Museum Archipelago Ian Elsner

Since it opened in 1981 to celebrate the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, Buzludzha has centered the visitor experience. Every detail and sightline of the enormous disk of concrete perched on a mountaintop in the middle of Bulgaria was designed to impress, to show how Bulgarian communism was the way of the future – a kind of alternate Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains. Once inside, visitors were treated to an immersive light show, where the mosaics of Marx and Lenin and Bulgarian partisan battles were illuminated at dramatic moments during a pre-recorded narration.


But after communism fell in 1989, Buzludzha was abandoned. It was exposed to the elements, whipped by strong winds and frozen temperatures, and raided for scrap. Buzludzha has been a ruin far longer than it was a functional building, and in recent years the building has been close to collapse. Preventing this was the initial goal of Bulgarian architect Dora Ivanova and the Buzludzha Project, which she founded in 2015. Since then, Ivanova and her team have been working to recruit international conservators, stabilize the building, and fundraise for its preservation.


But Ivanova realized that protecting the building isn’t the end goal but just the first step of a much more interesting project – a space for Bulgaria to collectively reflect on its past and future, a space big enough for many experiences and many futures.


In this episode, we journey to Buzludzha, where Ivanova gives us hard hats and takes us inside the building for the first time. We retrace the original visitor experience, dive deep into various visions for transforming Buzludzha into an immersive museum, and discuss how the building will be used as a storytelling platform.


Image: Dora Ivanova by Nikolay Doychinov


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Buzludzha has always centered the visitor experience.
01:00 “A Tomorrowland in the Balkan mountains”
02:40 The Original Visitor Experience
03:02 Dora Ivanova
03:15 Museum Archipelago Episode 47
03:35 Entering the Building
04:25 How to Stabilize the Roof
05:58 New respect for the Buzludzha thieves
06:25 The Inner Mosaics
07:26 Narrated Light and Sound Show
08:25 Moving from Preservation to Interpretation
09:34 Ivanova’s New Motivation
10:20 Buzludzha as a Storytelling Platform
11:10 How Buzludzha Was Built
12:30 Acting before memory becomes history
13:00 Buzludzha’s fate as a binary
14:05 The Panoramic Corridor
15:00 The Care For Next Generation and The Role of The Women in Our Society
16:02 Some Personal Thoughts about a future Buzludzha Museum
17:20 The preservation as proof of change
18:05 “Buzludzha is about change”
19:15 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 101. 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 rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.


Buzludzha has always

In the early days of this podcast, every time I searched for Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top result would be a small museum in rural Finland called the Archipelago Museum.


As my podcast continued to grow and my search rankings improved, I didn’t forget about the Archipelago Museum. Instead, I wondered what they were up to. What were the exhibits about? Did they ever come across my podcast? Were they annoyed by my similar name?


And while the museum had a website and a map, there was no way to directly contact them. Years went by as the realization sank in—the only way to reach the museum was to physically show up at the museum. No planned appointment, no scheduled interview.


So, for this very special 100th episode, I went to Finland and and visited the Rönnäs
Archipelago Museum.


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Why is Ian in Finland?
00:45 Museum Archipelago's Early Days
01:30 Same Name
03:14 Arriving at the Archipelago Museum
04:05 Naomi Nordstedti
04:30 Life on the Archipelago
06:04 Opening the Museum
06:54 Boats
07:55 The Archipelago During Prohibition
08:28 Thoughts About 100 Episodes
10:40 Thanks For Listening
10:54 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 100. 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.


This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum.



Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”.


Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland”



But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago.



Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…”



When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands?


And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck.


Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland.



Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ”


Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left”



For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, i

The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games, so it lets them. The artifacts are fully-playable video games, from early arcade classics like PacMac to modern console and PC games, all with original hardware and controllers. By putting video games in a museum space, the Computer Games Museum invites visitors to become players.


But, players can become visitors too. Video games have been inviting players into museum spaces for decades. In the mid 1990s, interaction designer Joe Kalicki remembers playing PacMan in another museum – only this one was inside a video game. In Namco Museum, players navigated a 3D museum space to access the games, elevating them to a high-culture setting.


Since then, museums and their cultural shorthands have been a part of the video game landscape, implicitly inviting their players-turned-visitors to think critically about museums in the process.


In this episode, Kalicki presents mainstream and indie examples of video games with museums inside them: from Animal Crossing’s village museum to Museum of Memories, which provides a virtual place for objects of sentimental value, to Occupy White Walls where players construct a museum, fill it with art – then invite others to come inside.


