The Role of a Mediator in the Participatory Practices in the Museum (Mediation and Facilitated Discussion)

Abstract

719 Abstract: In the era of the participation culture “viewer-inclusive” methods of communication in the museum have become in demand almost everywhere. The authors pose a question to the master of such a communication practices role. Analyzing participatory practices in terms of the achieved results, the authors appeal to the experience of art mediation (D. Malikova, E. Kochukhov, M. Lind, C. Mörsh), the VTC method (A. Housen, P. Yenawine) and its version adapted for Russian students — facilitated discussion (N. V. Ievleva, M. V. Pota-pova). The master of participatory practices acts as a part of an art environment. The master determines the perception and description norms for an art object, even if the traditional position of the teacher and expert is deliberately reject-ed. The development of creative thinking is the result of both methods. But if facilitated discussion primarily develops aesthetic literacy, then art mediation expands the museum communicative environment, attracting visitors from different demographic and psychographic groups and numerous communities. to the communicative one. Analyzing the specifics of participatory museum practices, we rely on the one hand on philosophical studies of the aesthetic perception, on the other on the experience of applying new methods and their understanding in the framework of Abstract . In the framework of the project “Scaling social memory of generations in ‘historically’ and ‘newly’ industrialized cities” we have studied various organizations associated with commemoration work. We have interviewed people and have had excursions in various museums: school museums, town museums, local history museums, and corporate museums. All in all, we have visited 11 corporate museums in several cities of Ural region. Certainly, now the best equipped museums are corporate museums of economically booming plants. They are supplied with state-of-the-art equipment that allows them to create fundamentally new expositions, change the traditional canon of the exhibition and storage of museum collections. Nevertheless, not all corporate museums follow this route, there are some which maintain traditional practices of housing exhibits. How do corporate museums of towns and cities of the Ural region work today? How would museum staff like to change their work with regard to use of multimedia technologies?