Location aware software for mobile apps are getting more common and more complex, but still function upon the proximity to single GPS points. The problem mobile-side is the significant drain upon the battery.
(Via ReadWriteWeb) Location Labs has announced the beta for its geofencing library for the new iPhone. This will allow new location aware apps to response to more than a single GPS point. In short, you can define a whole sector of GPS points as a single area, place or building. If Foursquare-type apps are your thing, this would mean people would actually have to enter a place before checking in.
GPS real estate. I wonder about the future lawsuit of owning location data. When geofencing data is claimed by a third party other than the people who own the building. Anyway, I’m thinking out loud. The useful part is that a museum that can plot of every corner of its own floorplan can be involved with the next generation of location aware apps. There’s also the function for automatic “checking-in” (To borrow from Foursquare again) and also automatically saying when you’ve left.
Other uses could be improved Augmented Reality apps that provided information exactly over an object without additional location tags (like QR, bokode etc.). Maybe location-aware WiFi? You can only connect to a network when sitting in a defined area.
Or maybe, tracking where you museum users are walking with handheld tours and working out the most popular objects/exhibits and where people gather. Vitally important metrics for museums.
In preparation for a lecture in early June at the National Museum of Iceland, I had a minor epiphany—that the spectrum of what can be defined as “curatorial activity” is simultaneously being expanded in two diametrically opposed directions. At one end, the word “curate” is being used to describe myriad activities not pertaining to museums or art, while at the opposite end is the increasing specialization of the practice as exemplified by introspective theorizing and institutional criticism as well as proliferating academic programs.
Two recent posts illuminate this dichotomy. “Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Age of Curation” by Eliot Van Buskirk for a Wired magazine blog takes Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps to task for suggesting that Apple “curates” the software allowed on iPhones and iPads. Van Buskirk says that in reality Apple polices the software on these devices. But he admires how Epps cleverly manipulates her point by employing the word “curation” and then goes on to give several examples of how “Curation is already fundamental to the way in which we view the world these days …” listing Facebook, news outlets, and devices like smart-phones as examples.
Meanwhile, in his article “Art without Artists ” for the May 2010 issue of e-flux Journal, the artist and e-flux co-founder Anton Vidokle warns of the tendency towards self-inflation and self-infliction within the curatorial profession. Vidokle criticizes the dangers inherent in the concept of the “curatorial” which according to a recent conference on the topic, is “a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions,” and which Marie Lind, director of the graduate program at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, has partially described in an Artforum essay as, “an endeavor that encourages you to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it.” According to Vidokle, “Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.”
My intention with this post is not to bolster or argue against either of these permutations of “curator,” which could be oversimplified as the amateur (a Facebook user) versus the academic (an over-educated, overly-theorized professional curator)—hence the title of my post. But I do want to note the concurrent existence and continued escalation of these developments. I can’t effectively argue that there is a causal relationship between the two, but I do think that the increasing use of the word “curate” to describe functions outside of the traditional curatorial profession does enhance the desire for insiders to study what it means to curate to the extent of conceptually formalizing the activity, as in the “curatorial.”
The optimist in me hopes that this increasing spectrum of what can be called curatorial activity ultimately makes our profession more relevant within the art and museum worlds and to society at large. As mentioned in my January 2010 Museum magazine article this trend is already off and running and we might as well embrace it.
My main concern in both these developments is simply that they each move further and further from what was the initial focus of curatorial activity, that being art (or historical objects or natural and physical specimens to make this more applicable to the museum field at large). If either end of the spectrum glorifies the act of curating above and beyond what is being curated—be it paintings, data, or performances—then we move into precipitous territory. I don’t want to halt the process, but rather want to suggest we proceed with “care,” which, as many curators know, is at the very heart of their profession.
UPDATE:
Anton Vidokle has kindly requested I clarify that, unlike suggested in my original post, he is not critical of Lind’s notion of the “curatorial.” He elaborated on this originally in footnote # 2, from his article which I referenced above. The following is the text from the footnote.
