FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PORTSMOUTH, UK, 11 November: The Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS) today commemorates the tenth anniversary of its first public event, its Grand Opening Gala which took place at 6:30pm at the London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London.
The capacity crowd in attendance witnessed a ribbon cutting ceremony officiated by Professor Angus Carlyle, who used a pair of health and safety-compliant child’s scissors to cut a miniature ribbon across the front of the museum’s iPhone 4S, the only device used to access the museum’s Permanent Collection of Sounds.
What was intended to be a brief Q&A session stretched to 45 minutes, proving the concept of a portable museum of sound was not only viable, but also conceptually capable of rigorous experimentation in the museological display of sounds as objects – as well as a radical upending of 21st century museum practice itself.
John Kannenberg, Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Portable Sound said:
“What began as a one-off conceptual art project has spawned a decade-long institutional journey resulting in such milestones as a PhD, well over two thousand individual face-to-face museum visitors in person, the establishment of our own international conference, multiple academic and popular publications through Museum of Portable Sound Press, Soundscape™ Barbie®, and a radical reimagining as an online experience due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our museum has moved from strength to strength as it continues to bring the culture and history of sound beyond music to the world, one listener at a time. All of us here at MOPS look forward to our next decade of operation.”
As part of the celebration, MOPS has also recently announced the publication of its first new gallery guide since 2019: A Brief History of Sound Recording: Fully Incomplete and Highly Biased will be available later this month, breathing new life into the museum’s gallery of sound recording history and, for the first time, allowing one of its galleries’ objects to be publicly accessible online.
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Further information:
The Museum of Portable Sound 