mind fabricated thing and I do like the blood and flesh kind of reality.

This is Andrea Wieloch, director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.

Andrea Wieloch: Hello, my name is Andrea Wieloch. I am a German museum professional and I am the director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.

The museum – a kind of documentation center of everyday life in the GDR – is built inside a former kindergarten which opened in 1953. The central staircase still features the original, very colorful, stained glass windows by Socialist Realist artist Walter Womacka depicting children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity.

Wieloch says that a big part of the collection comes from a public announcement for people to bring in objects that they wanted to save. Today the collection has 170,000 objects of everyday life and of every aspect of GDR life. The permanent exhibition, which opened in 2012, called Everyday Life: GDR, uses these objects to give the visitor an introduction to politics, society and everyday life in the country.

Right inside the entrance to the museum, under the stained glass kindergarten scene, is one of these objects: a rusty TV antenna.

Andrea Wieloch: The antenna you see in the front is a really great example for a life hack, basically, because someone did it himself.

People living in Eisenhüttenstadt could fashion an antenna to get western television broadcasts in part because of their proximity to West Berlin and favorable terrain. It started as something you could do if you were brave enough to do something forbidden, but by the 70s, it became a special privilege.

Andrea Wieloch: One privilege you would get here but only starting in the late 70s was getting West TV and radio, which was forbidden. But they needed workers, so that was a privilege here, not in other parts of the country.

Amazing. Well, it also illustrates, so before it was a privilege, it was a hack. And I feel, feel like that is the bridge between utopia and daily life. It's because , in a true utopia, there would be nothing to hack because everything is already perfect.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah and that's a two-way street. You go from hacking to utopia again, because of course in the 40 years that the GDR was existing, there were really waves. And you've seen upstairs the new exhibition we are putting on with plastic furniture, that was a wave of utopia again, in order to also make people not jealously look at the West, but really a propaganda to really tell we are able here, we are future, we can send a man to the moon as well, kind of, you know.

The privileges associated with working in the Steel Factory is an example of the centrality of work in the way this utopia was structured.

Andrea Wieloch: All aspects of life in the socialist society were organized around work. Which means your housing was organized around work. The way you made holidays, where you would put your children to kindergarten or school, how you would spend your free time. There were club houses all over the city. There were artists coming into the factories and the worker was very well taken care of in the socialist society. And here in that city, it meant you had a beautiful flat, you had all the facilities that would really enable you to be a good worker, be at work and not think of anything else.

Wieloch was born in 1983 in the GDR, and so has a better memory of the period after 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR dissolved, and the process of German reunification began.

Andrea Wieloch: I was six years when the Wall came down and I was living with my family at the Polish border, so really far away from what was happening. And I remember my parents sitting in front of the TV and relatives coming in and that it was something special, I remember that. But besides that, I'm more shaped by the reality of the 90s, mass unemployment and lots of friends leaving the area with their families in order to look for better places and a more prosperous life.

The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life, and the way it presents the history of the GDR, is unique in Germany.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think we are talking about a very young history. And it's – I hope I get the word right – it's a contested history. It's one that is not set yet. Where we know no history is set, but as soon as people who can talk about the history aren't there anymore, we rely on what we by then have agreed upon. And there are very different ways in which the history of GDR got told within the last, let's say, 30 years.

Wieloch says that she’d classify four types of museums that interpret the history of the GDR in modern Germany. The first is the entertaining museum, places like the slick GDR Museum in Berlin which caters to international tourists and highlights the most daring escape stories. Then there’s the museums, mostly founded by the government, which talk mostly about GDR's dictatorship and the oppression. The third is so-called “wild” or “amature” museums, where individual people, often not tied to any public institution, just collect the things they love and, of course, entangle their own memory into their collections.

Andrea Wieloch: And the fourth place kind of is our museum, which to look into all this life and find the ordinary and the extraordinary there, but also ask about structures and about various perspectives. And that way we attract not only visitors from all around the world. We also attract the neighbors, the schools, scientists, artists. Usually we attract people who are who like to read in between lines. All of them are getting into a really nuanced, interesting dialogue and it's always happening. And for me, the most exciting is, and then I really step back and just listen, when people who have experienced GDR talk to each other and they kind of compare their memories and they are not fixed with it. They are very open and flexible and they really get into questioning really what happened there, and did we interpret it right, or was it state ideology, and that's really awesome to see. I think it's just a great practice for life.

In my discussions with Wieloch, she underscored her feeling that many people from former West Germany haven’t taken the time to understand the experience of growing up in the East – and that museums like the GDR Museum in Berlin, while entertaining, aren’t helping.

Andrea Wieloch: We are very accepted by people who experienced the GDR because there's always this discussion, is that a western view on eastern history or is that something more outweighed? I don't know if that's the real – balanced. Is it more balanced? And, yeah, that's what you find here. Yeah. A lively discussion.

I noticed this lively discussion while I toured the museum. Groups of older people telling younger members of their family that the coffee thermoses were exactly the same ones in their kitchen or the ubiquity of one brand of baby powder.

Because material culture under the GDR was much more narrow than it is today, it is likely that your uncle had the exact same motorcycle, or your dad had the exact same portable radio on display.