“While I agree in principle with the description of “the Curatorial” as it has been articulated by Irit Rogoff and practiced by such figures as Maria Lind—insofar as that curatorial methodology and knowledge is not limited to exhibition-making only, and can be productively applied to many different activities from book publishing to teaching—my concern is with a rather large gap between theory and concrete power relations that exists within the culture industry, and only grows due to misunderstandings.”
One of the most intelligent things ever written on io9.com was by Matt Jones, Design Director of Berg. “The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future“. Radical architecture designing an urbanism that is “increasingly linked and learning”. I strongly suggest you read this article. This quote from Dan Hill stands out.
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
Everything we need to survive the possible outcomes of the future is dependent upon the city becoming an organism. The Internet of Things video from IBM says the “planet has grown a central nervous system”.
I don’t doubt that claim, except I say that the cities of this planet are going to be the first that actually construct a that workable system of system. We can really ramp-up the hardware inside our City Battlesuit.
The role of the city in the future will affect the role of the museum. All this data, all this information, networked and communicating along the city’s nerves, adding to the superabundance. Cross-referencing stuff will just produce more stuff. There will be organisations who will turn this into some useful apps, like the intelligent alarm clock that will check your calendar and your route.
The museum’s part in this must be to get directly immersed in this city’s central nervous system. It’s role will be like the lymph node, distributed throughout the city’s body (networked/linked) and providing the immunity against the city’s ills. Culture will be the city’s white blood cells.
I don’t see this as another form of social engineering. You can distract museum’s with all kinds of outside missions. I remember one museum who had to try to deal with the city’s knife crime problem. I don’t see this response involving a political step.
By being involved in the system, the museum can make its own responses. That data will be analysed (maybe into the visualisations that are so popular) to give the populous something to make their lives a little better. This isn’t just market research. This is about audience development. This is to make sure the living-city-organism doesn’t die or brutalise itself. This is to make sure the City has a Soul.
Location data leads to a list of nearby places arranged in a nice UI. It’s a good directory with links to Google Streetview. Lots of potential to add things to each venues profile.
Now, let’s look at something similar. French organisation CultureClic’s app, also for the iPhone and they also show a Blackberry, Nokia and a Samsung. I figure it works on others. Watch.
Kids nowadays. Remember when there was such a thing as standards?
The Internet, all you needed was a standard screen and any browser. Now its all ep-ods and ep-ads and tablets and apps that don’t work with Android. Everything’s behind a password. In my day, we didn’t have to lock our data.
Whyioutta *shakes cane*
Welcome to the Splinternet, where your website might not work and Google can’t search it.
Is the fact that so many fantastic innovative museum things are occurring on an exceptionally expensive pieces of kit a form of social inclusion?
As an Android phone owner, I can’t think of a single museum making apps for it. A quick search on the market brings up a bunch of tourism and picture apps. Not a single official museum app.
Where’s the inclusion? Where has that bastion of museum work “Access” gone? We were doing everything we could to break down the barriers to the museum-loving public and then we go and provide all this innovation to a technological elite. Then this innovation is at the mercy of the sanctioning process of the platform and the limitations of the device.
Just how are museums going to deal with the Splinternet?
“To build a set of tools and services, spanning mobile devices and built environments, that can transform a public space into a reactive, collaboratively mediated experience”.
If there is something that is on my mind more than anything right now, it’s how the future of museums will depend on the function it provides inside the city. I’m talking less along the lines of educating and providing culture to the populous, but as an ingrained node of a living city.
I hate kiosks. I’ve said it before. A sad leftover of late-20th Century museum design. Get some technology and put it in a box. Keep it sealed like one of the exhibits.
Technology now is flexible, mobile and information hasn’t been a strictly linear experience in years. There is nothing a kiosk (ie. a central information terminal) can do that’s better than my phone or my laptop. I sit and casually watch television, hitting into Google people, places or history and can do quick data mine for surrounding information.
It is painfully tricky to do this in museums. Mainly because of the general lack of space to sit or available WiFi. Museums that have this can be a godsend, especially if you feel you don’t have to buy a coffee first.
So I love museum mobile apps. I like to have a little control over getting more information. That’s why I like Augmented Reality so much. But AR is still a few steps too far from that plateau of productivity.
