The Academy of New Media

The Academy of Natural Sciences was a really great place for the last of museum visits. Though it falls under the classification of the Wagner Museum (science), The Academy of the Natural Sciences was a great look into the progression of the museum world. While we were visiting, we got a rare inside look into the lives of museum workers and also the start of a brand new exhibit. The exhibit is called "Inside the Diorama" which is going to attempt to give vistiors a look into how the Academy of Natural Sciences was created. It will depict how the Academy's diorama's are crafted and give visitors a chance to see the "behind-the-scenes" of how the Academy's exhibitions are crafted. The idea of showing the public the manipulation that is used by museums to display their collections may be baffling to some but this trend is based on the public's desire to get a real interactive experience from their museum visit. As Michelle Henning describes in her, New Media essay, "The anxious desire for transparent communication has shaped the deployment of new media in museums, in particular, interactive new media."(p.311). Because the public wants to become more involved with the history they are trying to learn, museums are working towards finding new ways to teach their visitors. The inside the diorama exhibit will let museum visitors experience old media in a new way. What the Academy of the Natural Sciences is doing is pretty ground-breaking because they are on of the first museums that I have seen that is taking the old media and resources it has and updating them to "fit in" with 21st century learning and life minus the fallback onto "hyper-technology". [Computers at every corner, touchscreens and the like] Although they are not the first to make their museum exhibits interactive and more accessible to the visitor, they are breaking down the foundations of their museum in order to become more appealing. This new, interactive media has been changing the relationship with curators and their visitors. In Andrea Witcomb's Interactivity essay she describes interactivity from the curator's perspective, "...in employing interactives, curators in MacDonald's study felt they were empowering the visitor and thus becoming democratic in their museological practice..." (pg.355). And it does seem as if this new desire for interaction and control by the public is working to help people become more interested because they are allowed to shape their own experiences and also learn how museums function be there own curator. Hopefully visitors take advantage of this rare chance and really immerse themselves in the museum exhibit and learn something new.