I toured with my mom, who was raised in socialist Bulgaria, and she noted the similarities in the outfits of the “young pioneer” uniforms she used to wear and the graphic design of propaganda posters.

Andrea Wieloch: I want to create a space that raises questions. That's also a safe enough space for you to take the creative risk and maybe think twice and think if I just correlate your own memory and knowledge with it and and then get into a conversation. That's the aim that we have here. Therefore, we invite different people and in groups with their own practices and questions in order to really enrich the conversation, because it's complicated and we like it that way. You know, it's it's ambivalence.

Ian (in room) yeah. And it's also noticeably different from the way that the. media in the GDR operated because it's complicated was not the message. The message was actually it's simple and these are the reasons and if you are a pioneer and that means that you enjoy sport and you love to be clean and you love your parents and you love the workers and there is no, there's no ambiguity in there. And I think it's also what you've demonstrated is that you can also have that same kind of simplicity on the other side of the wall. And so creating a space where you say it's complicated is somewhat radical in itself.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think it is. And we all struggle with being okay with all the ambivalences and with not knowing the right or wrong answer. And it would be a mistake to paint the history here too sweet now, just because we don't concentrate on the repressive aspects. But I think it's for those people who experience GDR. It was their life. Just imagine someone comes to you and tells you the way you lived, you loved, you raised your children, you worked, you looked at everything is wrong. I think it's as damaging as to tell someone you're always right with things.

The museum seems so effective at addressing the audience of people who are familiar with the GDR, that it makes me wonder how the museum approaches today’s young people who never lived through it.

Andrea Wieloch: Yeah. You're putting the finger right into our most vulnerable spot because it's mostly like that. A family comes in of different generations and then one teaches the other. That's how it works in the moment. But that is a big thing. But actually the new generation is very interested. So especially also foreigners, there are less clichés or less prejudice that way and big openness. So yeah, I have the feeling the interest is rather rising because people who lived here for a long time, they also want to see something new and not always circle around themselves.

There are plans for a permanent exhibition, with a target open date of 2029. The revamp would use some of the adjacent buildings as a campus with more room for programs and storage.

Andrea Wieloch: And we want to, first of all, give you a closer look into to our storage. And then we would like to really take all those questions and practices that all our cooperation partners brought here and discuss them with the audience to have different displays for parts of our collection that show the collection and show you already what is that material world that we are collecting in the museum world, we are really in the peripheral area. So Berlin is close enough for us to have visitors from a metropolitan audience too. But it is also too far away to be gaining from the prosperous big city. So we are in a city that was ahead a 56,000 inhabitants now has 24,000 inhabitants. 40% of them are over 65. And we have a wonderful task to address a metropolitan or even international audience, and then also be relevant for the community we have here. So you asked me for children, I can tell you our program for dementia. So we're working with the school that educates people in the care sector. And they have 600 students. And with them we developed a program with all day, everyday objects and from the GDR. And they bring them either to the care homes or people from care homes come here. And we do a lot of programming around that target group. I think that's really my focus. The museum as a set of cultural techniques, a toolbox to know the world, to get a hold of the world, and to also find a consciousness around those tools that you're using. So it's still a long way to go and a lot of money to collect. But yeah, that's what we do right now.

The everyday experience of the person plotting their daring escape was different from the person just trying to get by and they both were different from the worker content to set up a better antenna to enjoy western TV shows. But in the GDR at least, they may have all been drinking out of the same type of coffee thermos. And you can see it at the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. This has been Museum Archipelago.

In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology.

While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust.

Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 Auction of the U.S. Constitution
• 00:43 Constitution DAO
• 01:36 The Role of Governance Tokens
• 02:02 Nik Honeysett
• 02:45 Balboa Park Online Collaborative
• 04:29 Museums and Crypto
• 05:24 Blockchain and Provenance
• 07:40 Smart Contracts and Museum Governance
• 09:56 The Outcome of the Auction
• 11:58 Museums as Trustworthy
• 14:00 Museum Archipelago Ep. 39. Hans Sloane And The Origins Of The British Museum With James Delbourgo
• 16:41 Conclusion and Future of Crypto in Museums
• 17:44 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month.

Join Club Archipelago

Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show.
• 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us.
• ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

Transcript

Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 107. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

In November 2021 an extremely rare, first printing of the U.S. Constitution was available to buy at auction. While the item was special – only 13 copies existed according to the auction house – the bidders were the usual assortment of wealthy individuals.

Auctioneer: “And now let's begin the auction. Lot 1787. The United States Constitution. We’ll start the bidding here at 10 million dollars. 11 million.12 million ”

Except for one. Among the individuals trying to buy the Constitution was not an individual at all. It was a new kind of organization – a decentralized autonomous organization better known as a DAO. This organization, ConstitutionDAO, had formed just a few weeks earlier for this exact purpose – to buy the Constitution.

I remember the memes – backers of the project posted images of Nicolas Cage in 2004’s National Treasure, drawing parallels between his character’s fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and this real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.