So then there’s TAP. Good old wireless networks, no fiddly barcodes and I can get a bunch of curated content that I can pick through. Properly curated too.
TAP is a content management system. And it’s Open Source.
You can have this in your own museum. Here’s five reasons why. They should have added a sixth: Made by a Museum. The Indianapolis Museum of Art is becoming the game-changer to the future of museums. It may be one of the first to become a resistant museum tribe (1. Localise production. 2. Virtualise everything else).
This hasn’t got anything like enough exposure over here in the UK, where Culture doesn’t have a… culture of early adoption of innovative technology. TAP can go, and you have mobile tours in your museum.
Shame its iPhone/iPod only. But the exciting part is that the IMA is looking to keep on developing this. There’s no end to the potential of a good UI and an easy-to-learn system behind it.
An interesting addition to an exhibition design? This video shows what you can do with two big flatscreens, some easily available technology and a IR-emitting necklace. $3000 for the lot. You could look out onto a Roman city, Mars or the view Turner had from his Margate home.
An Xiao’s @Platea project has always been a source for interesting collaborative art over various social media networks. I’ve been involved in a couple.
They’re up to Project VI now, what they are calling PlateaKnit. It’s being lead by one-time ArtFriday alumnus Ingrid Murnane.
Using the twitter hashtag #plateaknit, “instructors” call out instructions using the abbreviations set out and “makers” get to dip in and out of the feed and follow whatever comes out of it.
Ingrid herself plans to knit with the full instructions.
Dundee based games developer Gentlemen of Fortune are working on a game called Quick as Thieves, a “Physics based Action-stealth game”, which means you play a comedy-style burglar with a swagbag robbing a museum blind. As you can see, everything and anything can go into the swagbag. The bag gets bigger and can be used for other things.
Yeah, okay, it actually sounds like an innovative idea for a game and looks quite fun as well. But it goes to prove that museums are never a setting for anything else apart from crime (stealing stuff), supernatural/superstition (magic/cursed objects) or both (stealing magic/cursed objects).
The Centre for the Future of Musuems made five predictions about the museum of the future. They said Green, Personalised, Comfortable, Interactive and Flexible. Read the article to get the explanation of each one (especially “Interactive”. They means something a bit more advanced. I think a better word would have been something from the Nina Simon lexicon “Participatory”)
I pretty much agree with these predictions, so I would like to offer five of my own.
I predict the museum of the future will be:
1) Closed. As in the doors are shut and the staff laid off. Whilst the financial and business world are slowly recalibrating themselves to try to deal with the new systems in places, I imagine there are a great number of museums that just will not have the ability to adapt for whatever reason, or the reasons will be out of their hands.
2) Enslaved. I think this to be the best antonym for autonomous. What I mean is that there will be ever increasing influences or a museum program from outside the museum. Corporate sponsorship of exhibitions, oppressive criteria for funding, government social engineering agendas and media lynch-mobs of ignorance. The actual museum will be very few decision left to make.
3) 3D digital. A more positive one. It only makes sense that the current digitisation projects will move into the next phase and an extra dimension. Considering there are people doing basic 3D scanning using only a webcam and other people doing amazing handheld highly-detailed scanning, museums are going to have to start soon.
4) Sillier. I agree with the CFM’s statement that future museums will be Flexible, but I feel that’s a statement about requirement rather than actuality. Distributed sites and chameleon spaces are sensible suggestions but urban regeneration through the construction of massive monuments isn’t going to go out of fashion. Well, it’s not as long as our concept of a city doesn’t change too much. As nobody has a set idea about what a museum or art gallery has to look like, they can build ever more bizarre buildings in attempts to be iconic.
5) Curatorless. Celebrity curators (like Shaq rather than Koons) or tyranny-by-majority decision making processes to pick out favourites. I wouldn’t be surprised if the task of curators is outsourced either to voting schemes or freelancers. Those banks sitting on large art collections will probably have more need for curators anyway.
Those are my five. Anyone else want to come up with five of their own?
I”ve been playing with the new Android app by Google called Goggles. The name’s a little daft and means I’m rereading every mention of it to make sure I haven’t confused the spelling.
