%0 Journal Article
%T Oramics to electronica: investigating lay understandings of the history of technology through a participatory project
%A Tim Boon
%A Merel van der Vaart
%A Katy Price
%D 2014
%V 
%N Autumn 2014
%K co-creation
%K co-curation
%K Daphne Oram
%K Oramics
%K public history
%K Science Museum
%X Oramics to Electronica was a 2011 Science Museum project designed to put the tools of museum participation in the service of research into public history, taking the history of electronic music as our example. The primary output was a temporary exhibition. Whereas the term ‘public history’ is often used to denote popularisation of academic history, in this inflection we are primarily concerned with how lay people like our visitors think about the past in general, and about the past of science and technology in particular. Taking the opportunities that arose, we worked with two ‘expert’ groups – of original 1960s participants in electronic music and of 12 recruited present-day music enthusiasts. We also enrolled a group of theatre students and another of writers to respond to the themes of the project and, in particular, to the ‘Oramics Machine’ a unique sound synthesizer created by Daphne Oram. In this essay, an account of our practice is bookended with consideration of related practice and reflections on the implications of the project. It is suggested that the project demonstrated the virtues of proceeding by way of engagement with micro-audiences to understand the ‘cognitive exclusion’ of potential visitors who do not see their interests represented in museum displays.
%Z The Oramics project was studied by the doctoral student Laurie Waller; his thesis contains a considered account, with an investigation of its implications in terms of science communication and gender issues; see Waller, Laurie, 2014, ‘Exhibition as Experiment: An Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology and Culture at the Science Museum’, PhD, Goldsmiths, University of London

%Z The accompanied visit programme has been run by the Science Museum’s Audience Research Department to help staff understand the visitor experience; staff are attached to recruited families or individuals and are led by the visitors, rather than providing a tour. They accompany the visitors in the sequence the visitors follow for as long as the visitors want to stay in the Museum, and are strongly discouraged from using inside knowledge to assist the visit; it is the staff member who is learning here.

%Z The use of the adjective ‘lay’ to describe the groups involved has been adopted for this essay with some deliberation. Terminology is difficult here: ‘general public’ implies a distinction between public and private that we do not wish to invoke; ‘amateur’ is a rich and complex word whose current dominant meaning is unhelpful; ‘participant’ we need for more precise use. While the term ‘lay’ clearly has religious origins (meaning someone who is not a member of the clergy), ‘layperson’ is used in this article according to its alternative definition of a person who does not have professional knowledge of a subject. However, the authors note that within the non-conformist tradition in the UK, laypeople also carry their own beliefs and interpretations of their faiths, even whilst they interact with priests. This is therefore a helpful metaphor for considering how people interact with exhibitions on science and technology. 

%Z A consensus conference, as developed in Denmark in the late 1980s, consists of an invitation to a lay audience to organise a conference for a general audience about a specific scientific topic with the aim of providing a better understanding of the subject through testimonies by a wide range of expert witnesses. Based on the information provided during the conference the lay panel writes a report, advising on the policy development related to the subject.

%Z The House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology delivered its Third Report in February 2000. The report highlighted the need to move from a deficit model to a dialogue model of the public understanding of science. See http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldselect/ldsctech/38/3802.htm

%Z See also SciDev.net: Gregory, J, ‘Public understanding of science: lessons from the UK experience’

%Z More recently, the participatory process has been extended to more historically themed galleries, such as the ‘Turing’ exhibition (2013) and the soon-to-open Information Age gallery. There has consequently been a growth of institutional expertise and staff confidence in this area. Participatory projects (including the Oramics exhibition discussed here) are evaluated by the Museum’s long-established audience research team, to gain insight and allow constant evolution of the exhibition development process. Findings from evaluation of the process and impact of participatory projects have largely been in the form of internal reports designed to improve both the Science Museum’s practice and visitor offer. But see, for example, ‘Naked Science: evaluation of eighteen months of contemporary science dialogue events’, Science Museum, supported by the Wellcome Trust, 2004. http://www.danacentre.org.uk/documents/pdf/front-end_evaluation_report.pdf

%Z We also gave the artist filmmaker Aura Satz access to the Oramics Machine, and showed her resulting film Atlantis Anew in the exhibition’s mini cinema.

%Z There was to have been a co-created display on the BBC 2LO transmitter (eventually this ambition metamorphosed into The Voice of the BBC, a small BBC 90th birthday exhibition in 2012; see http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/voice_BBC.aspx. For the Science gallery, we intended a display on South Kensington as a scientific place, and on nuclear power; these were abandoned when it was decided not to proceed with the gallery in 2011.

%Z The Radiophonic Workshop is already served by two books and much coverage beyond, not least in relation to its work on the Doctor Who series (Niebur, 2010; Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell,1983). EMS has seen less historical attention, but there is, as it were, a standard account (Pinch and Trocco, 2002, pp 276-301).

%Z The intended three sessions became two, and the second half of the first session was given over to an encounter between the original participants and electronic music enthusiasts (see below).

%Z So much so that some of the key themes were reproduced in a live witness seminar for the public in September 2012, of which a record film was made, which can be seen at: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/new_research_folder/Oramics Reunion page.aspx

%Z The high degree of abbreviation was a product of our concession to a labelling regime that demanded very short labels, as has become the fashion in many museums in recent decades.

%Z Circuit bending is a sub-genre of electronic music in which artists rewire sound-producing electrical tools, mostly children's toys, in order to create interesting sounds and sound-loops which can then be sampled and used in compositions.

%Z Three participants worked again with the Museum in 2014 as part of a group that extended participation into a democratic experiment in the collecting of music technology for the Museum.

%Z Although Laurie Waller has argued that the need to proceed sensitively with this group may have led to a reinforcement of their social exclusion. In this view, they ended up as outsiders to the otherwise inclusive approach of co-curation. See Waller, Laurie, 2014, ‘Exhibition as Experiment: An Ethnographic Study of Science, Technology and Culture at the Science Museum’, PhD, Goldsmiths, University of London, pp132–64

%Z Other museums have used this technique; see, for example https://en-gb.facebook.com/mrblobby.blobfish (accessed 10 June 2013).

%Z See the Facebook discussion started on 13 September 2011 on https://www.facebook.com/OramicsMachine (accessed on 8 September 2013).

%Z The song that was in fact commissioned for the broadcast was ‘All you Need is Love’ by the Beatles. This was not explicitly mentioned in the competition description, but we assumed that some of the contestants would research the topic and discover this information.

%Z These included both the German and US office of Soundcloud, which introduced a time difference that made instant email correspondence impossible.

%Z Exploring controversies in contemporary science has, since the late 1990s, been a normal part of the Museum’s programme, for example, the Science Box temporary exhibition series, Antenna ‘Talking Points’ (including a Euthanasia machine) and Antenna ‘Features’ on GM foods, the male pill, and the MMR vaccine, not to mention the Science Museum-designed Sellafield visitor centre.

%Z This was part of the AHRC-funded project, 'How should decisions about heritage be made?'; Co-designing a research project (AH/K006754/1).

%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/oramics-to-electronica/
%J Science Museum Group Journal