In the weeks leading up to the auction, thousands of people contributed money to ConstitutionDAO using the cryptocurrency Ether. That money funded the bid – the amount ConstitutionDAO could pay to try to acquire the constitution. What the contributors were actually buying was a so-called governance token: governance rights, the ability to vote on what to do with the Constitution, specifically, which museum to send it to, and what text would be displayed next to the document in the gallery.

Nik Honeysett: The ConstitutionDAO is an interesting example of the public claiming back ownership of a document that, you know, really should be owned by the public. And I think, you know, that's the challenge for museums.

This Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, California.

Nik Honeysett: Hello, my name is Nick Honeysett. I'm CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, known as BPOC. We are a nonprofit, technology and strategy company located in San Diego's Balboa Park, which is a cultural park of about 30 institutions. And we provide a range of services on a shared service model. And we also work with museums across the U. S. and outside the U.S. largely providing digital strategy, to help organizations figure out what they should be trying to figure out as we enter a more prevalent digital world.

The genesis of BPOC came in the early 2000s. Because there’s such a high density of museum institutions in San Diego’s Balboa Park, museums realized they could pool their resources and they wouldn't need to start from scratch to build each individual institution’s technology stack,

Nik Honeysett: It's a very dense cultural environment. Some of the institutions are actually physically in the same building. There has to be an opportunity for us to do this collaboratively. To create a team of IT professionals that would provide IT support. So essentially a kind of separate IT service department that would serve the institutions. That they would pay for those services. So you were gaining the economy of scale. And so we did a lot of, in the early days, a lot of digitization, kind of collaborative digitization projects. We have a couple of collaborative infrastructure applications like digital asset management. And really the benefit is there's an altruistic need. So the larger institutions are offsetting the costs for some things for the smaller institutions. And we do serve some volunteer-only institutions and they have access to the same level of IT service and support that the larger ones do.

While BPOC’s shared service model pools resources from lots of different museums, it still operates as a normal organization with a board of directors and a CEO making decisions and some sort of legal counsel and a sustained collaborative relationship with museums. The focus is technology, but the methods are more traditional.

ConstitutionDAO, by contrast, was a spontaneous, decentralized effort to acquire a historical document that probably wouldn’t have been possible without crypto technology.

I’ve been working on this episode about crypto in museums for years: I recorded this interview with Honeysett in March of 2022, two and a half years ago. Most museum people I know are reluctant to talk about crypto for various reasons: concerns about the massive energy use of some blockchains, how from the outside, it looks like speculative hype cycle, and – maybe most importantly – there’s a wide cultural gap between the centralization of museum power and the decentralized ideals of blockchain culture. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t sound too appealing if your job is to make sure the ancient vases don’t shatter.

But I will argue that museums and crypto have some interesting overlaps. Museums and crypto both address the same fundamental issue: trust, and they seek to answer the same question: what happened?

Blockchains keep an unchangeable record of what happened, stored not in a warehouse or a datacenter, but distributed without a point of control or a single point of failure. The first and most famous use for these blockchains is to power cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they can do a lot of things, like, for example, provenance.

Provenance is the record of ownership and history of an item, tracking where it has been and who has owned it over time. Right now institutions like museums and auction houses handle provenance but maybe there are better ways.

Nik Honeysett: Provenance is extremely important in the museum world and I think provenance seems to be the ideal application for blockchain. Here is the irrefutable, definitive, provenance of this work. And we saw a huge issue with provenance, which is the Nazi era provenance issue, you know, when a lot of works of art disappeared from the record because they were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II. And there's been a lot of research to reestablish the true provenance of works of art and repatriate them, in certain circumstances. Collections held in the public trust need to be presented to the public. If you look at what really engages audiences, there are some emerging strategies that think about collection objects, as a sequence of experiences. The first experience is it was created. A painting was painted. The second experience is maybe shown in a show. The third is that it was sold to its first owner. And then it was transported and then it was acquired by a museum or whatever it is. So you have these sequences of experiences and the painting interacting with a whole set of things, again, all which happened in a particular sequence.

Of course, somebody still has to write these experiences onto the blockchain as they happen and museums might be well positioned to do this.

But if a future fascist regime steals an object, they would never be able to delete or destroy the record of who previously owned the object the way they can destroy a museum or its records.

We have one more crypto concept to dive into before we can get back to the story of ConstitutionDAO. When ConstitutionDAO pooled resources, the money raised to buy a U.S. Constitution, the idea was to govern the organization using a set of smart contracts, code that runs on a blockchain. And that's why it's different from asking a whole bunch of people to contribute to a bank account that one single person owns. Sure, the owner of that bank account might feel that they must listen to the community of contributors, but nothing is technically stopping them from spending the money however they feel like. Legally, they could face consequences for misusing funds, but the money could still be spent before any legal action takes place.

This is much different from a smart contract. You could set up a smart contract that ensures – technically – that the money cannot be spent unless 50% of governance tokens have voted in a certain way.

The reason to have this code on a blockchain instead of just somebody’s computer is that there’s a much greater degree of certainty that the smart contract will be executed correctly when spread across thousands of computers: someone can’t just unplug their computer and the smart contract fails to execute.