I am very impressed with this. You take a picture, its gets scanned with something that looks like an edge-detect and it seraches results based upon that. This little video explains it.
Visual search technology. At last, we have something that could use all that effort we put into digitisation. It works too. Despite the limitations that they admit to, it’s really quite powerful. As a test, I took a rather blurry scan of a postcard of one of my favourite buildings, the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. Top result was the Wikipedia page.
In a truely incredible feat that makes this even more relevant to museums, I scanned this postcard I picked up from the Imperial War Museum.
This somewhat staggered me. The top result it offered was this image from the London Transport Museum.
It had found the image I scanned inside another image hosted by a museum. The link took me to the artist’s biography.
At first, I was doubting some people’s claim that this was an augmented reality app. I could see how the technology could be used with other things and the “pointing at businesses” was a little thin, but I just saw a new form of Search. This is still a Google Labs product. Is it much of a jump to think that real-time video could be scanned/searched? Right now, we take a picture to be analysed. One day, we just need to stare at something for the revelant Google results to appear.
And in real-time, no doubt. Looks like we won’t be needing those QR codes after all. No wait, it scans those as well. And text. Amazing.
If there’s ever a time for museums to get their photography policy sorted, it’s right now. People will be wanting to scan stuff to get more information. Do you really want to deny that?
Speaking of Nick Poole, seems he wants to do a Britian-centric version of previous Wikipedia projects such as Wikipedia Loves Art.
Britain Loves Wikipedia. Click to find out more details, but the idea is to get 10-20 UK museums involved. I would love to see this be successful. I don’t think enough UK Museums are getting involved in this sort of thing. Hell, I don’t see enough UK museums on twitter.
Contact Nick via email nick(at)collectionstrust.org.uk or on twitter @NickPoole1 to find out more and hopefully partner up.
Back in April, I wondered why there wasn’t some efforts by Google to work with museums. They had put some ultra-high definition photos from the Prado Museum into Google Earth in January, but that seemed to be an exercise in photographic technologies and some much needed publicity for one of Google’s products.
I mean, can you think of any link between art and mapping? Of all the visualisations available on Google Earth, 14 images places upon a single geolocation in Spain seems a little odd. I mean, what’s the purpose?
What are they up to? Of all things, a digitisation project? 14,000 photos of the 5,000 remaining objects in the museum.
Does anyone else think this feels like a story from about 8-9 years ago?
I hope, no, I wish this will be something more than just interesting PR for Google. They can be game-changes to almost anything they get involved in, and it seems like they will photograph collections! And put them online! There are museums up and down the UK photographing stuff. Most of them are using volunteers.
Unless they can do something amazing with it. Unless this is a test for some greater plan that will blast inferior collection management software out of the water and begin some decent level of connectivity between museums. I suppose we will have to wait for “early 2010″ to see the results.
Just amazing. We could start getting 3D digitisation projects for museums going tomorrow. Okay, best to wait for the thing to be ready first. But then you have all kinds of options opening up.
There are many things the scans could be used for. When fabricating gets going, a museum could have a set of blueprints for models. Museum objects could start appearing in games (and some games have better economies than countries).
I want this technology in my phone. Its have a camera so it makes sense. And all consumer technology is moving towards increasing levels of mobility. I want to 3D-scan objects on the fly. We will need a word for this, I think.
Also, imagine what this would do to copyright discussions. I await the sign in the museum that says “No Flash Photography -- No 3D Scanning”.
The Arts Council has a new website. Good thing really as I remember the last one being very difficult to get around. Now, they’ve gone for something feeling more like an arts magazine approach. It was clearly time for an image change. The Arts Council has been taking a bit of a kicking recently in a few mainstream newspaper articles.
To go with the launch of the new site, they commissioned artists Thomson & Craighead to make a short piece of video art, Several Interruption. Nice simple idea. I wonder who it was who would have said, “You’re the Arts Council, how about some art on the website for the Launch?”
Here is the Thomson & Craighead video. (Requires flash, Javascript to be unblocked and sound)
DISCLOSURE: Yeah, I get paid for you watching this video. I get a few pennies per play (all the way through, I think). This is the deal. You watch this interesting piece of video art and I get to pay my hosting fees. I promise to only do these things if they are relevant to newcurator’s editorial, so I won’t be running adverts for films or something. And I’ll say every time if I get paid. Deal?