Image: The Computer Games Museum in Berlin by Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0)


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 Computerspielemuseum Berlin
01:23 Joe Kalicki
02:06 Namco Museum
03:42 Digital Museum Spaces Elevating Video Games
04:26 Museum of Memories by Kate Smith
05:25 Occupy White Walls
07:18 Discovery Tour for Assassin's Creed Origins
10:11 Animal Crossing
11:29 Video Game Engines In Museums
12:44 Joe Kalicki’s new podcast, Panoply
13:13 Museum Archipelago's 100th Episode Party 🎉
13:44 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.



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 99. 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.


The Computer Games Museum in Berlin knows that its visitors want to play games. The central interpretive throughline, called Milestones, presents a timeline of the rapid development of the video game industry through 50 individual games: from Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT to the latest console and PC games.


But nearby, tucked into corners and side rooms, visitors are invited to play many of these games on their original hardware with original controllers.


The museum even goes so far as to emulate the spaces in which people would have been playing these games their year of their release: games like Asteroids or Space Invaders are presented in a full arcade-like environment, early home computer games like Oregon Trail live inside your parents home office, while the home-console classics like Super Mario Bothers are in a space made to look like a basement in an early 90s suburban home in the U.S.

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

As the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn’t make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered.


But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Nixon somberly reciting those words. It looks like real historic footage, but it’s fake. Artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund used the text of the original address and media manipulation techniques like machine learning to create the synthetic Nixon for a film called In Event of Moon Disaster. It anchors an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen.


In this episode, Panetta and Burgund discuss how they created In Event of Moon Disaster as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium.


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 July 18th, 1969
00:40 The Safire Memo
01:38 Clip From In Event of Moon Disaster
02:30 Nixon’s Telephone Call
03:00 What is Deepfake?
03:30 Halsey Burgund
04:06 Francesca Panetta
04:30 How They Did It
04:50 Why This Speech?
06:02 Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City
07:05 Misinformation By Editing
09:53 Misinformation and Medium
10:23 Museums as Trustworthy Institutions
11:27 What Would a “Deepfake Museum Gallery” Look Like?
13:43 In Event of Moon Disaster
14:00 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 97. 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.


On July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the Apollo 11 astronauts who were hurtling towards the moon, on their way to be the first humans to land on its surface, didn’t make it to the moon – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Nixon would have to address the nation.


So Nixon’s speech writer, William Safire wrote an address titled “In Event of Moon Disaster.” It’s a short, haunting speech – the first time that billions of people on earth would learn about the failed Apollo 11 mission. Safire notes that before delivering the speech, Nixon “should telephone each of the widows-to-be.” Widows-to-be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t be dead yet, just stranded on the moon with no hope of recovery.



Halsey Burgund: The astronauts are still alive. I mean that – every time I even th

Public historian and writer Tegan Kehoe knows that museum visitors act differently around the same object presented in different contexts—like how the same visitor excited by a bayonet that causes a triangular wound in an exhibit of 18th-century weapons could be disgusted by that same artifact when it’s presented in an exhibit of 18th-century medicine. Kehoe, who specialises in the history of healthcare and medical science, is attuned to how objects can inspire empathy, especially in the healthcare context.


Kehoe’s new book, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures, looks for opportunities for empathy in museum exhibits all around the U.S. Each of the 50 artifacts presented in the book becomes a physical lens through which to examine the complexities of American society’s relationship with health, from a 1889 bottle of “Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters” that claimed to cure a host of ailments to activist Ed Roberts’s power wheelchair that he customized to work with his range of motion.


In this episode, Kehoe describes how her work has helped her see tropes in the way museums tend to present medical topics and artifacts, how the aura of medical expertise is often culturally granted, and how living through the current coronavirus pandemic changed her relationship with many of the artifacts.


Image: Ed Roberts's Wheelchair, National Museum of American History. Treasures of American History online exhibition.


Topics and Notes


00:00 Intro
00:15 The Old State House “Weapons of the American Revolution” and “Medicine and the American Revolution”
01:35 Tegan Kehoe
02:00 Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures
02:30 How Museums Tend to Present Medical History
05:40 Who Is “Worthy” of the Most Care?
08:02 Ed Roberts’s Power Wheelchair
10:06 Ambulance Damaged in the 9/11 Attacks
11:28 Lessons from the Latest Pandemic
13:41 Pre-Order Exploring American Healthcare Through 50 Historic Treasures
14:00 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 Directly 🏖️


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 96. 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.


Museum curator and historian Daniel Neff used to present tours in the Old Statehouse Museum in Boston, the site of the Boston Massacre in 1770. One tour was called “Weapons of the American Revolution” and went into gory detail of the carnage inflicted by bayonets and musket balls.


At the same museum, Neff also presented a tour called “Medicine and the American Revolution,” often featuring the same grizzly battle wounds.


As his colleague and today’s guest Tegan Kehoe recalls, Neff started to notice a difference between the way visitors responded to each of the tours.



Tegan Kehoe: He remarked a number of times that visitors who seemed otherwise te