Nik Honeysett: I can see parallels in the museum world. A group of museums could come together to purchase a seminal work of art that would guarantee attendance at the blockbuster level and they would come together, they would purchase it and then they would share it. So it would be a work of art that would travel. The ConstitutionDAO, ultimately somebody has to receive that thing. So, this group comes together, they pool their resources, they secure ownership of this object. But then, someone is responsible for doing something with it. Yes, there's, it's kind of by proxy. So the group will vote on what they want to have with it. But at some point, you know, it translates to a physical series of actions.

The organizers of ConstitutionDAO said they had interested museums lined up with various proposals on how to store and display the Constitution, including the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library.

But they never got the chance. ConstitutionDAO got outbid, rather dramatically, by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

Nik Honeysett: And so part of me wonders. It would have been, as fascinating as it was, it would have been much more fascinating. And I don't know whether the folks behind it were experienced enough to receive something as important as that and what they would be able to do with it.

Ian Elsner: Right. I think at some point though, we will actually see that play out. I don't know if it's sometime this year, some other ConstitutionDAO will pop up for a different historical object, Someone would have to decide, okay, how do we ensure it during transport? And instead of that being a decision made by museums or other institutions familiar with historical stewardship, that might be put to a governance mechanism in the DAO. And, then all of a sudden it would be asking a huge number of people to decide together, to come to a consensus about what the best insurance policy is to take out during transport of the object, or however that works.

Nik Honeysett: But, you know, and the challenge with that is that, that group, you know, that governance group needs to be informed. There's a danger of damaging the object if you don't understand what is required in transportation of an extremely valuable work of art, you run the risk of losing it.

Ian Elsner: I'm kind of curious about, about how you feel, if you were to walk up to, to an object like a copy of the Constitution and, you saw that, okay, this is owned by a collection of people, not necessarily all Americans, but people who are united in their interest in owning a piece of this. But that's the only loose connection. How does that make you feel as a museum visitor?

Nik Honeysett: That, you know, that's a really good question because if the public hold museums in the highest regard in terms of trust. They are one of the most trustworthy entities. And if that wasn’t the case, if you're looking at an object. I guess it's, you know, as I'm thinking about it, it's no different than a donor who has lent a valuable work of art to the museum. Your interaction with that piece is in the context of the museum with which you hold high trust and high regard for. So I guess the, the fact that that governing body had determined that the museum was the best place to, albeit temporarily, house that object, would make me feel comfortable, to know that something of such foundational historical value is actually in an institution that I know has the highest practices to preserve it.

Ian Elsner: I'm glad you brought up trust because that's one of the applications of blockchain in general is that it allows for various systems to happen in a trustless environment. if the two of us enter into a smart contract, we don't have to trust each other. That the money will be distributed according to the terms of the smart contract, we just have to trust that the smart contract itself is trustworthy, And there's this sort of interesting tension between, between very trustworthy institutions and then this system which is designed for actors that don't trust each other.

Nik Honeysett: It's interesting to noodle down on that. And so, Inherently, you know, people trust museums because, A, because museums tell them that they're trustworthy but B, you know, you can experience something and, and connect with your culture and your past and there's an implicit understanding that the museum is custodians of this thing and it's in his, you know, taking care of them and they'll see an object that might be hundreds of years old in pristine condition or something like that.

My theory is that museums have had two overarching eras: the power era and trust era. As we’ve discussed in previous episodes of Museum Archipelago, the first public museum that we would recognise as a museum was The British Museum in London, which opened in 1759. The point of the museum was to showcase the power of the British Empire, to indicate that anyone in London could see treasures owned by the most powerful people in faraway places. Slowly and over centuries, perhaps much more recently than we’re comfortable with, museums have entered their trust era.

Perhaps, museums are enjoying peak trust right now – scandals like museums naming buildings and wings after donations by the Sackler family, as well as the continuing holdover horrors from the time that museums were in their pure power era like decolonization and repatriation will slowly erode this trust. And the crypto world has so many scandals and general confusion that it’s certainly not trustworthy.

Nik Honeysett: I think partly for the public to generally accept the trustworthiness of the blockchain, they need to more tangibly experience it. So right now it's just, it's a couple of words and people don't really understand it

But the difference I think is that crypto technologies are built for a trustless world. Maybe, if we do start to see declining trust in museums, there’s some crossover appeal to bringing these crypto tools like blockchain-based provenance and smart contracts to the museum world.

Nik Honeysett: Museums they hold collections in the public trust. They are duty bound to be transparent in what they do, but they are clearly not. There is a lot of behind closed doors things going on. That would be a fantastically interesting governance model where everything is completely transparent if you translate you know, mission to smart contract right?

Nik Honeysett: So your mission is actually a smart contract with your community. What is the obligation that you set up in that smart contract that then , the public can hold you accountable for? We used to do this exercise, with museums and say, demonstrate unequivocally how your mission. Is being interpreted. Put some hyperlinks on your mission statement to where you've actually done what you said you did. But if that was open and transparent, that your mission was a series of smart contract statements that would be fascinating.