Recently, I read an article about arts engagement, and a quote the author plucked from a poem by Aleda Shirley struck me as appropriate in describing the precarious position the museum assumes when exhibiting work that could or does stir up controversy. Shirley, in The Rivers Where They Touch, writes “Falling backwards from his boat, the diver would see, beneath the surface busy with leaves and eels, how the rivers don’t seem separate after all and perhaps tell us what night so often tells the pilot, the cartographer, the pair of lovers sighing from a bridge: that an edge is never a simple or a sudden thing”(1). Without too prosaically dissecting the museum with this quote, it is useful to ponder the edges that arise neither suddenly or simply in museums, most tangibly in the intersection of values, rhetoric, and experience that is the art exhibition. At a macro-level, with the whole picture spread before us, when a museum exhibits art that could be deemed controversial or incite conservative ire, it is seemingly justified by how it communicates the goals of the institution as a space for talking about the “tough stuff.” However, from a staff’s perspective, often what we see is the here and now, a scary drop into the dark abyss ahead as we attempt to appease the public, to push the boundaries of art and conversation, as well as sate the aesthetic tastes of our funders. Navigating sharp edges that appear to push and pull in a myriad different directions. How do we delve below the surface, as the diver in Shirley’ poem, and see where these many currents fuse as one? In response, I want to explore Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo, a popular culture exhibit at the Portland Art Museum.
As part of the Marking Portland exhibit, visitors could stand behind this monitor and get pictures taken with superimposed tattoos on their bodies. This is another example of the museum bringing in the public as part to the exhibit and not simply as spectators.
I had the fortune of interning there this past summer and witnessed first-hand the public outpouring of support for Marking Portland, which was actually kept up for longer than planned because it was so popular. The show took place in what I call the thoroughfare gallery; the museum is two buildings and this gallery space connects the two in a long, wide corridor. Here, a projector screen was placed on one wall and images of tattoos were projected in a rotating fashion for the public to view. The photos were all publicly-sourced; the museum set up a Flickr account strictly for the purpose of collecting images of body art from Portland residents or whoever had a mind to post their photos. Every day, a crowd gathered in front of the screen and on the benches in the gallery for long periods of time, as if watching a movie. The statistic that states that visitors only stand in front of an art work for an average of 3 seconds, or an equally dismal figure, did not apply here. The shared authority evidenced in this exhibit allowed the public a conduit for contribution, and ensured that meaningful dialogue around Marking Portland was not simply the responsibility of the museum, but was shared by the public. Of course, not everyone who saw the show thought it was something the museum should be exhibiting. But on a larger scale, the museum must be commended for smartly attempting to connect the popular culture aspects of the tattooing with examples of tattoos in its ancient Asian art collection. For some, this helped elevate the topic from mere spectacle as it linked it to the wider art historical narrative.
Fiona Cameron writes, “In attempts to marginalise conflict, many institutions deny the inherent politicalness of topics and audiences and instead promote the public reinforcement of a particular set of values” (2). Here, Cameron like Aleda Shirley, is addressing edges, not simply from a safe aerial view, but below the surface where institutional narrative and community values are not so divergent. They can successfully be united around a controversial exhibit as the Portland Art Museum demonstrated through the shared authority that made Marking Portland a success and not simply another attempt by a museum to institutionalize popular culture or become a gimmick for attracting a younger, hipper audience.
(1) Katz, Jonathan. Understanding the past; Envisioning the future. WESTAF Symposium Proceedings: Re-envisioning state arts agencies, 71-78.
(2) Cameron, F. (2006). Beyond surface representations: Museums, edgy topics, civic responsibilities and modes of engagement. Open Museum Journal, August 2006. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume8_index.asp
Megan Blankenship is a graduate student in the arts and administration program at the University of Oregon, blogs at MJ Writes, and is currently immersed in researching the role of the art museum in facilitating dialogue concerning controversial exhibitions. Questions, comments, and wine recommendations can be directed to mjwritesblog(at)gmail.com.
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