September 2013 Café Scientifique
Noses, Buses and a Sailor's Foot – new ways to engage with Museum and Art Gallery collections
Simon Gould
Independent Curator and Producer
Staying relevant is no simple matter for museums, collections and galleries these days. Even a knockout collection displayed and interpreted with traditional methods doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. But if the exhibition is filled with touchscreens and Twitter channels, it’s easy to ignore the objects themselves! Just what sort of experience do we want to have when we visit a Museum, anyway?
Curator Simon Gould explores some exciting possibilities to make the objects, ideas and people that surround every collection more dynamic, participatory and relevant to new as well as existing audiences - just so long as the audience is willing to put in a little work.
Simon Gould has won several awards for his work at University College London, where he was Contemporary Projects Curator for UCL’s Museums and Collections between 2008-2011. A natural fan of all things interdisciplinary, Simon helped to pioneer exciting new ways for the museums to reinterpret their collections, engage different audiences and generally to work in new and genuinely innovative ways.