Immediately after Ken Griffin won the auction, it was announced that this U.S. Constitution would be temporarily loaned to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was put on display as part of the We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy exhibit in July 2022. Since ConstitutionDAO would have also displayed the document in a museum, not much is different from the outside. ConstitutionDAO made the refunds available for all contributors to claim and disbanded. Sometimes an organization only needs to exist for a short time and just serve a single purpose.

Museums should prepare for a world where a group of individuals, leveraging crypto technology, can plausibly – and maybe preferably – do things that were once only possible with museum institutions.

There’s still a lot of crypto to talk about and in part two I’ll dive deeper into projects that overlap with museums. Until then, this has been Museum Archipelago.

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned about the Panama Canal in school told a narrow story about the engineering feat of the Canal’s construction by the United States. This public history reflected the politics of Panama and control over the Canal.

Today, González is executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum, and she’s determined to use the Canal and the struggles over its authority to tell a broader story about the history of Panama – one centered around Panama as a point of connection from pre-Colonial times to the present day.

In this episode, González describes the geographic destiny of the Isthmus of Panama, how America’s ownership of the Canal physically divided the country, and how her team is developing galleries covering Panama’s recent history.

Topics and Notes

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:15 The Panama Canal's Politically Sensitive History
• 01:20 Ana Elizabeth González, Executive Director of the Panama Canal Museum
• 01:35 Opening of the Panama Canal Museum in 1997
• 02:44 Making the Museum About Panama, Not Just The Canal
• 03:10 Geography is Destiny
• 03:30 The Isthmus of Panama as a Point of Connection
• 04:20 A Brief History
• 04:50 French Attempt at a Canal
• 05:10 Treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla
• 06:30 Construction of the Canal
• 07:00 "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll"
• 08:00 Martyrs' Day
• 08:50 Work In Progress: Galleries of Panama's Recent History
• 09:10 Panama's Recent History, Briefly
• 11:10 The Museum's Future
• 11:15 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
• 12:20 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Support Museum Archipelago🏖️ Club Archipelago offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 98. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

When Ana Elizabeth González was growing up in Panama, the history she learned in school about the Panama Canal told a narrow story.

Ana Elizabeth González: The history of the canal that was told here was told in a way that was very politically sensitive at the time. So it didn't want to ruffle any feathers.. it's mentioned in schools, but not in depth.

Up until 1979, the United States fully controlled the Panama Canal and a 5 mile zone on either side, and until 1999, the United States jointly controlled the Canal with Panama. The presence of the United States, and the politics of the Canal, meant that the safest story to tell was one that was mostly focused on the technological feat of building it.

Ana Elizabeth González: The history was very carefully constructed so that it praised the engineering feat of the United States, but it completely ignored the fact that Panama was home to people from 97 different countries to build this Canal, which causes such a diversity in our country.

Ana Elizabeth González is now Executive director of the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City, Panama.

Ana Elizabeth: Hello. My name is Ana Elizabeth González and I'm executive director of the Panama canal museum, El Museo Del Canal.

González became director in 2020, but the Panama Canal Museum itself opened in 1997, two years before control of the Canal was returned to Panama. The museum – a non-profit which is not government funded – was created out of a hope that, among all the changes, Pamana’s complex relationship to the Canal would not be forgotten.

Ana Elizabeth González: I was in school at the time, but, I remember it was, I think the then President of Panama and the Mayor and a lot of other people that created the board of trustees and I think it was the idea that this history of this struggle to gain our land and to find our sovereignty and the generational struggle that had been going on. There was a fear that it would have gotten lost in memory or forgotten. So I think that the museum back then was created to preserve and study and research everything surrounding the Canal history and promoting the education of what an impact it had.

So for González, the Panama Canal Museum is really a museum about Panama.

Ana Elizabeth González: I think people come with the preconception that the museum is just going to be about how the Canal works and how the locks open fill with water. And we don't really have that in-depth here. That's why the Canal has a visitor center that explains how it works in terms of technology and engineering. But it's something we just brush over here because we deep dive into the history of Panama as a point of connection. And as this route that changed the world.

The first gallery of the museum begins long before the Canal and highlights the unique features of Panama’s geography: a small isthmus that’s both the only way to travel between the North and South American continents by land and also the narrowest land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Ana Elizabeth González: We've been a trade route or over a route of connection. Ever since Panama – well, the territory sort of resurfaced from, from the oceans, because we were always a bridge between north and south America for animal species and then indigenous peoples. So we've always sort of been a point of trade and contact both culturally and commercially. You enter, the first exhibition space, which is the sort of emergence of Panama as a land in this sort of Omni globe that we have, and you see how it connects both landmasses of North and South America. And you go through the exhibition towards the pre-colonial living traditions, and what Panama was like before the Spanish colonization, then the importance of Panama as part of the Spanish crown and monarchy until 1821.

After three hundred years as part of the Spanish monarchy, the isthmus’s geography started to look even more useful to outside interests during the 19th century, as global trade started to pick up. Here, goods and passengers could bypass a much longer and much more dangerous journey around the Strait of Magellan on the southern tip of South America. In 1855, a railway was built across the Isthmus, facilitating the movement of people and goods in time for a wave of the California gold rush.

