m. w. burns's Page

Last October The Museum Of Vancouver held a conference called “City Museums: Collisions/Connections" which focused on city museums and their engagement in city life. The conference's keynote speaker was urban planner Larry Beasley CM who presented “The City as Museum and the Museum as City”. Here Mr. Beasley looks at the city as a malleable place of collaboration where the museum could become an integral part of its development, approaching the city…

Think of all the history, culture and science at play when you walk down a city street, shovel snow, shop for clothes or cook a meal. Occasions for informal learning are everywhere, in everything. The simplest object or event can be the link to myriad subjects, stories and interactions. In an atmosphere of expanding interconnectivity, we are seeing museum efforts increasingly move beyond the walls of the institution, (science camps, archeological digs, hack-fests, nature…

This is undoubtedly something many of us have played with; placing a scale figure among full size objects and watching those objects become places to inhabit. And in so doing, we embark on a form of travel, a way of exploring parts of the world we’ve never been to. However, as travel, this is something we…