It was because of Dan Spock’s informative and thought-provoking review of the Terror House that I found myself there in late May, while I was in Budapest for the ecsite meeting. As it happens, I visited with Andrea Bandelli, who posted his own review the other day, and I shared some of his reactions and reflections. There’s a forced-march quality to the experience, with no place to sit down and think or have a quiet conversation, that makes it hard to address the questions Andrea reminds us of: Why did this happen, and what does it mean for us? (Actually, you could sit, if you wanted to, at the table laid out for Nazi officials.)

There’s no doubt a visit to the Terror House is a powerful experience. Still, I wonder: As captives of a narrative that’s cinematic in its power, are we likelier to leave satisfied that the story is simply over? Is a themed environment that’s polished down to the last detail, lacking in the rough edges of reality, perhaps too smooth for a history of human suffering? Does the implied moral judgment fail to address what Primo Levi called moral gray zones, and thus let us, individually, off the hook? When I visited Dachau in the early 1960s, it was hard to find and starkly real. I wonder if the gritty immediacy made it harder to walk away as if a film had just ended.

Dan notes that the Terror House has stirred controversy within Hungary, at least in part for the very act of remembering it represents. Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of its cinematic interpretive structure, it does create at least one place for highly personal acts of remembrance and reflection, which people have made their own: a row of photographs of people killed after the 1958 revolution that runs around the outside of the building - and under it, a ledge.

What happens when you invite visitors to tell their own stories?

In his recent case study of the Liberty Science Center’s Skyscrapers exhibition, Wayne LaBar described a place among the towering exhibits where visitors can make themselves heard. As Wayne describes it, “Our visitors also have a voice in the story when they write their own memories about tall buildings, when they draw and submit a skyscraper design to be exhibited in the gallery, or when they assemble their own internet-based project, blogging about skyscrapers built in their neighborhood.” Wayne later sent along this postcard, left by one visitor:

Wayne was among the authors who contributed to the recently published book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions (which Kathy McLean and I co-edited), which explores the museum world’s counterpart of citizen journalism: visitors actively commenting on, contributing to, and even creating exhibitions.

A few other ExhibitFiles case studies and reviews mention this kind of “visitor voice” exhibit (like the Cafeteria area in the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Race exhibition), but we know there are more. We hope others will share their experiences, experiments, and reflections here – and tell us how museums are responding to visitors’ contributions.

Are there topics you, or others you know, consider “unexhibitable”? The AAM’s National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME) wants to hear about them. The Fall 2008 issue of the NAME journal, Exhibitionist, will consider this and related questions, and the editor, Gretchen Jennings, and Boston Museum of Science exhibit developer Maureen McConnell are looking for comments and reflections now. We also hope you’ll share any case studies and reviews here on ExhibitFiles to build up our collective record. We’ve already seen some examples (was the House of Terror in Budapest a concept that would have been considered impossible 30 years ago?).

More specifically, what Gretchen and Maureen want to know is: If there are ideas or topics you consider to be “unexhibitable” — that is, incapable of being made into an engaging museum exhibition — why is that? These are some of the reasons people have already mentioned:

- too controversial or sensitive
- too violent
- too revolting or disgusting
- too abstract
- too ordinary or insignificant
- untimely – could/could not have been exhibited years ago (or perhaps could e in a few years), but not now
- constrained by place – my museum/country could/could not do it, as opposed to another museum/country

On the other hand, if you think there is nothing that cannot be exhibited, could you share your thinking? Post your comments right here in the ExhibitFiles blog — or write to Gretchen or Maureen. If you’re willing to have your comments considered for inclusion in the issue, please respond by June 15 and identify yourself so they can contact you.

With so many of the ExhibitFiles reviews and case studies focusing on computer-based exhibits (browse the tag: computer),  I thought there might be some interest in a survey we (Ideum) have developed on the subject.  We’re conducting the survey to better shape a project that we’re developing called Open Exhibits. We hope to find out just how museums are using computer-based exhibits.

One of the primary goals of Open Exhibits is to develop a suite of open source electronic exhibit templates which will be freely available to museums.  There’s more about Open Exhibits on the Ideum blog or you can go directly to the survey. We will share the results with everyone who completes the survey.