Ana Elizabeth González: And then in 1881, if I'm correct, the French after the success of the Suez Canal, the French chose to build a canal through Panama. Unfortunately, due to yellow fever and other diseases and badly managed funds, the enterprise did not succeed, but it was bought from the French by the United States through the treaty of, Hay–Bunau-Varilla, which we signed upon getting our independence as a country.

The 1903 treaty of Hay–Bunau-Varilla granted the United States complete ownership over a 50 mile long slice of land that was to be the Canal. In the gallery, visitors walk through a hallway that’s completely covered in words from that treaty. Powerful words like “perpetuity” and “authority” look down on them.

Ana Elizabeth González: The United States had rights for… well for forever it wasn't even a question of whether or not they owned it. They owned the land where it was going to be built and the land where they had to operate and the land where they had to create their offices and their ports. Back then the country was completely divided, through a gap that was considered the canal zone. And that was United States territory and Panimanians were not free to wander into it, and it did separate the country in a massive way. And that treaty, which no Panamanian negotiated or signed, was actually the seed of our struggle with international relations during the whole 20th century until the CanalI was transferred back to Panama in 1999.

But first the massive task of actually constructing the Canal through that slice of land. The project required enormous numbers of people, and Canal administrators tried to entice workers from all over the world to take part in the project – yet another way that this isthmus was at the forefront of a more globalized world.

Ana Elizabeth González: We had people obviously from the Caribbean, we had people from Europe. We had people from Asia. So there's a big mix and such a big diversity that came with the construction of the Canal.And many of them remained in the country after the Canal was built and they made their life here, but what is also not known is the amount of racism and discrimination that these people faced. Because in order to work in the Panama Canal construction, you were assigned either a gold roll or a silver roll.

So the payroll was either you were paid in American gold or in Panamanian silver and the American gold was reserved for white Americans. And sometimes there were some exceptions with some Europeans, but the remainder of the population whether you were Asian, Caribbean, European, or even Panamanian, you were paid in Panamanian silver. The living standards for silver roll were appalling. The law even, because I'm assuming some of it was important from the Jim Crow laws at the time, they had segregated entrances for silver roll and gold roll. The schools were segregated. And this is a history that not many people in Panama or elsewhere know. And I think a lot of that ripples into certain racial tendencies and racism that permeates through our society today.

After taking people through the construction of the Canal, the museum’s exhibits end abruptly in 1964, with an event known as Martyrs' Day in Panama.

Ana Elizabeth González: And it ends in 1964 because we had a very significant moment in history at the time where students from a high school in Panama peacefully protested with their flag towards the Canal Zone. And there was a scuffle, there were a lot of tensions and in the end, many of the students died, shot by Canal Zone police, or otherwise, and the flag was torn. And at that moment, Panama became the first country to break diplomatic relations with the United States. And we still commemorate that day as the day of the Martyrs' that day. And that was a turning point in the negotiations of a new treaty. For the Canal and that's where we are at the moment, because the next exhibition rooms are completely empty at the moment. We're continuing to renovation plans for those.

González and her team are developing the galleries that feature the rest of the story, up until the present day – this includes the Torrijos–Carter Treaties in 1977 which defined the handover of the Canal at the end of the 20th century, and the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. When the new galleries open, it will be the first time much of this history has been presented in a Panamanian museum.

Ana Elizabeth González: Yeah, it's our next challenge. Many people may not know this, in 1968 we had a coup d'état. the government was deposed and we had a military regime and it's a history that not many Panimanians talk about till this day. There's still a lot of sensibilities I think that could be hurt, from it because there are still people around that were part of both the military regime and families of the victims it disappeared. But it was a big part of our history and it was a big part of the negotiations for the canal because, general Omar Torrijos who signed the Canal treaty with president Carter from the United States was in fact that a dictator and not many, not everybody agrees on that terminology, but, he eliminated political parties. He eliminated media that was not government controlled. We had another dictator until 89 when the United States following a clause from the treaty from 1903, and also 77, which said, they can invade Panama at any point where they, when they think that Canal is being endangered, invaded the country to a lot of human losses, but managed to successfully arrest our dictator.

All of that is a very difficult history to share. And I think that's why maybe in 97 when the museum was created. It was still too soon. But it's something that we're definitely going to tell now. And I think it's going to be a really important dialogue with the people's Panama to remember maybe parts of history that are hurtful to remember, maybe embarrassing to remember, but that need to be remembered in order not to be repeated. So that's our next step.

González says that the new galleries featuring recent history will be open in September 2022. In the century since the Canal was built, the globe has only become more connected – and the Canal remains the world’s biggest trade route. González is sure that Panama’s place as a global point of connection will only grow – and wants to make sure there’s a museum that tells that story.

Ana Elizabeth González: I think it's important for people to know the Canal is not just a recent history. To know that Panama has been a link between peoples and. cultures and points of trade since we've existed is quite important. We've been geographically blessed and such a small country plays such a big impact in the world that it's an honor for me to direct the museum that tells that story.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

Museum Archipelago is turning 100 and you’re invited! Whether this is your first episode or your 98th, I’m so happy you’re listening. How I want to celebrate is by hearing from you. To do that, I’ve set up a place on the internet where you can send a voice memo to be included in the 100th episode.

There, you’ll be presented with two questions: one, where do you listen to Museum Archipelago, and two what museum would you like to hear about on a future episode of the podcast. You can answer by recording yourself, or just writing in a text field.

Visit museumarchieplago.com/party to join the celebration. Looking forward to seeing you, and thanks for listening!

Museum Archipelago is an ad-free, listener supported podcast, guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Thanks so much to everyone who supports the show by being a member of Club Archipelago. You can join them by going to http://jointhemuseum.club. Thanks again for helping make this show possible.

For a full transcript of this episode, as well as show notes and links, visit museumarchipelago.com. Thanks for listening. And next time, bring a friend.

This week, we visit two museum works by architect Santiago Calatrava: the Prince Felipe Museum of Science in Valencia, Spain and the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, USA. Both museums look nothing like the museum icon on maps and in mapping programs. Do these facades have anything to say about about what the museum icon might look like in 50 years? Do these buildings even make good museums?

Correction: This episode misidentifies the Milwaukee Art Museum as the Milwaukee Public Museum. 

Notes: 

Santiago Calatrava - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

City of Arts and Sciences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Milwaukee Art Museum | Museum Info

Most of the time, nothing.

This week, special guest Carole Sanderson of the National Roller Coaster Museum and Archives describes the process and challenges of documenting the entertainment industry.

Notes:

Six Flags New Orleans - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

National Roller Coaster Museum: Welcome

Matterhorn Bobsleds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Special thanks to Carole Sanderson

Until Muzeiko opened in Sofia, Bulgaria on October 1st 2015, there were no children’s museums in the Balkans. 

One of the reasons for the lack of children’s museums was a cultural attitude towards childhood education during communist times, according to Vessela Gercheva, the Programs and Exhibits Director for Muzeiko.

In this episode, Museum of Museums visits Muzeiko to find a shifting attitude towards children's education. 

Notes:

Muzeiko - Official Site

A Children’s Museum Comes to Bulgaria - NYT

Image: Monika Bernotas and her family interact with statues of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that were previously located in the cities of Lithuania at Grutas park.

Go to the central square of any Soviet influenced country like Lithuania, and you will find empty pedestals.

The pedestals used hold monuments to Soviet leaders. Where there once were statues of Lenin and Stalin, you now find overgrown bushes and pop-up cell phone stores. 

Where are the statues now? In Lithuania, they are in a pseudo-theme park called Grūtas Park or, unofficially, Stalin World.

With special guest Monika Bernotas.

Notes and Links: 

Grutas Park and the Fate of Soviet Statuary in Lithuania

Grūtas Park - Wikipedia

Music composed by Adam Emanon from his album for rest (2008). Used under a Creative Commons licence. 

 

Built in 1966, the Bison Hunt on Horseback diorama at the Milwaukee Public Museum is a throwback to an older style of exhibit, without projectors or screens. In this epsiode, Dr. Ellen Censky, Senior Vice President and Academic Dean at the Milwaukee Public Museum, talks about the diorama and modern exhibit design.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.

As one of the nation's most-trusted category of institutions, museums project an enormous amount of authority over their subject matter. In this episode, Seb Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Technologies at Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, talks about the ways that museums can share that authority with museum visitors comfortable with a less top-down approach to authority.

For discussions on how museum's got to amass so much authority, stay tuned to Museum Archipelago.

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or even email to never miss an episode.

Unlock Club Archipelago 🏖️ If you like episodes like this one, you’ll love Club Archipelago. It offers exclusive access to Museum Archipelago extras. It’s also a great way to support the show directly.

Join the Club for just $2/month.

Your Club Archipelago membership includes:

• Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don’t make it into the main show;
• Archipelago at the Movies 🎟️, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies that take place at museums;
• Logo stickers, pins and other extras, mailed straight to your door;
• A warm feeling knowing you’re supporting the podcast.

Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 3. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

View Transcript

[Intro]

When we walk into a museum, we trust that the objects laid out across the table are done so with some expertise. Who gets to decide where those objects go? In a school, the teacher is the authority. In a household, the parent might be the authority. And sometimes the museum can lend the parent some authority.

Seb Chan: When I was working in a science museum, we would always talk about making sure that the labels had enough nuggets for the parents to feel smart.

This is Seb Chan, Director of Digital and Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Seb Chan: The kid would ask, "What is that, mom? What is that, dad?"

Seb Chan: And mom or dad would look at the label and they would need to be able to glean, in a second or two, two or three main points about that thing and one that would make them seem really smart to their kid.

That's delightful.

Seb Chan: And it was a tactic that you know you employ in museums because you're not designing it for the kid to read, you're designing it for the parent to read, and the parent needs to feel that they are smart in conveying this information to their child. They also need to feel that they can trust that.

Our topic today is museum authority, specifically museum authority in a world increasingly comfortable with user generated content. Our story begins in 1994 at the National Air and Space Museum. The museum plans and exhibit on the Enola Gay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Critics of the planned exhibit, particularly U.S. Veterans Groups charge that the exhibit focused too much attention on the Japanese casualties inflicted by the atomic bomb rather than on the motivations of the bombing or the discussion of the bomb's role in ending the conflict with Japan. Who gets to decide? In the earlier age, this decision is simple, it's the authority of the state. The official reason for dropping the bomb was what would be reflected in the museum. In 1994, you had the debate over the moral and military reasons for dropping the bomb play out in the context of an exhibit that hadn't opened yet. The Smithsonian canceled the exhibit and the Director of the National Air and Space Museum resigned.

Seb Chan: I mean, the Enola gay at the Smithsonian is one of the canonical examples in museum studies. I mean, everyone who studies museums looks at that and looks at it almost as a cautionary tale of what happens in a politicized situation.

This is Seb Chan again.

Seb Chan: But I think what is important going forward and particularly in a time where more people have more voices and we can hear global perspectives. There are alternatives to traditional mainstream media. There are alternative political viewpoints available to us, perhaps not always accessed and utilized, but available to us at least. Museums more than ever need to be confident in presenting and arguing potentially controversial and difficult subject matter and they need to stay the course, I think.

Why I like this story is that the controversy happened before the idea of user generated content was widespread. What would it look like today? Today, many museums allow visitor input. It doesn't have to be fancy. Sometimes it's a pile of pens and the stack of sticky notes on which visitors are invited to write about the memories of the Kennedy assassination like they are at the Newseum in Washington D.C. Sometimes it's a more elaborate system like the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City where visitors' stories are displayed elegantly on the wall. We call this a participatory museum, but where does the authority come from in a participatory museum? Surely, we don't want the person next to us telling us about history. We don't want the creationists telling us about how evolution works.

Seb Chan: And I was thinking about this when I was traveling through Arizona and Utah, traveling through those areas, and I came to the Natural History Museum in Utah, a fabulous museum, one of the best museums with fossils and dinosaur skeletons. And you think about that area and you think about the deep time that is evident as you pass through it, and the museum is providing tangible proof for evolution and tangible proof for a very old earth.

So there is authority in the size of an exhibit space. Thinking of exploring a giant virtual world, I asked Seb about authority in video games. Perhaps there is some authority in the game system. It certainly feels super special when you find a hidden room or a secret passageway in an environment.

Seb Chan: A player who gets immersed in a game, tries to figure out the rules, and so when I'm playing a video game or I watch my kids playing video games, they are testing the boundaries of the world and trying to figure out how the rules work in it and how to figure out the story, how to figure out the story and the game mechanically. The museum is itself like a video game. There's a series of rules and once you learn the rules of the museum, you can understand it, you can have a mastery of playing museum. You can learn the words that art curators mean when they say things on those object labels. You can interpret that. That's mastery of museums. You can do exhibitions well, you can understand what a non kind of linear narrative really means.

Seb Chan: I think it's actually very hard to build a mastery of museums because museums don't often consciously worked towards making those rules explicit in a way that visitors can understand them.

A participatory museum can also be thought of as analogous to Web 2.0, the idea that software gets better the more people use it. But Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and the author of the book, The Participatory Museum, argues that participatory museums only get half of Web 2.0 right. She says that there are two tent poles to Web 2.0. The first is that users do something that generates information like uploading a picture or editing a post. This is what museums do now by allowing visitors to upload their own experiences. The second tent pole of Web 2.0 is that the system adapts to those changes to create a better experience. Think of how YouTube will always generate a new recommendation, a recommendation compelling enough for you to click on. Museums don't make it clear how the information you're uploading will be used. Nina Simon says that's as if Netflix encouraged its users to rate movies they've seen but not provide better recommendations based on their input.

Without the second tent pole of Web 2.0, the majority of visitors, the visitors who don't think they have anything to add, are underserved by the exhibits that invite you to add your own voice. Who wants to drop a slip of paper into a comment box? But now let's imagine a share your own story exhibit that acts in the way that we're already comfortable with acting on the web. The most interesting stories would land at the top providing a much better experience for the majority of visitors who have no intention of adding something to the conversation. So let's take this one step further. Instead of just being able to rate user contributions, there's now a robust tagging system, the type that museum visitors have already been comfortable with on the web for over a decade.

For our modern day and Enola Gay exhibit, let's picture this tagging system. Users can add whatever they want, whatever opinions they have, and thanks to rating and tagging, the opinions slowly organize themselves along axis from pro atomic weapon to anti atomic weapon. Like video games, the authority in the museum should come from users trusting the system, not the institution itself. Wikipedia has authority because we trust the way the system works, not because we trust the people contributing to it. There's no reason why museums should be any different. If your job is to display only one quote, you have to choose a well rounded quote. How do you choose a well rounded quote for dropping an atomic bomb? But if you display multiple extreme points of view, you won't have a well rounded quote, but you will have a well rounded exhibit.

This has been Museum Archipelago.

[Outro]

Early 20th century cartoons showed exhausted visitors craning their necks to read labels and stopping over to examine artifacts. What's the story 100 years later?

Topics and Links

Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach by Beverly Serrell

MUSEUM FATIGUE, 1928, JAMA

Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or Spotify to never miss an epsiode.